Social media is poison and since women use social media a lot more than men, women are more poisoned by it. QED.
It doesn’t have a thing to do with the (non-existent) inherent terribleness of women, just the demographics of who has experienced more of the most mind-rotting “innovation” of the past few decades.
I think I finally understand content warnings now. They aren’t effective at what they’re actually supposed to do. Studies show that pretty clearly.
Therefore, why they exist is, like many human things, for the purpose of signaling. Content and trigger warnings are used to convey that you are courteous enough to be concerned with the viewer’s sensitivities about something. They also communicate that you are embedded enough in a particular culture to know what its triggers and concerns in fact are.
Thus, they are used both for courtesy and to express status (these two are always closely related) and make a lot more sense to me from that sociological angle.
What About Pizza Hut Are You The Most Nostalgic For?
That it was a treat, mainly. Something special. My immediate family was poor; we did not go to restaurants pretty much ever. Pizza Hut was something that was affordable and pretty good for a small town. It was one of the rare times I had food I actually enjoyed rather than just tolerated. When I knew I was going to get to go to Pizza Hut, I looked forward to it all week.
Their restaurants also used to be vastly better; they had salad bars, higher-quality food and better service.
And I personally always liked that they were very dimly-lit compared to other places. Made them feel kind of mysterious inside.
Green Day’s SoFi Stadium show proves it’s officially a classic rock band now.
I never really cared for Green Day. I bought their second album, Kerplunk, sometime in 19921 and only listened to it once or twice. I believe I gave it to a friend a few weeks later. But the band has certainly stuck around, which befits our era of constantly-recycled and remixed nostalgia combined with culture becoming static.
It’s funny that Green Day’s first really popular song was about being bored, which is such a 1990s thing to do a song about. That’s what I mean exactly when I say that even the 1990s “pessimistic” songs seem optimistic in hindsight. “Oh, you’re so bored, all you can do is masturbate and lounge around all day, boohoo, so very sad.”
Seems like comedy now in retrospect.
An artist retrospective: Montreal-born Jill Ciment’s memoir asks ‘Me Too?’ after the fact.
This is a better and more perceptive review than I was expecting it to be. I have not read (and probably will not read) Ciment’s book, but I like how Maltz Bovy does not go for the easy bien-pensant head-nodding along with current harmful strictures of how relationships “should” work.
It gets trickier once you factor in the newer, more questionable quasi-taboos. #MeToo has long since stopped being the of-the-moment fixation, but it has left its mark. Relationships between what would have once been deemed consenting adults now get picked apart for imperceptible or theoretical power imbalances. It’s squicky to meet someone at school or at work, even absent any supervisory capacities, because (supposedly) women find it threatening to be hit on, even by men who take no for an answer.
Facilitated by the existence of dating apps—that is, by the possibility of meeting someone only after vetting their willingness—we now have a generation increasingly convinced it’s weird and problematic to flirt with someone your own age, with whom there is no power imbalance, in a public space. A woman should be allowed to go to the supermarket without some man talking to her! (Never mind that most women will at some points in their lives want this sort of thing, or initiate it, even.) Age-gap discourse is not, in its current incarnation, particularly concerned with what would legally constitute statutory rape. Rather, it’s all about whether it’s a violation (of what? of whom?) for a 30-year-old to date a 50-year-old. #MeToo’s legacy is, in part, this proliferation of relationship categories that are a bit hmm, one that will soon enough encompass all potential love affairs.
What a great couple of paragraphs. In not that many words, she really shows how absolutely absurd the accepted discourse and conclusions are now. #MeToo, though it began for noble ends, caused and continues to cause quite a lot of harm to women. Like incels, many women have torpedoed their chances of happiness and then blamed others for their self-gestated problems.
I don’t want to detract from the work with my ranting. I’ll have more to say in other posts. But it is a good one; read it.
To be perfectly clear, the problem with feminism’s implicit contention that women should be treated like children when it benefits them and not when that treatment does not help them is that a child is a child at all times; once you’ve declared yourself to be in need of protection even from yourself, there is no longer any choosing where that applies.
Feminism must allow women to be fully mature. There is no second choice.
I liked Gone Girl too, but the “Cool Girl” discussions ended up being another way for women to self-infantilize, to claim all the boons of feminism while accepting none of the accountability or responsibility that increased power and respect entails.
Welcome to life: if you want something to be a certain way, you have to make it, take it, or shake it till it gets that way. Eventually I think feminism will get good again as it embraces women actually being fully-responsible members of the political and social community, but right now feminism is mostly about attempting to pretend to be agency-free children when it benefits women and then complaining when they are actually treated like a child in other realms too.
And that’ll only go so far. Those contradictory leanings have probably reached about the end of their practical shelf lives, but all this will take another decade or so to play out, as these things always do.
The Coming Wave of Sex Negativity.
