Nerds With Porn Machines, Or How We Got Here

Years ago, I blocked "Aella" on Twitter because I was tired of reading her nonsense. To my dismay, I discovered that I also had to block the term "Aella" in order to avoid being exposed to her nonsense by other people on my Twitter feed discussing it... often favorably.

That the things Aella says and does are complete and utter nonsense is perfectly obvious to anyone older than the Millennial generation. It's a banality, not even worthy of an explanation. But people Millennial-aged and younger have lost the tools to discern why her particular brand of "Why shouldn't I completely debase myself to a leering audience?" is objectionable. 

How did we get here? Buckle up, I'm about to explain.

Part One: What Life Used To Be Like

First, we have to travel back in time to the year... oh, say, 1982. Nerds existed in 1982, but nobody wanted to be one. Not even nerds. Maybe especially not nerds. There was no such thing as a "self-described nerd." The term itself, by 1982 standards, would translate roughly to "self-described sick fuck that nobody likes" in today's parlance. Nerds were bullied, and that was sad, but the fact that they were bullied doesn't mean that they were harmless or doing the right thing. They were bullied precisely because they were doing the wrong thing.

See, in 1982, if you wanted to have fun, you had only a few options. We can group all of those options into two basic categories: 1) Going out of the house and socially interacting with other people, or 2) Staying home and not interacting with anyone. Good, popular, well-adjusted people mainly chose option 1. They enjoyed sports, social clubs, shopping at the mall... but even if they were introverts, they'd still have a little group of friends to do quilting with, or to tinker with cars, or to have a drink with their buddies at the bar, or to hang out in a church group, or etc., etc. Having fun just was getting out and doing stuff, usually with other people, but at least in the vicinity of other people.

Except for nerds. Nerds preferred staying home and playing Atari or reading books or otherwise being alone. 

Being able to relate to other people is mainly a function of going out and being with other people, forming a social identity, forming social bonds. It's not about being an extrovert, it's about joining the human race in something, anything. When you self-isolate, as the nerds of 1982 self-isolated, you gradually lose your ability to relate to other people. Eventually, other people can smell your inability to relate like a stench. You become a pariah. No one wants to be around you. Consequently, people hated nerds.

Now, back in 1982, nerds had a path to normalcy. They might still be interested in Ataris and fantasy novels, but if they could find a group of other nerds to actually interact with, to actually join with in the real world, maybe play some D&D, then they could form social attachments and their minds would rehabilitate. They might never be popular "jocks," but they'd be normal. 

Perhaps even more importantly, nerds could acquire romantic partners, girlfriends and boyfriends. They could kiss each other. They could, dare I say it, have sex with each other. This is important because love, romance, and sex are all absolutely crucial for good social development (to a point - stay with me here). It's impossible to be a self-isolating weirdo when you're emotionally invested in the wellbeing and care of another human being. Friendship and romantic partnership extract us from the bottomless pit of our own private thoughts and thrust us into the real-world adventures of another person's mind, body, and emotional care. 

Nerds who acquired healthy romances didn't often remain nerds for very long. You can spot this in old 80s movie tropes: the nerdy guy with glasses has sex with a female vixen character off-screen and suddenly becomes a "real man" again. Or, the nerdy girl has her glasses removed by a good-looking guy who also lets her hair down and gives her a big kiss, revealing that she was a stunningly beautiful woman all along. These tropes existed in movies because they reflected a real social phenomenon. Romance rehabilitated nerds almost completely. Sex and love are powerful forces that melt even the staunchest defenses of a self-isolating weirdo. 

Nonetheless, some nerds never got to experience true romance. Well, humans are sexual creatures, and all that pent-up energy had to go somewhere. In the worst cases then, as now, socially repressed nerds became sexual creeps and perpetrators of real harm. You can see this in some developing countries in which hoards of men who have never been able to experience romance harass, grope, and "Eve-tease" women endlessly. Many of those cases further develop into shocking crimes of rape, acid attacks, honor killings, and so on. 

But of course not all sexually repressed nerds become criminals. Most of them just become gooners, in other words, porn-obsessed perverts. In the 1980s, in order for such people to satisfy their urges, they needed to go to pornography stores. I think Zoomers and Gen Alphas would be quite surprised to know that there used to be physical retail stores, usually on the outskirts of town or on the wrong side of the tracks, that sold pornographic VHS videos, magazines, dildos, and who knows what else. They were one-stop shops for sexual deviants, people who had an under-developed sense of romantic human bonding and an unsatisfied sexual appetite.

I want you to pause and think about this for a moment, because it's important: When a person never develops a healthy sense of romantic attachment to a sexual partner, then sex becomes the mere satisfaction of an urge, rather than a form of loving communication between two equals. It becomes a process rather than a relationship. This is why pornography depicts sex as some kind of anatomical display, with close-ups of genitals and fluids, rather than words and facial expressions and loving care. People don't use pornography to experience a great love story, after all, they use it merely to get off, after which point, they discard the pornography and go about their day.

Pornography and the kinks and fetishes it encourages is not a healthy expression of human sexuality. It's merely the depiction of a sex act. The lone goal is orgasm. There is nothing else to it. By contrast, healthy sexuality involves loving communication between two people who are interested in more about each other than an orgasmic endpoint. It involves the mutual respect and care of another human being. Healthy sexuality doesn't just look different than pornography, it's different in almost every way.

And this was all perfectly obvious to people in the world of 1982. Maladjusted perverts were frowned upon more or less the same way we look at "incels" today. There was no justifying their porn obsession with high-minded explanations about "kink-shaming." Everyone knew that the kinds of guys (usually guys) who skulked off to the adult video store to get their rocks off were to be avoided at all costs. Everyone knew they weren't healthy.  

This was the world circa 1982 and before.

Part Two: The Social Impact Of Pornography And New Computer Technology

Then, computer technology exploded. It gained a lot of ground in the 80s, but it was the 1990s when it really took off, thanks to the proliferation of internet technology. Whole libraries have been written about this topic, so I won't waste too much space here. What's germane to my purposes is the fact that internet technology had a few crucial attributes that changed the social landscape.

First, it made computers a commonplace thing. It was no longer basement-dwellers who were interested in computers. Pretty much everyone needed to get interested in computers in order to produce a good job resume, or to do good schoolwork. It revolutionized the workplace to the point that now even auto mechanics these days are a specialized sort of IT worker. We all use computers now. To some extent, we all love them. So "being a techie" was no longer something that socially isolated people were; we are all techies now.

Second, it created a platform in which socially isolated weirdos could discuss their weirdness with equally weird people in a way that felt "social." It's not social. Posting your thoughts on the internet and having them judged by strangers is not even remotely "social." It's voyeuristic, but because voyeurism requires the participation of an observer, it can be mistaken for "social interaction," especially by people who lack real social experience and emotional maturity. So, pockets of nerds began to clump together like bits of mud.

Third, and probably most dramatically and tragically, the proliferation of internet technology put a PORN MACHINE in the living room of every home in America. Dell came up with a way of marketing home computer sales to the middle class ("Dude, yer gettin' a Dell!"), and so among the more affluent segments of the middle class (or within those households in which there still existed a pre-90s nerdy streak) there was soon a porn machine in the bedroom of a large number of teenagers. To make matters worse, Steve Jobs invented the iPhone and essentially put a porn machine in the pocket of every adult and almost every teenager in America. 

Of these three developments, we can call the first either neutral or good. High productivity is certainly a good thing, as are economic development and increased salaries and wages. Just remember that this was the result of using computers to solve old problems in new ways. In other words, it wasn't merely an increased interest in tech that caused these developments, it was that we had better tools to solve problems. But the other two developments were absolute disasters. 

The rise of "online communities" gave nerds the false impression that they weren't really socially isolated, leading to believe that they were just a different kind of normal. This reduced their incentive to go outside, get into the real world, and interact with real human beings. Thus, it significantly reduced nerds' collective ability to rehabilitate themselves through true social interaction.

Here it bears repeating that interacting with an online community is not a kind of social interaction. Again, it might feel like it, because other people are tangentially involved, but what people are actually doing online is putting their own mind up on a web page and then choosing to either focus on a few approving comments or lashing out at a few disapproving comments. This is nothing like interacting in the real world. In the real world, your friends will support you when you say or do something that warrants support, but if you say something wrong, crazy, or bad, your friends will set you straight. They do this not because they are jerks who hate you, but because they love you and have an obligation to prevent you from falling into some kind of mental trap.

With the rise of internet communities came the rise of "flame wars" and "trolling." Again, this is something that can only happen through online, pretend social interaction. If you walked into a public space and attempted to have a "flame war" with someone you disagreed with, you'd probably end up in a fistfight, which comes with real-world consequences such as black eyes and jail time. Online, however, the socially underdeveloped denizens of the early internet would rally around anyone in a flame war who happened to agree with them about some political issue or something. So what was clearly antisocial behavior became a reason for online communities to grow stronger. Think about that that, stronger through antisocial behavior. That's problematic.

When we add porn machines into the mix, we begin to gain a real sense of what has happened to society since about 1995. Remember, pornography in 1982 was relegated to the outskirts of town and the dregs of the community. It was another type of antisocial behavior, categorized mainly by social underdevelopment and unhealthy expressions of sexuality. By placing pornography into the homes of every American and making it mainstream, we created a situation in which socially stunted nerds would go online to express their sexuality in unhealthy ways. Instead of finding a romantic partner with whom to explore love, romance, and sex all together as one expression of a single pair bond, nerds would go online and search for exactly which kind of kink or fetish they most "identified with."

In short, sexuality quickly devolved from being a biologically and emotionally driven tool to propagate the species into being something like "the collection of images and paraphernalia that are most likely to trigger an orgasm in me while I am alone at home, outside the context of a romantic bond." 

