Category: Uncategorized

The Failure of the Sexual Revolution

by

Out of the Darkness

 

I’ve recently been doing a lot of thinking about the horrible quagmire that modern dating has become. Fortunately, I’m out of that game now. I’ve spent the best decade of my life blissfully married to a wonderful man. Before that, however, I was admittedly a bit of a slut. I’m infertile and have been since I was 18. It’s a running joke that if I end up with an unplanned pregnancy, what I really need is a priest, because it’s a bit late to have a replay of the Virgin Mary. Between knowing for a fact that pregnancy from sex is impossible and a religious usage of condoms in any encounter that wasn’t preceded by exchanging recent STD test results, I saw no reason not to be. I was assured that this was healthy behavior for a young woman. Looking back on my experiences and looking at the world around me, I disagree with those assurances.

Let’s start with some background information. Women have stronger hormonal responses to sex than men do, in that we have a larger oxytocin surge in response to all physical touch, but especially orgasms. This is great for bonding. While the initial hit of serotonin and dopamine gets less strong over time, the oxytocin levels can be maintained with regular contact and your brain eventually ties the oxytocin high to the other person. This creates a deeper relationship bond. Men get vasopressin, which pushes them to protect the person their brain has tied to the production of the chemical. There you have the brain chemistry basis for a relationship. (Interestingly, oxytocin and vasopressin aren’t produced for every partner in men. This is probably why men are more capable of casual sex. Oxytocin only? Good lay. Oxytocin and vasopressin? Next wife.)

Also of note, there’s a an interesting physical phenomena in which male DNA can and does cross the female blood-brain barrier even if they don’t reproduce by a process called microchimerism. That actually means that every time a female has unprotected sex with a male, she stands a pretty decent chance of carrying around his DNA in her body forever, and it may express in her future offspring even with another man. Ladies, you should think really freaking hard about whether or not you want any part of a man’s DNA in you and your future children before you have sex with him.
What does any of that have to do with the sexual revolution? The more partners a woman has, the harder it is for the brain to tie the release of oxytocin to a specific partner, which interferes with long-term bonding. Sex becomes less personal, less intimate, and more about pleasure. Humans have more or less known this forever. We didn’t understand what the brain was doing, but we knew that a woman who slept with a bunch of men before she slept with her husband was a less devoted wife. Every culture on earth has had strong social mores against female promiscuity. Male promiscuity was frowned upon, but not as strictly. If a man made a child with a woman, in pretty much every culture on earth, he was responsible for both the child AND the woman. Shotgun weddings are the most classic example of this, but there’s mention of similar situations in the Bible. It’s not a new trend. The message is pretty clear: if a man doesn’t want to keep that woman for life, putting his dick in her is a pretty bad idea because he might get her pregnant.

Culturally, this translated to the development of marriage for the production and raising of the best possible offspring. Polygamy was acceptable in many cultures for a variety of reasons, but there was mostly the expectation that women would be faithful to one man. (I’ll note that every old religious text I’ve found encourages men to be close to their wives and treat them with affection. Even religions that encouraged men to discipline their wives encouraged a very affectionate relationship in a marriage. This translates into the encouragement of continued oxytocin production and the maintenance of the relationship bond.)

There is also a nearly universal theme in the pursuit of sexual relationships between males and females. Males pursue females. The often unspoken side of this is that women lead the pursuit. We entice a man to continue pursuit. Historically, a successful woman in this regard enticed a man to continue this pursuit all the way to the altar where a trade is made between the two sexes. He gets access to sex from her and to presumably father all her offspring. She gets access to his protection, resources, and affection.

This leads into the point of this little rant. Sex is a commodity. There’s an economic exchange going on at all times, throughout all of history, for this sought after commodity. Because men want sex more than women do, sex is the female commodity. (Because I can already hear the, “REEEEE!” F*ck off, feminists. You’re entitled to your opinions. You aren’t entitled to your own facts.) Commitment, however, is a man’s commodity. Throughout history, the social mores that encouraged women to be chaste have placed a hard restriction on how much sex there was to be had. If a man wanted it, he had to accept that he either had to share the same women everyone else had access to (prostitutes and loose women) or he had to trade commitment for sex.

This was an overall positive for women and for society at large. Women got security and partnership for raising their offspring. Single motherhood is an undeniable contributor to poverty. A requirement that men had to put up commitment to get sex reduced poverty for women immensely. It led to better quality offspring, which in turn provided for parents in their old age. The parent most likely to need care was the mother, because we statistically live longer. Society benefited from men working hard to collect enough resources to attract a prime woman for marriage. Men built civilization itself in the pursuit of getting laid, and women controlling access to sex was a huge part of that.