This was written in 2021, so the sex-negative trend had already been firmly in place by that time. But she is still correct. And she (as I do) thinks it’s going to get worse. Much, much worse.
If there’s one drum I’ve been beating for a minute now, it’s that I believe the pendulum with sexuality is going to swing, big time. And seriously, if you guys remember me for anything, have it be this.
Mark my words: Next financial crisis, we’re diving headlong into something that’s been simmering in the background since 2013-2014… sex negativity.
Younger millennials and Gen Z are already extremely sex-negative, even a lot of the men and boys. I also think she’s gotten closer to the core of the real problem with this than anyone else; I’ve been having similar thoughts.
This will be as much a rebellion against the pod as it is anything else. People do not want to be atomized. They do not want to be neutered. Sex dolls are unsustainable. Nobody wants this dystopia. It WILL be painted as anti-tech but it is not necessarily “about” tech. THIS IS THE REAL CULTURE WAR.
I disagree with her about sex work and that her overall tone suggests that, like many women, she sees women as just larger children a bit but I believe she’s got the gist of what is happening and what is about to happen.
The only good part of this mess is that I expect tattoos to get much, much less popular as a result. That won’t make up for this insanity, but even the worst things have some benefits.
Obviously not everyone in the younger generations has embraced extreme prudishness and non-sensuality. The people in the below videos have not abandoned all that makes life good, obviously, and they are all in their 20s. But it is the dominant strain now.
So I do wonder what was it that happened to cause this enormous change in so many to make it a generation-defining social alteration? Was it social media? The internet? Just natural churn and change, explained by nothing (I don’t believe this, but offering it as a hypothesis)? Reduction in social mobility? What?
Whatever the cause, it’s horrible to see; I feel like people are becoming puritan hikikomori because they cannot imagine anything else. Perhaps it’s all simply because they make better, more pliant consumers that way.
According to modern pseudo-feminists, what Dorsa did is unfeminist. The compulsion found in modern feminism to worship the gender-based restrictions of radical Islam and to condemn those who do not has been some strange shit to see, hasn’t it? I sort of understand how it developed but damn it still makes no sense.
Anyway, good for her. It takes real guts to abandon your culture and country and live more freely. In this I agree with Noah Smith: we need many more smart people like her here.
One of the things I particularly enjoyed about My Summer of Love is that it was made in 2004, before smartphones and before social networks became ubiquitous. Thus, it feels really quite dated in a good way. The whole terms of relation are much different. Modern movies are glaring in their omissions of smartphones if they are not present while still being dominated by the social forces of their preponderance.
Also, Summer was filmed before the current deep prudishness had set in so the characters treat sex as just another part of life, like eating or breathing. No, those times weren’t better in every way (the 90s were even better in those respects), but it’s clear that everyone was just much mentally healthier then.
It’s sad but enlightening to hear all the female-to-male transition stories where they newly-minted man is shocked and saddened to realize that he will no long be appreciated just for existing.
Welcome to life as a man. We have worse clothes, die younger, and generally speaking no one gives a single shit if we live or die; we are disposable. It is lonely and very isolated. But at least we have pockets.
To clarify something, it’s completely wrong for incels and others weirdos to attack and harass any specific woman, no matter what she’s done. It’s pointless and counterproductive in addition to being morally misguided. It just doesn’t help.
But it’s a fine and even a good thing to do to observe that women’s mental health is in decline, that social media is causing grievous harm especially to women, that feminism has gone off the rails completely by its demand for power with no responsibility or accountability, and that a lot of things that women demand and do harm men. And that no one really seems to care one way or the other what men say or feel about anything, while believing that they are ravening sex beasts with no emotions at all.
Those things all should be discussed out in the open, and even more so the more people declaim so vociferously that they are not real problems.
This weirdness is caused by a few things. A lot of Gen Z is very, very prudish — of a kind and severity that hasn’t been seen since the Great Awakening in the 1730s and 1740s. This doesn’t just include “prudishness” directly related to sex, but also a deep suspicion and hatred of anyone doing something so innocuous as having fun and dancing.
And part of it is just misogyny — any time women are acting of their own volition with no men around, especially if they are having a good time, it’s seen as invalid or undesirable. This is becoming common even among Gen Z men.
Another part is that Americans in general are distrustful of anyone — man or woman — not working, not preparing to work, not doing something directly related to work, or not otherwise pointed in a direction that might be related to doing something “productive.” It’s that ol’ execrable Protestant work ethic popping up as it always does. Seeing those women enjoying themselves at a yoga dance rave (?) triggers that subconscious voice in the back of their heads that says, “Shouldn’t they be working or doing something useful?”
As for me, I think they’re cute and their awkward dancing is also cute. Good for them for having fun in the way they want to be having it. We need a whole fuckin’ lot more of that.
My best friend is 30 years older. Here’s what she’s taught me about life.
There should be a whole lot more of this, even though socially busted-ass Gen Z finds it creepy.