Nowadays, young people scour the internet for which depraved thing is theirs, which fetish they are going to call their own. They're looking for kinks the way people in 1982 used to look for partnership. But there is all the difference in the world between looking for someone to have sex with and looking for which activities to orgasm to.

Rationalism: The Final Nail In The Coffin

Turning the youth of society into socially underdeveloped, self-isolating gooners is bad enough, but it's all just abstract internet stuff until it becomes a modus operandi, until it inflates itself to the point of being a philosophy. Sadly, that is just what happened when "Rationalism" appeared.

Rationalism began as a hobby for particularly bookish nerds. At its core, it's just a bunch of nerds in an online community trying to explain things they don't really know anything about. This kind of thing is completely harmless when it's relegated to little parties where everyone knows they're just having a little fun. If it happened at a dinner party among friends, it would even be a good thing. 

But Rationalism would be Rationalism if it happened in real life among friends at a dinner party. No, Rationalism is precisely what it is because it's an online community of people writing tomes and tomes of complete and utter nonsense in absence of direct connection to the experts who do happen to know about whatever topic the Rationalists have taken aim at today. 

I've written plenty about Rationalism on this blog, and I don't want to repeat myself. Today, it will suffice to say that Rationalism encourages socially isolated nerds to come up with their own ersatz theories about why the world is the way it is, and when socially isolated nerds do this, they tend to engage in an enormous degree of confirmation bias. If I'm all on my own, coming up with any explanation for any phenomenon I happen to be thinking about in absence of real-world expertise and peer review, then I'm going to end up fixating on anything that upholds my existing world view and underestimating the importance of anything that contradicts me. It's human nature.

But it's an aspect of human nature that is severely restricted by real-world interaction. When you cook up some bizarre theory about why hallucinogenic drug use is good, actually, or why bacon will not really clog your arteries (these are real examples from the real Rationalist community, by the way), and you articulate that theory to a real person, face-to-face, that person is going to rightly tell you that you're insane. But if you do this in an "online community" and then channel all of your bookish energy into defending your position, you trick yourself into believing that there is a legitimate debate to be had about any of these things. There isn't, but you're now convinced that there is.

More to the point, the effect of "Rationalism" and Rationalism-like behaviors on social trends has been to smear a thin coat of legitimization on behaviors that, prior to 1995, were clearly and obviously antisocial and aberrant. 

It was precisely these people who rewarded Aella for her complete and utter nonsense. "What's wrong with polyamory?" quickly yields to "Why shouldn't some women become prostitutes?" The fact that Aella had been sexually abused as a child was consciously ignored by the Rationalists as irrelevant. "Plenty of people become consensual polyamorists without suffering sexual abuse!" Really, who? But anyway, the whole purpose of their argument was to willfully engage in confirmation bias in order to avoid thinking about the most obvious thing in the world: Aella wasn't a healthy person, she wasn't doing healthy things, and polyamorist prostitution and "analysis of" (undue consideration of) pedophilia are horrible examples of how people should live their lives. Add a hefty dose of drug use to that, and you've got yourself a perfect demonstration of antisocial behavior from a group of people who are basically socially maladjusted gooners.

In 1982, they would have been ostracized into silence, but in today's world of social isolation and sexual fetishism... well, here we are.

Conclusion

Every now and then, vestiges of the old way still rear their heads. That happens when Aella says something weird about pedophilia or about going on a 200-hour LSD binge that "cured" her of the damage she suffered in childhood. Isn't it wild how the pathologies of her condition magically made her condition disappear? She must be normal, after all! Or, it's confirmation bias again...

But anyway, to normal people, these things are just obviously bad and wrong. There's no question about it. There's no debate. There is no Rationalist community suggesting that maybe, just maybe Aella has the right idea about life after all. There is no survey pool of perverts answering poorly controlled surveys and demonstrating that "See, we're normal after all - 65% of us do these crazy things." To normal people, this whole thing is bizarre. And it is. 

But these are merely vestiges of the old way. For the most part, Gen Y, Gen Z, and younger are all encouraged and incentivized to scour the internet for their own unique brand of bad behavior and throw themselves into it like a labrador retriever throws itself into a mud puddle on a hot day. It's been 30 years since 1995, and social mores have been significantly eroded. Today, thankfully, Aella's behavior is still seen as strange and unusual, but over time, if things keep going this way, it will look increasingly less strange. More and more kids will get into polyamory, drug use, "sex work," and all the rest of it. Anyone who has any kind of rational (lower-case R) objection to any of this behavior will be accused of being "judgemental" and of "kink-shaming," and there will be no one left to raise any objections to this except the most extreme social conservatives who refuse to change with the times.

And that will be bad.

Stop Yelling At People For Fun

The big story over the weekend was the curious case of Nick Sandmann, a student caught on viral video wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat and smirking at a singing Native American man who was beating a drum. The whole episode constitutes a lesson in what is wrong with (a) the news media, (b) Twitter mobs, (c) the culture of political protest, and (d) the culture of political commentary.

First, let's review the facts. Initially, a short video was posted online somewhere, and an attached comment claimed that a group of white teenagers were chanting "build the wall" with their Trump hats, and that they then surrounded a group of Native Americans and got in their faces. Later, a series of longer videos appeared that made obvious the fact that the situation was quite different. What really happened was that the MAGA teenagers were killing time after being part of some pro-life Catholic protest, and in doing so came across some fringe group of African-American bigots who started calling them homosexual epithets and saying things that, by all accounts, are pretty bizarre. (For example, they told one of the MAGA boys that the others were going to harvest his organs. That's crazy.) Finally, a third group of protestors -- a Native American group whose goals were not clear to me -- decided to walk up to the MAGA boys for some reason; one of them grabbed a drum and beat it in student Nick Sandmann's face, while Sandmann stood there, trying to put on a defiant face of calm composure.

In short, we were initially lead to believe that the MAGA teens were the agitators; it turns out that they were the real victims here, victims of two other groups who decided to get in their faces and agitate them.

In the wake of the first video, the one that made the boys out to be the antagonists, many news media reports simply piled on without bothering to investigate the full set of facts. I could talk about media bias or about lazy journalism, but what we all really know is that getting the facts wrong, right out of the gate, serves the media's purpose better than getting the facts right would have. By getting things wrong in the first place, the media has created a more dramatic news cycle; more drama equals more clicks, more clicks equals more ad revenue, more ad revenue equals more bad reporting. Think about it: If I tell you something completely false on Day 1, then I get to write another article on Day 2 that merely questions the initial falsehood. On Day 3, I get to validate the additional facts coming in, and then finally on Day 4, I get to write a concluding article with all the right information in it. Then I also get to write a series of op-ed pieces reckoning with "society's" tendency to latch-on to first impressions and come to biased conclusions.

In this way, the media plays on our sense of outrage in order to stretch a single day of click revenue into a full, week-long news cycle, with all the clicks and impressions that entails. And, by participating in those clicks, we reward the news media for that very behavior and ensure that it will happen again next time.

The second most guilty party in this fiasco is the culture of political protest. If you've never participated in or attended a political protest, you likely have no idea what this culture is all about. But if you have, then you understand full well that this is a subset of people who think it's fun to spend an afternoon yelling at people. That should tell you everything you need to know about them. Think how preposterous it is that a school would sponsor a field trip to Washington DC, where the kids will all get together and yell about abortion. That's not education, that is madness. While I don't think the MAGA teens should have been subjected to what they've gone through, perhaps next time they will be a little more circumspect about what they can expect from an afternoon of political activism. Yelling at people for fun will get you all riled-up. So, when you're finished with your "fun," and meet a bunch of people who have become similarly all riled-up, you can probably expect conflict. If you're not expecting it, you're not very self-aware. Hopefully these kids have learned a valuable lesson, and they don't grow up to be anything like the people in the other two protest groups. The people in those two groups obviously seek out differently minded groups to go yelling at. And the result is what you see this week.

Twitter mobs -- a term I'll apply to any social media outrage mob -- also have this proclivity toward yelling at people for fun. That's the main reason I stopped using Twitter: I don't think yelling at people is fun. I don't think snarking at people is fun. I don't think apoplexy is mentally healthy, much less entertaining, and anyone who actively fosters that kind of thing in their own lives -- indeed, in their leisure time -- is, in my opinion, insane. It is far more productive to use your leisure time to foster healthy relationships, get outside, create some art, move your body around, than it is to find things on the internet to yell about or prove wrong.

Many political commentators I follow on social media were quick to take sides. Those who did so early on had a lot of egg on their faces. One rather famous libertarian commentator mentioned that he'd like to punch the kid, and put forth that the kid was a clear example of "toxic masculinity." That commentator now has to retreat into a bit of soul-searching, and I hope he finds it productive, because this is not the first time he's jumped the gun on fake news. Others are smugly presenting the fact that the initial story was wrong as proof of how dumb the reactionaries are. I'm not sure this is a productive response, either, though. Ultimately, they're all just piling-on.

So, what am I doing here? Am I just piling on? Maybe I am. What I think I'm trying to say is this: Stop reading the news; stop participating in the media's use of outrage-marketing to turn minor events into major news cycles; stop yelling at people for fun; stop using social media to make yourself angry.

Go outside, get some sunlight on your face. Breathe deeply. Play some music or draw a picture or read a book. Spend some time improving your relationships with other people. Spend your time wisely on things that make you happy. Life is so short and so precious. Don't waste it on this kind of nonsense. Learn to recognize when you're being played, and run like hell from it. Run into the welcoming arms of the love of your life and stay in that embrace for an hour. That's an hour well spent.