Enter the birth control pill and the sexual revolution. Suddenly, women were “free” from the consequences of sex (children). “Free love” made promiscuity a virtue. Sex was no longer tied to commitment, and men could get it for the price of dinner and drinks. Now, marriage rates continue to fall right along with the number of children produced. Meanwhile, the age of first marriage and divorce rates continue to rise. There are oodles of single mothers, and all the subsequent issues with poverty and poor outcomes for children. Why? Because women devalued their commodity and increased the value of men’s.  Here’s a link to a video that explains what’s happening now in purely economic terms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO1ifNaNABY&feature=youtu.be

What happened in biological terms and how it relates to mate selection is even odder. This is a vast oversimplification of an immensely complex topic, but here’s the basic idea. Hormonal birth control works by convincing your body that it’s pregnant. This changes how women select for a mate. Our primal monkey brains signal off of different things to tell us, “This is a good man and you love him.” Instead of us selecting for particularly dominant, masculine men, regardless of other features, we instead look for a more passive man, as if we’re pregnant already and don’t want to be around a potential physical threat.  That doesn’t sound so bad, but when you decide to actually make a baby and stop taking the birth control, your entire perception of the man you chose shifts as well. Sometimes he’s still a good candidate for a mate. Sometimes you end up thinking that he’s a little bitch and you need to get yourself a real man. Everything changes, and not always for the better.

This change in preferences for softer, more passive men is also dangerous to us. Take hard look serial rapists who’ve been caught. They aren’t typically big, threatening looking men. They’re smaller, more passive in appearance. Many of them are rather charming. There’s a wide variety of biological explanations for this, and it’s seen in many other species. A beta male will essentially rape a female and leave her with the kid. How many women have met a charming, pretty man, gotten pregnant by mistake, and had him take off to never be seen again? This shift in mate selection is making us chose less ideal men to mate with.”

None of this is good for society, and it’s worse for women. Women bear the hardships of raising children alone. We bear the poverty. We bear the neigh-impossible task of being both mother and father. If you believe feminist drivel, women have the worst parts in divorce too. (I would argue that fact, but that’s a wholly different rant.) Even more than that, men are less willing than ever to commit. They’re keeping the value of their commodity, and when women are “ready to settle down” in their 30s or 40s, they’re past the optimal age for fertility and men in their generation are looking at women in their 20s to trade commitment for sex with, especially if they want kids. Those mature women are stuck with their cats unless they’re lucky enough to find an acceptable man in an increasingly small pool.

The sexual revolution failed us. Feminists pushing the idea that bad “male” behavior was “equality” failed us. We failed ourselves. We’re failing the children being produced with no male to guide them. I don’t know that there’s anything we can even do to fix this mess now, but let us at least recognize that the whole experiment was a colossal cluster-fuck and we need to, as individuals do better.

I think it was in Darkship Revenge that Athena just started saying “Nothing is ever simple nor easy.”

I confess this is because at that time, just after moving, and knee deep in boxes all over the house, that’s what my life felt like.

But it’s something we forget very often.  There should be a note along with “Everything worth doing is worth doing well” that says “everything worth doing will be hard and have setbacks.

Don’t believe me?

How many of you are married?  And how many weeks have you gone through where you just weren’t feeling it, and then suddenly, inexplicably, the marriage was back to being the best thing ever?  And as you go on the good times outweigh the bad or even the blah?  I bet most of us go through that.  And it’s not something we tell the kids.  Who wants to admit that sometimes, because you’re sick, or tired, or — in our case, mostly — you’re both working obsessively at the things that demand your attention, you just CAN’T feel anything? But the end result is that young people expect marriage to be ardent joy and great happiness all the time.

How many of you have kids?  How many times in the middle of it did it seem all lost?  But you forged through, and you ended up with your children being adults you’re happy to know.

How about your career?  How many times was it all lost.  I swear there was a time I tried to give up writing once a year.  And there have been low points even after publication.  Heck, even after I was making professional money. I almost quit the year before I won the Prometheus.  Then things started doing better, and there is a chance they will do very well indeed.  Okay, probably when I’m eighty, but there is a chance.

As for large endeavors, managed by large societies, that’s even harder and has more ups and downs.

I keep hearing people say stuff like “How can we put a man on the moon and not be able to end poverty?”

Well, mostly because they’re problems of a different order and depending on if you define “poverty” as an absolute or a relative quality, we already have.  But that too wasn’t as easy as it seems.