IRL

Ultimately, an increasingly narcissistic culture will stop being narcissistic all by itself. We should have realized this long ago; after all, the more obsessed we all are with our own image, the less important to us other people’s images become, the less narcissistic supply there is to be given. The narcissists will turn elsewhere for their narcissistic supply, but where will they turn? None of the other narcissists are interested in doling it out, and those that are are paradoxically less narcissistic since they seem to recognize the reciprocal and mutually beneficial nature of giving people respect.

Lately, I have seen small communities pop up that seem to be inhabited by small groups of narcissists. They take turns reaffirming the same set of principles, and thus any compliment they provide to others is, in effect, a way to gain narcissistic supply out of them. “You said what I said previously. This validates me.” “Oh, you said it, too? I knew I was right all along.” But this sort of thing will be short-lived and mostly self-contained. The more we are all interested mainly in ourselves, the less supply there is to go around, the less validating it is to be a narcissist.

This doesn’t suggest, however, that such a society is “out of the woods.” It is beginning to alarm an increasing number of people that human beings are turning inward for things that a social life used to provide. The Atlantic has a very remarkable recent article about that (H/T Tyler Cowen). Ostensibly, the article explores the mystery of why young people are less interested in sex. I think the author is asking the wrong question. Skin-on-skin is the ultimate social interaction. There is arguably no other thing that human beings do together that requires more communication – assuming they are doing it well. The article gives ample evidence, of course, that young people aren’t doing it well. In example after example, the author reports on many young people who find real-world (“meatspace”) personal interaction to be creepy at worst and awkward at best. Meanwhile, in example after example, these same young people engage in occasional romantic encounters only to be choked, jackhammered, genitally injured, and so on. (Yes. And so on.) What the author, and subsequently Tyler Cowen, focus on is the question of why young people are doing it less, but of course they would be doing it less if everyone were collectively getting worse at doing it at all. No one shies away from an encounter with an expert lover with whom they have already united. Toward the end of the article, the author explores how women are decided en masse to avoid painful and injurious intercourse, in favor of pretty much any other way of passing the time, and one can hardly blame them. Still, throughout time immemorial, human beings have always thought that marriage and family is worth it. Today’s young people are increasingly unaware of what they’re fighting for when it comes to romantic relationships, because they don’t know what romance is, they don’t know what the benefits of a healthy and self-affirming intimate relationship are, and they can’t seem to communicate with each other well enough to find anything that even approximates what they should be looking for.

Elsewhere on the web, you can find the blog of a widely read libertarian woman who uses her romantic life as a metaphor for state oppression. I’m not entirely sure if it’s meant to be taken seriously or humorously, but when I occasionally read it, it only makes me sad. Nearly one-hundred years ago, Franz Kafka made a name for himself describing the horrors of mankind’s relationship to the state, which is both impenetrable (The Castle) and suffocatingly omnipresent (The Trial). Bureaucracy, when you must make a request of it, is thoroughly and impossibly inaccessible. When it wants something of you, however, nothing you say or do can stop it. Imagine how a person must feel whose romantic encounters serve as plausible analogues for, not only either of those interactions with the state, but both of them.

A concerned onlooker might conclude that the woman has been hurt, terribly and often. However, another possibility exists. It could simply be that she is no more capable of communicating with a romantic partner than she is with a faceless bureaucracy. That is, the fault might well be hers. I’m not suggesting that it is her fault, because I have no insight into that. I’m merely a reader weighing all the possibilities.

I’ve written before about society’s transition in art, away from being a performance intended for community consumption, and toward and inward-looking expression of self. That is, when musicians take the stage today (and I’m talking about amateurs learning how to create art), they’re mostly focused on playing their parts. To the extent that they’re interested in the audience at all, it’s mostly for attention-getting reasons. They want adulation and applause. Well, performers have always wanted adulation and applause, but in the past it was more participatory. You played to the audience, and you fed off the audience’s energy. You didn’t just want them to think you were neat, you wanted to be the one who was capable of showing them a good time. You might have been in it for the chicks, but being in it for the chicks meant being the guy who was capable of pleasing the chicks. The metric of success was still very much external to the artist: the chicks decided if you were cool or not. You relied on their assessment, and to the extent that you could do so, you attempted to influence their opinion by tailoring your performance to them.

Today, though, you’re a rock star if you feel like one. You can buy Facebook likes and Instagram followers, and you can even leverage that into a world tour. In the end, nobody cares that he was never famous, because he’s famous now. Mission accomplished. He didn’t become famous by showing people a good time, he became famous by tricking people into believing that he was already famous. The metric of success is no longer the audience. The metric of success is your phone. If your phone says you have tens of thousands of fans, then you do. And let’s be clear about it: This is true even if you’re just using bots and AI apps to force your phone into displaying the numbers. The very idea that you would spend years honing your craft in front of a bunch of chicks (or, more generally, music fans who listen to you and provide you with actual “meatspace” feedback) when you can simply hire “The Russians” to boost your Spotify plays seems so old-fashioned.

This is not a narcissism problem. This is not something borne from the fact that we think too highly of ourselves or are too obsessed with presenting a false image of ourselves. This is rather a short-circuit in the basic wiring of human society. Each of us is supposed to be a node in a several-billion-strong network called the human race. We are supposed to be bound to each other by our interactions, by our participation in a common experience. More and more, our society is not bound by a common experience because people do not share experiences in common. We eat lone, make love alone, perform art alone. We are lonely and alone. We are increasingly incapable of having positive social interaction with each other.

Take close note of who it is that is writing this today. I’m the individualist, the guy who claims that being a strong and well-expressed individual is the key to happiness. When I’m the guy telling you that your society is so uninterested in being a society that it’s starting to crack and crumble, you know it might be time to go make some new friends and do something with them. In meatspace. You don’t have to make love to them, but judging by current trends, it might not be a terrible idea. Just make sure to look them in the eyes while you’re doing it.

Silicon Valley Is Weird, A Continuing Series

The other day, I clicked through to the profile of a friend-of-a-friend on Facebook. This individual is a Silicon Valley dweller, and arguably a stereotypical one. At least, that’s how it appeared to me.


This individual had cast an early ballot in the mid-term election, and had posted a status update that revealed and invited discussion about everything he had voted on. Every senator, ballot initiative, judge, etc. This behavior – revealing in a public forum exactly how he voted and attempting to discuss it publicly with all comers – struck me as being incredibly odd. For one thing, I’m a big fan of the anonymous ballot. It’s a privilege that protects us from suffering any number of negative consequences for voting our beliefs. (Clearly, this guy wasn’t worried about the negative consequences.)


But the other thing about it is that it’s a socially awkward way to have a discussion about politics. If you get to know me (or read my blog), you’ll soon discover what my politics are. That’s mostly a function of the fact that I talk about the things I believe, I try to learn more about the issues, I try to share what I’ve learned, and I hope to learn from others. Announcing where I stand on every ballot issue on a particular election doesn’t provide a format for conversation. It’s a declaration: Look at me, look how I vote. I’m not typically very warm to the “signaling” theory of human behavior, but what else could such a thing be? Especially since, I should note, this person voted precisely along party lines.


Well, it looked like really weird behavior to me, but I just set it aside in my mind under the belief that this just happened to be a weird guy.


But then this morning I happened to be reading through the first few posts of Slate Star Codex and noticed that “Scott Alexander” had done precisely the same thing. Okay, Alexander’s blog post was a little better, since he actually provided reasoning for each one of his votes, and critical discussion in the comments section of his blog is a well-established norm. That makes this behavior much more conversant, but it doesn’t make it any less weird. I’ll happily discuss the issues with anyone; but I don’t want to go point-by-point through your ballot. WTF. It’s self-absorbed.


There are, of course, many weird things about Slate Star Codex. The most recent post is about ketamine, why the literature thinks it works to treat depression, and reasons we once thought it worked but now know to be wrong. The post itself is actually fine and even a little interesting, if you have a pharmaceutical or medical background. The comments section, though, turned into a shit-show of self-reporting on how people felt when they recreationally tried ketamine, heroin, etc., themselves.


That’s Silicon Valley culture for you, though. They do a lot of drugs and they post their election ballots on social media. If it were just some odd sub-culture, we could scratch our chin anthropologically for a moment and then go back to our lives. But this is a sub-culture with deep pockets, who have the collective ear of politicians, and who have a stated objective of nudging society toward their beliefs. We all have our own view of what we want society to be like; I don’t happen to think that making society more like an odd collection of drug-abusing swingers is a step in the right direction.


I have a lot more to say about Silicon Valley culture, but I’ll save it for future posts, as I continue to report on the trend.

Swipe Right

I was thinking about 80s movies tonight, and how much narratives around romance have changed.

The core romantic conflict in 80s movies was either that the guy didn’t have the guts to ask the girl out, or he wasn’t cool enough for her to agree to go out with him. Really, this is two versions of the same story; after all, a cool guy wouldn’t lack the guts to ask a girl out. Over the course of the movie, the guy would have to figure out how to be cool enough to captivate her attention.

Initially, he’d start out by trying to fake it. He’d pretend to like the same music she likes, or have the same interests as hers. He’d act like a jerk, try to display some knowledge about her interests, and then she’d roll her eyes and say, “Get lost, you creep!” Then he’d fall down or something, and a crowd of people would laugh at him, underscoring the fact that he was not cool enough to get the girl.

But the movie would always offer our hero a path to being cool. Either he’d learn to display some skill or prove some talent, or he’d learn to stand up for himself in the face of various bullies (parents, rich squares, a school jock, that sort of thing). Often the girl he thought he wanted would turn out to be shallow; she’d like him only when the crowd liked him, and despite him otherwise. Meanwhile, the girl he ultimately gets ends up appreciating him for who he was even when he wasn’t cool. He’d realize by the end of the film that he’d been a jerk the whole time — a “jerk” here being a type of uncoolness. And by the end, they’d fall in love.

However, exactly, the old movies told these stories, it was basically the same narrative. What strikes me about this narrative in hindsight is that it offers a path forward to people who are unlucky in love: By demonstrating coolness, we find the people who appreciate us. “Coolness” is a broad concept that encapsulates whatever happens to be important to you: your talent, your dignity, your ability to triumph over adversity, whatever. Prove that you’re cool enough, and you’ll get the girl; and if you’re true to yourself, you might even get a better girl than the one you wanted in the first place.

Modern romance stories do not function like this.

For one thing, if you’re not already cool, you have no chance with the girl. The message conveyed is that if a woman isn’t interested you from the beginning, you shouldn’t try to win her affection through personal merit. No means no; get lost, you creep.

For another thing attraction is instantaneous in modern love stories. A lot of these stories mask this assumption by having either the guy or the girl be “unaware” of his or her own feelings, until late in the movie, when he or she realizes that the whole reason all that emotion was bubbling to the top in the first place is because he or she subconsciously loved the other person.

And finally, the hero may win or lose (he usually wins, of course), but winning has no direct relationship to getting the girl. Sometimes he gets the girl before he wins, and they lie together and brood. Other times, he gets the girl after winning, but only on her terms.

So the modern love story is about two people who are already in love, deciding to act on their feelings, while other important plot-stuff happens to them independently of the love story. The message this is bound to convey to young people who unfortunately end up learning about love from the movies is that love is something that just happens to the heroes of the story, and nothing anyone actually does has anything to do with it.

Swipe right.

Narcissism And Truth In Politics

These guys are becoming an easy target these days, but in this case they happen to have saddled-up one of my hobby horses, so it's time to comment.

The topic du jour is "post-truth" and journalism. If you're committed to taking the written world only ever at face-vale, as the Sweet Talkers seem to be, then the question is why don't facts matter so much in politics? Why does the mainstream media so often publish lies?

The question not being asked - the question that actually contains the answer - is Why do I keep reading all these articles, even when the majority are ideologically slanted, many are factually incorrect, and the rest don't tell me anything I don't already know?

Well, here's a five-year-old explanation for you. It's got everything we're still talking about today: fake news, ideological polarization, and one important fact about the news you read:

It's easy to guess that the target demo for Fox & Friends is white women over 55 who have to get their teenage kids off to the methadone clinic and are perfectly content with a flip phone. "I don't need a touchscreen to fellowship with the Lord." Fair point. Gretchen Carlson is a standard example of what that demo calls a "well put together woman"-- heavy foundation, dresses that fit easily over Spanx and the hypercoiffed hairdo preferred by men who first ejaculated in the 1970s. I just got the shivers. Fun fact: Michele Bachmann was her babysitter back in the day. "Michele who?" Exactly. Remember how you were told she mattered, and you believed it? Kept you out of the game for 2 years 11 months, well done. Assange was right, the internet does make it easier for us to think for ourselves. 

What's not easy to guess, yet importantly true, is that the other target demo for Fox & Friends is everyone who viscerally hates that first demo. Do you think it upsets Fox that their footage is making The Huffington Post a lot of money? All part of the plan. The battle isn't Red v. Blue, but Purple v. You. You lose.

Post-truth means we have entered an era in which truth is literally unimportant to people. See for example here, which should give you just a taste of the overall argument against Scott Sumner's Rorty-ish tendency to say anything and everything as long as it advances his narrative.

It comes down to the reason people advance a narrative today. It used to be that the narrative was intended to persuade. Now the intent is somewhere between magical thinking (take, for instance, Trump's claim that God made it stop raining for his inaugural address) and quasi-religious team cheer-leading (take, for example, a "women's march" that has no clear policy objective).

Stripped to its essence, "public discourse" has gone from making claims to swearing allegiance to groups who make claims. That's identity politics for you. Note well the difference between "I believe in women's rights" and "I am part of the group that believes in women's rights." The first statement gives you something to talk about; the second statement is... well, I'd use the phrase "a mask," but others would use the phrase "moral grandstanding" What good is it to make claims and support them with evidence if you don't genuflect to our collective sense of identity?

Post-truth means that advertisers and politicians are the same people now. See how many SEO specialists write for think-tanks these days. It's not about the issues anymore, it's about branding. What's your brand? People don't vote according to their party, but according to their brand. That's why you've got Silicon Valley techno-libertarians and "libertarians for Trump." You'd think a bunch of people committed to principle - that is, you'd think libertarians, at least, if anyone - would be able to understand and sympathize with those who voted the other way. But that's not what happened. Why not? Branding.

To be sure, we all want facts to matter. But we just want them to matter. That doesn't mean they actually do. In the end, all these discussions are about branding, which is one reason why I spend so much time emphasizing the importance of results over theory. Political theory in the modern landscape is a "vanity project." It's not about what you believe, it's about how you believe it. Lew Rockwell and Roderick Long are both anarchists. Why does the first name make fans of the second name bristle, and vice-versa, if they're both committed to free market anarchism?

All anyone really cares about is their brand. It's a modern problem.

When Your Way Out Isn't A Way Out

I followed a link on Robert Murphy's blog, and then followed another link, and then somehow I found myself on The Other Side of the Internet. I don't recommend going there often, if at all. Still, "While I'm here," I thought to myself, "I may as well see if I can learn something."

I discovered an article written by one Sophie Gray, who, in an article tellingly entitled "Why I've Stopped Posting Ab Selfies to Social Media," opens with the following:

If you were scrolling through my Instagram account on July 15th you would’ve seen a feed filled with ‘ab selfies’ with comments littered underneath saying how I’m #LIFEGOALS and have the #PERFECTBODY.

Note the link to her Instagram account. We can already tell that this story is about to veer into sadness, but if Sophie can get a few more Instagram followers, then why not, right? She continues:

But if you were my boyfriend on that very same day, you would have seen a very different story. You would have seen a very different version of me. 

You would have been the one by my side as I stood crying in the baggage claim area in the airport. You would have been the one climbing into a rental car and embarking on a 38-hour drive home just because I couldn’t get on our connecting flight home. 

And guess what? My so-called enviable thigh gap and six pack weren’t the reason I wasn’t able to get on the flight.

It was because I had a horrible panic attack on our previous flight and was a total and complete fucking mess.

At this point, the average reader is keen to learn about how the relentless pursuit of physical perfection drove this poor woman into a melt-down. But Sophie never says that. In fact, she never says anything at all about what was behind her panic attack.

Instead, she self-diagnoses as someone who has "anxiety," and provides the unreferenced statistic that "1 in 5 people are living with anxiety." I haven't fact-checked that claim, because it is completely irrelevant. It's irrelevant to my blog post, it's irrelevant to her article, and it's irrelevant to her panic attack.

Sophie uses this statistic to do a quick calculation. She states (audaciously, in bold text) that she has 400,000 followers on Instagram (product placement again), and that this implies that 80,000 of them suffer from anxiety.

To Sophie, this means that 80,000 of her followers are suffering anxiety as a direct result of, or which is seriously aggravated by, her ab selfies. So, for their sake, she's not posting ab selfies anymore.

Well, gosh, I feel better now. Don't you?

It's possible that Sophie's desire to have lots of adulating Instagram followers drove her to a panic attack. It's also possible that her relentless pursuit of a perfect body drove her to a panic attack. And it is certainly believable that the combination of those two activities drove her to a panic attack. But if so, this means that Sophie's anxiety really has nothing to do with her followers. Changing her Instagram behavior might be exactly the right thing to do - for herself. So why does Sophie decide to do it for everyone's sake but hers?

It could be that she's just fishing for positive reinforcement from her nigh-half-a-million fans. Like, she's worried about how a change in behavior will affect her social media presence, so she wants to put the idea out there to them, so that they will say, "Yes! Do it! We support you!" Maybe she just needs that kind of adulation in order to make a positive change in her life.

But notice the difference between earnestly asking for support because you feel unsure of yourself and need to make a change, versus suggesting that it's really your support network who has the real problem, and that you need to make a change for them. Both activities feel like a positive change for the better, but while the former is an acknowledgement of personal weakness and an earnest request for help, the latter is a way of spreading the guilt around.

"I had a panic attack, therefore I'm going to do something so that you don't have one, too."

No, Sophie. You had a panic attack, so you need to make a change in your own behavior to prevent yourself from having another one. I don't know how many people have had panic attacks as a direct result of seeing her Instagram photos, but I suspect the number is much smaller than 80,000 and might even be close to zero.

Of course, Sophie has an incentive to ignore this. The thought that her Instagram followers don't think she's important enough to have driven them into a panic attack is, in essence, a narcissistic injury. It means she isn't as popular and important as she wants to be.

Notice the other ugly thing about this: A woman whose ab selfies are so glorious that they send people into panic attacks is still pretty marvelous, isn't she? So even by swearing-off her selfies she still gets to proclaim her superiority over her followers.

So she covers it with a self-serving story about how her ab selfies are driving anxious fans into panic attacks and that she needs to stop, for their sake.

My prediction: Sophie will stop posting ab selfies but will not stop being anxious.

Tough Love And Another Failed Narrative

Taking a trip through the narratives of our past reveals the emotional complexity with which society was once equipped. I sometimes worry that we are more poorly equipped these days.

Image courtesy Groove Music

I've been revisiting an old, old album from my favorite 80s band, Squeeze, Babylon and On. This was a hit album at the time, but in hindsight it was not their biggest album. While many people recognize the band's biggest hits, such as "Pulling Mussels from a Shell," and "Tempted," the only people who would recognize the hits from Babylon and On at this point are dedicated Squeeze fans.