Sure, going to the moon was relatively a rapid thing from the moment we (well, okay, the Wright brothers) first flew at Kitty Hawk, but there were still times of turning back and times no one thought we’d do it.

As for the discoveries from Europe…. Brother.  Portugal first discovered the mid Atlantic islands, and then seemed to forget about this far-from-shore navigation for a while.

Probably people saying it was too hard and why were they doing it?  And wouldn’t it be better to solve the problem of poverty and make sure there was a sardine in every pot?

Solving poverty too, for that matter.  For every step forward there were two backward, but we continued, and now our poor are richer than the kings of old, and Midas in his glory was never so well fed.

Human enterprise, human progress has its ups and downs, and there’s the inevitable luddites who think we’d all be much better for staying put, or redistributing today’s poverty, or, of course, throwing our hands up and giving up on humanity.  (Like the precious snow flake recently preaching against having ANY children, because they hurt muh environment and possibly muh feelings too.  Because they hate themselves so much they must hate the whole human race, too.)

It reminded me of going recently (with my publisher, and a few other writers) to the Redstone rocket test stand.

As we were leaving Toni (Weisskopf, Baen publisher) said “If we’d come just a couple of years ago, this would have been depressing, the historical tour of an abandoned endeavor.  But now… well, now we’re sending things to space, and talking about going to space again, and there’s hope.

If we stay the course, if we keep going, there is a chance we’ll get somewhere in space, perhaps even to other star systems.  Which right now seems impossible, but these things always seem impossible until you start working on them (and sometimes several points along the way.)

The thing is, it seems to me, or at least in my experience, that nothing worth doing is ever easy.  Or simple.  And if you’re really fortunate and get great success handed to you on a platter nine times out of ten you turn your back on it, despising it, or else break at the first real difficulty.

I’ve seen more potentially good writers be destroyed by having their first novel accepted than by having to struggle through ten novels to sell one at last.

Heinlein said humans are made to overcome adversity, and if we have things too easy:as humans, as societies, or as individuals, we go to pieces.

Fortunately, I’m not at risk for that.  Nothing is ever easy or simple.  And yet I forge on, and often end up getting what I wanted all along.

This is why it’s vital to have challenges, like the conquest of space, or interstellar flight.  Because humanity as a whole needs things that aren’t easy or simple.

We need to continue achieving.  Else, might as well let the snowflakes convince us to stop breeding, and end up extinct or with the sort of population that won’t support agriculture let alone a technological society.

Nothing is ever easy or simple, and yet, as humanity battles on,you could say we’re working to specs.

 

 

As a mid to late twentieth century young woman, steeped in the mores and tropes of my time it was always shocking to talk to my late-Victorian grandmother.

Shocking as in having your head held under the water pump when you’re drunk.  And in the same way, sobering.

There are a lot of myths running around our culture (usually with pants on their heads screaming coo coo) one of them being for lack of a better term “the highwayman with a heart of gold.”  Only sometimes he is a second story man (in Portugal’s notable case) and sometimes he is a pirate or a musketeer or someone of that sort.

I grew up with “romantic” literature in the sense where it has nothing to do with male female love, but with high adventure and wounded protagonists who have suffered and are looking for the redemption they know they’re beyond.

That’s a very powerful mythos, one most people can’t resist.

But talking to grandma was always bracing.  She would bring the reality of all that sort of people.  Guys who ran around with swords or pistols getting in duels were bad people, not to be trusted.

Pirates were evil pillagers and despoilers.  And don’t get started on highwaymen and second story men, no matter how dressed up by legend.  Hell-bound evil people.

The way she talked about it was so sensible, so clear, that you immediately knew she was right.  No matter how much you wanted to believe, no matter how romantic books made it seem, when Grandma painted pirate bands and loose living, heartless murderers, turning even on their own number and said that no, no amount of suffering could justify taking to that life, it cut through the entire fog of romanticism.

Part of it is that grandma was sane as a brick, or perhaps a cornerstone.  You could build entire civilizations on her, and arguably ours was built on minds like hers.  Part of it is that she was born in late Victorian times and in Portugal.  Not only had the pendulum of morality swung away from the “high romance” that generated really bad things like the French revolution, but Portugal was not that well off nor was the village that rich that she could stray from what was obvious and go in search of crazy notions.

In fact the romantics, though always a strain in human thought — which romanticizes the outcasts, the no-castes and the ones who behave outside of society — only took hold of society at large at the same time the industrial revolution was giving people enough distance from “root, hog or die” to go in search of outre ideas and those that wouldn’t benefit the immediate acquisition of money.