The third track on the album is called "Tough Love." Here's how it begins:

There she sits in an empty room
The look on her face says it all
A bruise appears round a crying eye
As the tear drops sadly fall
He knocked her over he hit her
And told her she's stupid
He's high as a kite once again*

So a woman sits alone, with a black eye, which she got from her husband or boyfriend, who was drunk and/or high at the time. Before you guess how the story ends, here's the final couplet of the first verse:

She knows that tough love is needed
To save the love of her friend

The rest of the song tells the story of how the protagonist uses tough love to help her man get clean. She throws him out of the house, he sobers up, they talk and argue about the whole issues, and eventually he stops "the drugs and the drinking" and "he's back in her arms once again."

Importantly, the song ends with the words, "She knows it's tough love that she finds in her heart to dissolve the pain." So this is not just a story of how he got clean and she forgave him.  It's also a story of compassion and forgiveness. She loves him, and she is strong when he is not. Her love and her compassion not only see her through the difficult process of helping an addict get clean, but also help her heal her own heart at the end of the process. It's not happily ever after when he gets clean; it's happily ever after when she takes the time to heal her own wounds after helping him through his demons.

Lucky guy.

What strikes me about this song is that it's the kind of good story that would never be told today. In today's world, getting high and beating your wife is verboten, as it should be, but it's also unforgivable. A fictitious character who does such a thing in the year 2016 is an unabashed villain. He's not worth saving. Of course she's stronger than he is, so she would leave him. If he managed to clean himself up after that, it's none of her business. At best, they would come to a friendly understanding of each other and move on with their separate lives. But under no circumstances would he ever find himself "back in her arms once again."

This narrative is coupled with the another significant one, which is the belief that addiction is simply a disease, that addicts have no control over their actions. Once you catch this terrible, hereditary disease, you are stuck and there's nothing you can do except never touch drugs or alcohol ever again. Period.

In today's world, addicts aren't allowed to heal and rehabilitate themselves. They're given the opportunity to simply acknowledge their disease, make amends, and then proceed as forever-broken people whose only "second chance" is finding a new circle of friends, a new family, and etc.

Longtime readers of this blog know how critical I am of drugs and of addiction. Still, the modern treatment of these very real situations leaves everyone who ever has to experience them with two choices: (1) Girl leaves boy and boy becomes a chronically diseased, broken person, or (2) Boy dies of his addiction disease. Neither of these options seems particularly therapeutic to me.

Way back when, society still had narratives that enabled recovery and healing along multiple possible trajectories. Maybe there is still hope - maybe if you get clean she can still find it in her heart to forgive you, and the two of you can move beyond your past mistakes. Maybe you can build a positive future for yourself.

But in today's emotionally stunted world, it's scorched earth. He hit her, therefore he is evil; he takes drugs, therefore he is diseased; the only viable solution is for them to break up - she'll live happily ever after she finds a good, non-diseased, perfect guy; and he'll live miserably but wisely ever after once he acknowledges his disease and wears it on his shirtsleeve until the end of time. Maybe if he's lucky, he'll find some equally broken woman, and they'll both brood together in their brokenness. But happiness is for perfect people who don't ever make mistakes - especially not bad mistakes.

The problem here is that people make terrible mistakes, and that emotionally mature human beings are capable of compassion and forgiveness. Not every person who ever makes a terrible mistake deserves our forgiveness, of course, but that doesn't mean that there is a list of mistakes out there which, if any one of them is committed, means that all love and compassion falls off the table and we cast the sinners out into the outer darkness of broken-people-land.

That's just not rational.

__________________

* On my copy of the album, in place of the lyric "He's high as a kite once again," vocalist Glenn Tilbrook sings, "He's out of his head once again." 

Some Links

Sometime between March 13th and 27th, this post from The Last Psychiatrist appears to have been removed from the web, although the link is still present. The rest of the website appears to be intact. Draw your own conclusions, but this suggests to me that our humble correspondent is still out there.

Everyone is linking to this wonderful post by Martin Gurri on Donald Trump. The link was passed to me many days ago, but like a fool, I ignored it. I should not have, and neither should you.

There has been an unusual recent uptick in homicides in the DFW area.

The ex-wife of a terrorist was not amenable to reconciliation, surprising no one.

The guy who once got in big trouble at Harvard University for making sexist comments now wonders why people aren't equally as concerned about anti-Semitism. It's a fair question, I guess, but pretty rich.

"What the DOJ is really afraid is losing this precedent-setting case in the U.S. Supreme Court."

Some Links

1. The evolution of Deepika Padukone. Interesting throughout.
2. My latest at Sweet Talk Conversation, on hermeneutics. Adam Gurri provides additional context.
3. David Henderson lauds Barack Obama. I would guess that this sort of politicking requires a great deal of experience, which explains why Obama failed to take advantage of similar opportunities in earlier diplomacy with the despots of Africa and Latin America.
4. Catherine Rampell on the soda tax, or as I have called it, making it illegal to be fat.
5. They were also discussing the ramifications of fat-versus-skinny on the Jason Ellis Show yesterday. I was going to link to it, but his show archives are only current up to February 6th. Watch that space for the 3/23/2016 show, and you'll be able to see how it dovetails nicely with link #4, above.
6. I need to write something about this totally awesome article on running form, but I haven't figured out how to say it better than she already said it. Read it now!

Bonus content! Here's some video footage I took of the storm cell that rolled in on me last night, with some commentary. Later on, the weather radar detected circular motion in the clouds and we had to take cover, but luckily it was a small storm that passed by uneventfully.

Shirley MacLaine Gets It Exactly Wrong

MSN.com has the report, but I think they wrote all the relevant parts of the story in the wrong order. Here is the middle part of the story:

Detailing her relationship with film producer Steve Parker, MacLaine tells PEOPLE and Entertainment Weekly Editorial Director Jess Cagle during a Sirius XM town hall that she and her husband of 28 years were friends more than lovers. 

"I guess you would say 'practiced an open marriage' in 1954, which was another lifetime," she says. "No one understood it, we did. He lived in Japan basically, I lived in America working, and this and that."

She continued, "We'd meet up, always great friends, traveled sometimes together."

The couple split up in 1982, but not before welcoming one daughter, actress Sachi Parker. Parker was mostly raised by her father, a childhood she later detailed in a 2013 tell-all book her mother called "virtually all fiction." 

Failed marriage - check. Abandoned child - check. Estranged daughter - check. You know, if you didn't read any other part of the story, you'd almost make the mistake of concluding that MacLaine had made some serious mistakes in life, for which she has paid dearly.

But, no, MSN.com has not published an article about MacLaine's regrets, but rather - wait for it - her advice on how to maintain a successful long-term relationship!

Regardless [of all the aforementioned bad stuff], MacLaine stands by the relationship with the man she once told The Guardian was the "love of my life."

The story starts out like this:

Want a life of happiness? Don't do it alone – but certainly don't get too tied down, says Shirley MacLaine. 

The Downton Abbey star, who has been famously candid about her love life – which has included a handful of affairs – says that the only way to ensure marital success is to take an open approach to monogamy.

The headline of the story reads, "Shirley MacLaine On Why An Open Marriage Is The Only Way To Go." Toward the end of the story, MacLaine is quoted as saying,

"I think that's the basis for a long-lasting marriage, if you really want to do such a thing," she shares. "I would say better to stay friends and we don't have enough time to talk about the sexuality of all. I was very open about all of that and so was he."

The story ends by mentioning that MacLaine now spends her home time with her three dogs, for which she has so little time that she has resorted to hiring a caretaker for them.

The Prince Memorabilia Auction Should Quietly Go Away

Yesterday, my news feed directed me to an article about an upcoming auction of Prince memorabilia. Today, as I was searching for the same article I originally read (the one I just linked), I came across pages and pages of rather predictable salaciousness.

I say "predictable" for two reasons, and only one of those reasons is "because Prince." The other reason, the primary reason, is because the "Prince memorabilia" being auctioned is not just stuff like guitars and costumes (although there is one of each of those things), but specifically memorabilia that pertains to the new-defunct love affair between Prince and Mayte Garcia. This includes an engagement ring, love notes, and fine china used at their wedding.

In short, these are the heartfelt memories of a woman's failed marriage.

My first reaction, as per usual, is to blame Ms. Garcia for making the disposal of her memories such a public event, literally selling them to the highest bidder. Can she not maintain some level of personal dignity and just quietly get rid of these things? My second reaction is, what kind of person would want to purchase someone's sad memories?

Ultimately, these two reactions I have become fused together and express themselves as a profound sadness for everyone touched by this event. This event should not happen, and all I can really feel about it is sadness. The Prince memorabilia auction should quietly go away.

The 2016 Oscar Gift Bag And Comments

I know. You were just dying to read my take on this. I shall happily oblige. I report the items and their monetary value as reported by a website called "Good.Is."

Haze Dual Vaporizer ($250)

Relevant only for those celebrities who choose to vape their marijuana. I claim no expertise here.

Personalized M&Ms ($300)

I'm suspicious of the monetary value here, but have no further comment.

A 10,000-meal donation made in the nominee's name to an animal shelter or rescue of their choice ($6,300)

Ethically problematic. I wonder if the celebrity can opt-out of this. If not, then the "gift" is really the use/abuse of a celebrity's name for a political agenda. I imagine most celebrities are used to this kind of thing, and probably have good lawyers who specialize in preventing it.

A lifetime supply of Pu-erh Tea Nourishing Cream and Pu-erh Tea Cleansing Bar ($31,200)

Any time I see something like this, I wonder whether the sponsor will actually last through that celebrity's lifetime and will remain solvent enough to follow through on its gift.

A year's worth of Audi car rentals from Silvercar ($45,000)

For the celebrity who cannot afford their own car.

10-day all-expenses-paid trip to Israel ($55,000)

And let me guess: Comes with a free photo-op so that the celebrity can be as conspicuous about vacationing in Israel as possible?

Tribute video services ($125)

This is probably really useful for actors.

Caolion Ultimate Pore Care gift set ($134)

This is probably nice, too.

Healing Saint Luminosity skin serum and hair follicle stimulant ($193)

I have never wanted to stimulate my hair follicles, but I'm not judging you if that's your bag.

Private 15-day walking tour of Japan ($54,000)

For the famous person who wants to walk around in a crowded public place during a holiday.

10 personal training sessions with Alexis Seletzky ($900)

Unless the celebrity is already planning on switching PTs, this strikes me as fairly useless.

Belldini gift certificate ($300)

Probably nice.

Chapstick ($6)

This one's just weird. Right up there with a pack of Brawny paper towels.

Chocolatines Drunken Fig Cake Bites ($35)

Likely delicious.

Dandi Patch anti-perspirant solution ($21)

The operable word is solution. What does it come in, a beaker?

Delovery gift basket ($2,000)

This is probably something that people from L.A. swoon over. I have no idea what it is.

Druzy earrings ($25)

A $25 pair of earrings? This must have been an impulse purchase they picked up while shopping for the Chapstick.

Fit Club TV “Ultimate Fitness Package” ($6,250)

Hey, baby. Wanna see my ultimate fitness package?

Gleener on the Go ($12)

I had no idea what this was, but it's actually pretty cool. Removes fuzz from clothing. Nice.

3-day stay at the Golden Door Resort & Spa in San Marcos, California ($4,800)

Let me guess, no weekends or holidays, not for use during peak season, cannot be combined with any other offer.

3-night stay at the Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria in Sorrento, Italy ($5,000)

Probably nice for those celebrities who already happen to be in Sorrento.

3-night stay at the Grand Hotel Tremezzo in Lake Como, Italy ($5,000)

Well, I guess I might as well spend an extra 3 days in Lake Como then, right?

Greenhill Blanc de Blancs wine ($39)

Gone before the ceremonies are over.

Hydroxycut Gummies ($20)

Betcha can't eat just one.

3 fitness training sessions with Jay Cardiello ($1,400)

Again, unless you're already planning on getting a new trainer...

Joseph's Toiletries toilet paper ($275)

Wow, I totally retract my Brawny paper towel comment.

Sterling silver necklace ($150)

No joke, I bet this is awesome.

Memobottles ($47)

It's a reusable water bottle. Celebrities probably have tons of these kinds of things coming out of every cupboard.

El Silencio Mezcal ($75)

Gone before the after party is over.

Mission1 protein bar ($6)

Probably fed to the dog, but likely very tasty.

Nuelle Fiera arouser for her ($250)

Well, I didn't see that coming...

Phantom Glass screen protector ($50-$60)

Probably cool, but will probably go unused.

Purely Inspired Organic Protein ($20)

Every male celeb is swooning over this.

Rouge Maple culinary products ($99)

Details not specified, leading me to wonder what we're talking about here. Serving spoons? Tapanade?

Sedone Lace makeup brush set ($110)

I got nothing here.

Signature Vodka ($70)

Gone by the end of the night.

Slimware plates ($30)

Not sure what $30 gets you for kitchen china. Four dinner plates? A teacup?

Steamist spa system ($5,060)

It's a spa, it's a system, it's two things in one!

Sundial powder coating ($500)

I have never needed to coat my sundial in powder. Is it more accurate that way?

Blow dryers and flat irons ($250)

People are coming up to Don Cheadle going, "Dude, are you gonna use that?"

Vampire Breast Lift ($1,900)

I bet the maitre'd will do it for free.

Wallet ($125)

In case you came to the Oscars without one.

740 Park plastic surgery ($5,530)

Not sure how they arrived at that specific number, but I bet Hollywood knows.

Back On My Hobby Horse

Every couple of months, I have to make everyone angry by writing a blog post about the deleterious effects of recreational drug use.

Many advocates of drug legalization like to use a weird rhetorical tactic in which they compare Illegal Drug X (usually marijuana) to Legal Substance Y (usually alcohol, but sometimes caffeine and sugar). In so far as their point is that Drug X is no more harmful than any other perfectly legal substance, it is a valid point. But occasionally these folks attempt to build a bridge too far, and actually try to make the case that alcohol, or tobacco, or caffeine, or sugar ought to be illegal, and that Drug X ought not be. Not only do I consider this a bad argument, I think it's an illberal one. If Drug X ought to be legalized, so should all the things that are already legal.

Let's move on to the topic of the day.

Several years ago, it was widely reported - and confirmed to the surest extent that any such a thing actually can be definitively proven - that chronic marijuana use causes testicular cancer. Those who would suggest that marijuana is harmless must now admit that there is one serious risk associated with using it.

Today, we now have another good reason to eschew marijuana. A number of media outlets are reporting that long-term marijuana use is deleterious to verbal memory.

Researchers found that as past years of marijuana use increased, verbal memory scores decreased. In practical terms, the results meant that for every additional five years of exposure, 50 percent of marijuana users would remember one less word from a list of 15 tested words.

So, if you consume marijuana consistently for seventy-five years, you can reasonably expect that you will remember zero of the words on a fifteen-word list. Consume marijuana for two decades, and expect to forget one third of the words.

Granted, it might not seem like much, but suppose those words make up a grocery list. That's inconvenient. Suppose the words make up your child's birthday list. That's shameful. Suppose the words make up a list of contra-indicated medicines that you ought not be taking with your current medication. That's potentially fatal.

But that's why I write shit down hehehehehehehehehehe puff puff pass...

This was an epidemiological study of over three thousand patients, so the findings are about as robust as we can reasonably expect from epidemiological studies.

Does this mean I think marijuana should be illegal? No. But don't anyone fool themselves about what this plant does to the human brain.

Katherine Ripley Rediscovers The Conventional Wisdom

Katherine Ripley of the Huffington Post writes,

By my fourth year of college, I had finally managed let go of all our society's misogynistic, heteronormative ideas about sex. But I'm left wondering--why did it take me so long?

Elsewhere in the same article, Ripley alludes to her having pursued heterosexual relationships. She does not, by contrast, make any allusion to her pursuing same-sex relationships. So it's probably safe to assume that she spent over twenty years of her life believing heteronormative ideas about sex because, as a participant in heterosexual relationships, those ideas are genuinely normal for her.

The real question is why a heterosexual would ever reject heteronormative ideas about sex. It's certainly a fair question to ask, but a truly attentive reader will be more specific: What happened before Ripley's fourth year of college that made her reject "misogynistic, heteronormative ideas about sex?"

A Jarring Perspective

The passage I quoted above was the fourth paragraph in Ripley's article. Here are the preceding three:

I recently finished reading Inga Muscio's Cunt. I'll start by saying that no matter who you are, you can learn something from this book. The first and most interesting thing I learned was this:

The word "vagina" comes from the Latin word for "sheath," as in, for a sword. 

This was one of those, "how did I never learn that in four years of liberal arts education?" moments that I've been having since I graduated in May. Of course. Women's genitals are defined in terms of men's genitals. And that's a problem. A woman cannot take ownership of her sexuality when the word for her sexual pleasure center implies it is her job, first and foremost, to please men. This is one of the many reasons Muscio rejects the word "vagina" and replaces it with "cunt."

Ripley wonders why, during the course of her college education, she never learned the etymology of the word "vagina," something she could have learned by looking it up in the dictionary.

Ripley now believes that the only clinically useful word for the female genitalia we have is an act of real misogyny. What could cause a person to take such a hateful view of oneself and one's sexual identity?

A Few Turtles Further Down

Why would one be inclined to first, reject every norm that genuinely applies to oneself, and second, to only ever use the most hateful term in the English language for one's own private parts? Think about it: What the hell would make a person feel that way? 

Ripley continues:

I remember being surprised when one of my girlfriends told me in high school that the first time she had sex didn't hurt at all. I was jealous of her. Because for me, it was still hurting. 

When we're left to figure out sex on our own, we accept whatever information we have available as true. Everything I read on the Internet told the same old story we've been telling for thousands of years: For girls, the first time you have sex is going to be painful; you need to just get it over with, like ripping a Band-Aid off; and once your vagina gets stretched out, it will be fine. 

I kept waiting for it to be fine. And it never was. Not until I understood that basically all of the information I'd absorbed was a lie.

Pause for a moment and reflect. I don't dispute what Ripley says about physiology, but that isn't really the issue here. We are reading about the thoughts of a sexually active high-schooler who, despite consistently feeling pain during intercourse, continued to be sexually active. Does that sound like a mentally healthy person to you?

Ripley next claims that "society" (who?) is "obsessed with this concept of 'virginity.'" (Scare quotes in the original.) For the record, I'm not aware of anyone who even thinks about virginity, other than virgins. The reason virgins seem to be obsessed with "this concept," I wager, is because transitioning from a sexless child to a sexually active adult is one of life's most profound stages of maturation. But Ripley says we're "arbitrarily holding vaginal intercourse up on a pedestal."

She claims to "loathe" (her word) virginity. If she merely loathed it, that might be the end of the story. But take a look at the bizarre story she claims that "society" believes (emphasis mine):

The "virginity" myth and the myth that a woman's first time having penetrative sex must be painful go hand in hand.... Pain during that intercourse is just a physical manifestation of the punishment you're about to endure (i.e. - burning in hell).

What?!? Who thinks this?

Next Ripley makes an empirical claim: That there are "tons" of pornographic videos that depict "'deflowerings.'" (The quotation marks are hers - who is she quoting?) I don't know whether or not this is true, but even if it is, I'm not sure it buttresses the claim that society has a violent infatuation with virginity, or that sex should hurt. After all, there are "tons" of scat-porn videos out there, and I'm pretty sure society in the main is not obsessed with that.

She hastens to add that she's not arguing against pornography, that pornography can be "safe." Safe? Why safe? Why does she use that word as a defense for pornography? Why doesn't she use a word like "healthy" or "normal" or "fun" or "appropriate?" Why safe?

Anyhow, at this point we finally come to Ripley's thesis statement: "we need better sex ed." Okay, fine, but now step back and observe the steps in her chain of reasoning:

1. The etymology of the word "vagina" is sheath, therefore women's sexuality is defined by men's, therefore we should only use hateful, ugly words to refer to genitalia in order to sever this relationship.
2. Therefore, society is dominated by misogynistic, heteronormative views on sexuality.
3. Ripley's high school sexual activity was painful, because she was taught that physical pain is her punishment for sexual activity.
4. This all relates to the fact that her boyfriend watched a lot of pornography, and consequently she learned everything she "knew" about sex from pornography.
5. Ergo, we need better sex education.

This sounds less like an argument and more like a session she had with her therapist. In fact, it sounds like the sad ramblings of an unbearably wounded person.

Lucky Guess?

In February of last year, Ripley was the editor of her college paper when she wrote in an article that she had been the victim of a sexual assault. If there's anything that will completely upend a person's views of healthy human sexuality, that's it. In her article, she spares us the details of her horrible encounter, but she is clear about the psychological impact it had on her:

The worst trauma I experienced was not when one of my ex-boyfriend’s fraternity brothers tried to rape me at a date function. The worst trauma I experienced was seven months later, when I had a trigger while having sex with my ex-boyfriend, and he left. 

For those of you who may not know what a trigger is, it’s something that makes you remember your traumatic event, in a way that you feel like it’s happening to you all over again. You are disconnected from the here and now. You feel scared, your heart races, sometimes you feel like you can’t move or breathe.

For those of you who don't know, Ripley is describing the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

In the wake of this horror, Ripley describes feeling a desire to reclaim the sexual promiscuity she described in yet another issue of the campus newspaper. Fair enough, but observe her reasoning (emphasis mine again):

You might say to me: why don’t you just wait until you’re in a steady relationship? And that’s valid. When sex is difficult because of traumas or fears, it’s probably best to do it with someone you know you can really trust. But I didn’t go that route because I wanted to return to a sense of normalcy. Taking a guy home from the party because I wanted to was part of my normal. After my trauma I continued to do it in order to convince myself that I was healed — that my past didn’t have to inhibit me.

Got that? The reason she didn't want to wait until she was in a healthy, steady relationship was because she wanted to feel normal. But what is more normal than a healthy, steady relationship? "Normal" for Ripley means separating emotional and physical intimacy at will, and choosing one or the other - not both. Normal also means not being bound by her past experiences, but rather being able to live as though she has never had them. It means living as though the same sexual history that lead her to physically painful intercourse in high school and sexual assault in college "didn't have to inhibit" her. That's her version of normal.

Once again, Ripley is ready to prescribe solutions. This time, it's communication:

Well, I have always believed you should do what you want to do, free of judgment or pressure from anyone else. Sometimes it’s hard to tease out your authentic desires from cultural standards, but to the extent you are capable of knowing yourself, listen to that instinct. And most importantly, in taking the liberty of doing what you want to do, take care that you don’t harm anyone — and that includes yourself. For survivors of trauma, this means waiting until you’re ready. And for those who haven’t survived trauma, it means being more aware of the fragility of your partners’ sexual selves. None of the men I took home with me had any power or responsibility to fix me. But they did have a responsibility to communicate — to check in every step of the way — because that’s what you owe anybody you share that level of intimacy with, no matter what their history is.

That sounds healthy enough... until you get insight into what effective communication looks like, in Katherine Ripley's opinion:

He had his hands on my hips as he led me upstairs, a trek I had taken already half a dozen times. He locked the door to his room behind him as he closed the door. He kissed me — a kiss that was starting to feel familiar. And in the moment right before I expected him to reach for the top button on my shirt, he stopped abruptly and said, 

“Doll, we’re clear right? It’s just casual sex.” 

It was the verbal summary of all the non-verbal communication that had taken place in the month since we’d met — the cheap drinks at night, the hasty exits in the mornings, the fact that he never texted earlier than 10 p.m. One thing was for sure: nobody was fooling anyone. And I kept coming back.

I mean... I put it to you, my readers: Does that seem like a healthy encounter to you?

Probably Not

If your answer is "no" - and, by the way, my answer is certainly no - then you'll be happy to know that after a few months, and many intensive therapy sessions, Ripley herself no longer believes that these encounters are healthy:

Hypersexuality is a common side effect of sexual trauma (as is avoiding sex altogether). I didn't know this at the time I wrote that piece. During that period of my life, I wasn't just, "taking a guy home from the party because I wanted to." I was actively going on Tinder and looking for guys to meet at bars and then bring home with me, because I felt like I needed to.

Ripley says she didn't want to stop being promiscuous until one of her casual encounters "went horribly wrong" and resulted in a major panic attack.

Just as she did with pornography, Ripley hastens to add that she isn't condemning "promiscuity" or suggesting that every promiscuous person has mental problems. Then she moves on to her conclusion. But if "hypersexuality is a common side effect of sexual trauma," then shouldn't Ripley be asking herself whether there is any benefit to embracing promiscuity as a sexual norm? Shouldn't she be asking herself whether she was right to defend "hook-up culture?"

No, she doesn't do that, but she does quote her therapist as having said something genuinely wonderful: "Society has all kinds of value systems for determining when sex is okay and when it's not okay. But the only one that really matters is the unity of mind, heart and body."

I agree!

Maybe Society Is Not So Misogynistic, After All

It's crucial - absolutely vital - to understand that Katherine Ripley writes feminist articles about sex for the Huffington Post. That puts her in the position of being more than some blogger recording her psychological development in a digital diary. She's in a position of influence, and she represents those voices arguing against "all our society's misogynistic, heteronormative ideas about sex," and in favor of hook-up culture, pornography, and casual encounters.

Rewind, back to when Ripley was discussing her sexual assault. I'll quote it again, because it's important: 

When sex is difficult because of traumas or fears, it’s probably best to do it with someone you know you can really trust. But I didn’t go that route because I wanted to return to a sense of normalcy.

Compare that to Ripley's perspective after a lengthy and intensive dose of psychological counseling:

I never went back to sleeping with random people. When I felt like I was ready to start dating again, I wrote in my new Tinder profile: "Do not message me if you are only looking for hook-ups."

I want to implore my readers to fuse all these ideas together into something that makes logical sense. For all the people out there writing in favor of being sexually libertine, of normalizing casual sex, of normalizing sex work (indeed, that there is "dignity in whoredom"), there are people out there who are genuinely attempting to live by that advice.

Katherine Ripley was one of them. She embraced pornography as sexually normal. She participated in "hook-up culture." She experienced promiscuity as "normal for her." She actively communicated about her expectations, or lack thereof. And the result of all of this was intensive psychotherapy and, ultimately, an embrace of committed physical and emotional intimacy with committed partners...

In other words, Katherine Ripley embraced society's norms and ideas about sex. Perhaps, one day, she'll be ready to ask herself whether those norms and ideas provide important guidance to us about what truly is safe and mentally healthy behavior.

Maybe there's something to tradition, after all.

Uptown Girls

Over the weekend, the song "Common People" by Pulp came on the radio. It tells the story of a working class man who meets a rich debutante love interest who "wants to live like common people." Through the course of the song, the man takes her around town and tries to explain to her what it's like to have nothing, doomed to "drink and dance and screw because there's nothing else to do."

When analyzed in isolation, this song is really strange. It is essentially a rant against a woman who doesn't exist. The songwriter made up a character based loosely on someone he met briefly at a bar, and then subsequently invents a set of beliefs or thoughts possessed by that character. He finds those made-up, fictional beliefs deplorable, and so he writes a song about how disgusting they are. But remember: he made the whole thing up. So who is he ranting against?

Details on the song's subject matter as described at Wikipedia reveal that the song's inspiration was a woman who the principle songwriter met at a bar and attempted to sleep with, suggesting that the song is actually a revenge fantasy twice-over: Once because he disparages a woman who would not sleep with him, and twice by striking at the upper-crust people who look down their noses at commoners. But again, the song isn't actually about real people with real beliefs, it's about imaginary people with imaginary beliefs, and the anger the songwriter feels toward those imaginary things.

And what fan could actually enjoy lyrics of this kind? Only someone who hates such imaginary people equally. But, importantly, they don't exist. So what exactly is going on here?

It's too weird to ignore, so I had to think about it more carefully, and what I realized seemed remarkable. What if I told you the whole thing was a kink?

Uptown Girls And Downtown Men

In cruder language, "Common People" is about a man who meets a spoiled rich girl who wants to experience life as a regular person, so he screws her and then chews her out for never really being able to understand the plight of the poor. If you accept the premise of the story long enough to absorb its social commentary, you're still left with one loose end: Why did he have sex with her? It doesn't seem to be relevant to the social commentary at all, so it must mean something else.

In my mind, there are two possibilities.

The first one is quite unpleasant: he had sex with her as a form of symbolic rape. The working class young man can't change his station in life, and he can't show her what it's really like to be poor and miserable; but he can screw her, and in the context of the story, that event is critical to the plot. ("I want to sleep with common people like you.") This one act is the "hero's" lone means of achieving control, and so he does it. I reiterate, this is a made-up story; this sort of thing absolutely does not happen in real life. So, on one level it could be analyzed as a rape fantasy. Yechh.

I think it very well might be a rape fantasy. However, I don't think that's the only way to interpret the song, so let's consider a more charitable alternative.

As I was trying to wrap my head around this rather strange song, I started thinking of other popular songs that depict a poor male commoner having sex with a rich young debutante. The first two that came to mind were Van Halen's "Beautiful Girls" and Steely Dan's "I Got the News."

The cynicism in "I Got the News" isn't apparent until the bridge, but lyricist Donald Fagen gives us a quick glimpse in the first verse when he sings, "Daddy is a rare millionaire, I don't care. Yeah, you got the muscle, I got the news." In the bridge, he simply insults her intelligence. This song might, too, be a sort of cross-class rape fantasy; Fagen might never be a rare millionaire himself, but he can still canoodle with the daughters of industry. Still, the rest of the lyrics are unabashedly fun-loving. Fagen isn't hostile to his interlocutor, he's thrilled. The point of the song is to describe joy, not rage. Maybe his insults are just teasing in good fun. Some of the lyrics are even cutely tender.

"Beautiful Girls" is much different. David Lee Roth doesn't express any disdain for his love interest. She's rich and he "ain't no man of the world," but that's alright with him. He's just happy to be at the beach with a drink in his hand, on the prowl for beautiful girls. I'm struck by how much more pleasant and happy Roth's perspective is, compared to the others. Note also that his spoken-word during the outro implies that she turned down his advances. ("Whoa, whoa! Hey, where you goin'...?")

Billy Joel offers us a more traditionally romantic take on the idea with his 1983 classic "Uptown Girl." Joel puts the woman in control of the story. Sure, "she's been living in her white bread world," but she has "hot blood" and "now she's looking for a downtown man." Joel is more than happy to provide her with what she's looking for. As for anything long-term, Joel's not hedging his bets, but "maybe sometime when my ship comes in" he'll win her heart. In any case, poor boy meets rich girl, canoodling ensues.

All that is to say that we have many examples here, many different takes on the same basic plot premise. Working class boy meets spoiled rich girl, attempts to have sex with her with varying levels of success. It's always the boy who's out of his league, even when the boy wants nothing to do with rich folks. This isn't a Jane Austen novel; the women aren't clamoring to "marry up" in order to save themselves from poverty and obscurity. Consequently, the stories aren't depressing like an Austen novel, either. They're sexy. The way the encounters play out provides an interesting look into the psychology of the specific lyricist in question, but the common strand is there, and the glue holding it all together is sex.

I'm going to call it the Uptown Girls Principle. The question is, why do people keep writing songs about this?

It's Not Just Music

Maybe it's not just pop songs. Maybe human beings have some kind of a "dumb heiress" kink. If so, we'd certainly see it more places than just a few pop songs from the second half of the 20th Century. Do we?

...too easy?

To answer this question, let's turn to literature. The publication of D.H. Lawrence's infamous Lady Chatterley's Lover takes us back to 1928. While the novel explores various themes including class conflict, mind/body, and the nature of love, it is more notorious for being scandalously sexual. Were it merely a book about class, there wouldn't be any point to including all that gratuitous sex. But that sex is integral to what Lady Chatterley's Lover is as a work of literature, and thus we find a rather poignant example of the Uptown Girl Principle.

Two years prior to the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover, a German author named Arthur Schnitzler published a remarkable novella entitled Tramnovelle. Today, Tramnovelle isn't particularly well known, but film buffs know it as being the story upon which the Stanley Kubrick's film Eyes Wide Shut is based. (Note: I have a HUGE film analysis of Eyes Wide Shut in a draft on my blog - it is long over-due and I'm anxious to publish it, but for now...) The protagonists in Tramnovelle aren't exactly poor, but they're not as rich as the people who frequent the orgies described in the book, either. It is an incredibly cerebral story, and one whose main (and quite feminist) themes are as relevant today as they were when the book was written. But what interests us here is the fact that this highly sexualized Uptown Girl theme serves merely as a backdrop to the story's main events. Schnitzel doesn't call attention to class differences in the story, he simply takes them for granted. They don't feature prominently, they go without saying. And yet the only point at which they are relevant during the story is with respect to the orgy, i.e. the sex. So, there it is again.

Working backwards to 1844 brings us to Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, in which young commoner D'Artagnan falls in love with noblewoman Constance Bonacieux. The Three Musketeers is ostensibly a story about a young man who goes from zero to hero on the strength of his character, his will, his wits, and the tutelage of his equally heroic friends. In that sense, Madame Bonacieux serves as a sort of testament to D'Artagnan's progress as a hero, but she needn't have been an adulteress to have served her literary purpose. That she was is merely a salacious little tidbit that makes the story more engaging, more exciting, and - yes - sexier. 

I won't further belabor the point. The Uptown Girl Principle, this kink, seems to have been with us in art and literature for centuries. 

Nor Is It Just A Guy Thing

Where did that dumb airhead act come from, the one some girls use to attract guys?

I realize that hundreds of articles have been written about this, and they all say more or less the same thing. It's always some version of the following: 

They do it to fit in. People don't like to feel dumb, so they don't hang around people who make them feel dumb. Consequently, a woman who plays dumb will be less offensive to more people, including the subgroup of people called "love interests." The more love interests you consider, the more likely you are to find a good one. Thus, girls play dumb to ensure they don't scare off a good man.

That's fine, as far as it goes, but it doesn't really answer the question. Another way to be attractive to the largest number of people is to be incredibly kind. Another way to do it is to be incredibly generous. Another way to do it is to be incredibly funny. There are many ways to be attractive to men. Why is playing dumb specifically such a common thing that girls do for male attention?

You could say, "Because guys don't really like funny (or kind, or generous, or etc.) girls." That almost sounds valid, except that it's a punt. Fine, they don't - then why do they like dumb girls? And why is having a love interest a good enough reason to play dumb?

In other words, if we accept any set of rationale for playing dumb, we're still left wondering, "Why dumb and not something else?"

The answer seems obvious to me: Because the Uptown Girl Principle, is common to men and women; and it's always Uptown Girls, not Uptown Guys. Sure, women like rich men, but they don't write songs about being poor and then "saved" by a rich guy... Unless they're Jane Austen, in which case the story changes from erotica into a tragedy. Very different.

Women will play the rich ditz when it works for them, and when it seems to work best for them is specifically in sexual situations. Think about the classic "pool boy" thing. Yeah, it's cheesy, but all of these things are cheesy; that they're cheesy doesn't mean that people don't still enjoy them. And women read Lady Chatterley's Lover, too. Women willingly participate in the Uptown Girl Principle.

Girls! Girls! Girls!

And, like any kink, the Uptown Girl Principle is well-represented in the adult content industry.

The initial set (the only culturally relevant set) of "celebrity sex tapes" were the ones featuring Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian playing the role of ditzy young heiress on tape with what were essentially B-list male celebrities in much, much lower income brackets. I don't begrudge a girl her choice in men, but these tapes weren't recorded to pay tribute to a match made in heaven. They were designed to titillate the parties involved. When they went public, they turned the women into massive celebrities and household names. It might be difficult for younger readers to understand that no one cared about the Hiltons or the Kardashians until those tapes were leaked to the public. As such things go, they weren't really any of any higher quality than something more, uh, professional, but they sold far better than any such "professional film." Why?

Sure, we all had a good laugh at their expense. You could say that these women brought society's wrath upon themselves by putting themselves in situations where they could be the brunt of our negative attention. But that's not really the point here. They put themselves in those situations voluntarily, because it was fun. And society didn't laugh for long - these women have made millions by creating brands out of their own notoriety, millions above and beyond whatever revenue they earned from the tapes themselves (if any).

This latter point highlights an additional and highly important dynamic involved in these tapes. Hilton and Kardashian seemed like airheads when society first got to know them, via their leaked tapes. Ultimately, though, they proved themselves to be highly business- and media-savvy - i.e. intelligent - women who were more than worthy of being the heiresses that they are. So the airhead thing really was a role, not their true identities.

It was an act. They were only pretending to be Uptown Girls, for personal pleasure. And society at large was just as into it as they were.

Including International Society

"India's first porn star" was a cartoon character called Savita Bhabhi. Bhabhi is a Hindi word that roughly translates to "elder sister-in-law," but it's rife with additional connotations, including that of attractiveness. You can think of it as being similar to the "bored housewife" thing here in North America. But "bored housewives" tend to be a little older than Savita Bhabhi. Indians traditionally marry young, so this would be, perhaps, a woman in her mid-to-late-twenties.

This character is famous for instigating a national dialogue in India regarding internet censorship by the state - thus being a cause celebre of libertarians. But I'm not grinding my free speech axe (today). Savita Bhabhi is an affluent woman who vacations in Goa and who studies at a good school. There are plenty of different men in her life, but generally they are young scoundrels, youth, commoners.

In short, Savita Bhabhi, like so many North American stories of this kind, is an Uptown Girl.

Conclusion?

So this Uptown Girl phenomenon is everywhere. The kink is universal. It stretches across borders and over generations. It seems to be part of the social fabric of human sexuality. I can't really explain it, and I guess I shouldn't even try. I decided to write this blog post mainly because I seem to have stumbled upon a cultural phenomenon - really, a human phenomenon - that I haven't really seen discussed elsewhere.

In fact, I tried to do some research on it in preparation for this blog post, and I couldn't find anything. Granted, I didn't really wander into the darker corners of the internet, but in a world in which even the most innocuous Google searches yield pornographic results, it seems odd that such a common and pervasive aspect of human sexuality would be comparatively difficult to track down.

I won't flatter myself to think that I'm the only person who has formally taken notice of this, but if my blog post serves as a starting point for someone else's research, I hope it proves to be helpful.

Also, it just seemed kind of interesting.