Medieval society tended more to the conformist and the established and anyone who stood outside it particularly in a dangerous way being considered harmful, and his motives not at all examined and certainly no sympathy spared for him.  This of course was shifting somewhat by say the 15th century, when people were living a little better.

In fact the non conformist and the quaint are valued in proportion to how well off the society is.

Now, I’m not going to tell you I’d love a society of rigid conformism.  As an Odd, I always stuck out and societies of rigid conformism don’t distinguish between “strange” and harmful.  All nails will get pounded down, even if one is an ornamental silver nail with a cute little triangular top.  Their job is to fasten things, and in a rigid, (and endangered) society everyone must just fulfill his role.

I also wouldn’t like to live that close to the bone, because you know, I like comfort as I think we’ve established.

But perhaps it is that we are the most comfortable society the world has ever spawned, and western society the most wealthy it’s ever been, but I think the myth, the romance of the “evil doer who is really good” has gone a bit far.

Look, I’m as susceptible as anyone else to the exiled nobleman who took to the seas as a pirate fighting the way into a citadel to rescue the body of his brother (he arrives too late to prevent the hanging) and bringing him to burial at sea, and promising to avenge him, as a way to start a book.  I read that one when I was eight and see how it stuck with me.

Mind you, at least in England, many pirates were noblemen, but they were at it not from high outraged honor but from greed, and they did things that would make you blanch.  As for the ones who were in it to survive… it partook a lot of our homeless culture, with a roster of pathologies from drug abuse to various psychological dysfunctions just as our homeless culture has.  Nothing romantic about it, just as there isn’t about vagrants and homeless.  And yeah, those get romanticized too.  Note someone the other day saying they would like it, just once, just for variety, if a homeless character were a horrible person.

No, I don’t want a return to a rigid society.  And I reserve the right to create a character or two who aren’t as bad as people think and who are more sinned against that sinners.  But perhaps also one or two that are highly romanticized and EXACTLY as bad as you think.

Because you know what?  We are rich, we are successful.  Some of the romantic insanity is dissipating, so people are saying less “it was the fault of society” but they still act like it to a great extent.  They still try to justify how people go that bad.  The entire “self esteem” industry is part of this, and also a piece of nonsense, as few people have as much unearned self esteem as juvenile delinquents, or a sense of the respect “due” to them as gang members.

Sometimes I just feel the entire society could benefit from taking a time machine to go to tea with grandma, and having her pour some common sense over their crazy heads.  Sure, there are people who reform.  Western civilization embraces the tale of Saul of Tarsus as a pretty dramatic example, but there are others.  There were even pirates who escaped the law, set up respectably and lived a decent life.  More often their descendants do.  Grandma had… interesting tales about the rich families in the village.

But those are the exceptions.  Most people who live an evil life be it simply squandering everything, or actually robbing others or extorting from others (money or sex or whatever) are never going to reform.  They like what they do, they’re successful at it, why would they stop?  Investing them with a patina of romance and undeserved suffering doesn’t help that one bit.  Psychopaths are VERY good at putting on the motley and playing the part you expect them to.

Why?  Who knows?  Why are some people just evil?  Whose fault is it?

Mostly theirs.  We all have evil impulses and trains of thought.  If you encourage them and allow them to grow, they become an habit, till you couldn’t do anything else even if you tried.

And sure, some people might be more susceptible to it than others.  And sure, having a bad childhood doesn’t help.  But blaming poverty or a bad childhood for later crimes, the way Marxists do, is an insult to every poor, abused child who chooses to grow up decent and a credit to society.

In the end bad people are bad.  Not romantic.  Not cute.  Not sufferers and suffering at the hands of an unusual world.

Just people who chose to fall to the dark.

Keeping that in mind cuts through a lot of romantic fog, and if society at large could do it, we’d spend a lot less money and time wringing our hands and trying to fix what can’t be fixed.

In the end, each of us is entitled to go to hell in the manner of his choosing.  He’s not entitled to dragging western civ along.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday Vignettes, nothing but Sunday Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: increase.

I’m writing today, after I take a couple of hours off this morning, which might seem odd to you, but yesterday night I crashed so early and so hard not only did I forget my online responsibilities I also forgot to feed the cats.  Which is why I woke up two hours ago with Greebo biting my elbow.  Since this caused me to yell at him, he’s now hiding, but the other cats have been fed.

So I’m taking a couple of ours off, because I’m still recovering from whatever cold-from-hell was and I do not want to relapse, since I have books (plural) to finish.

Also, on unpacking my office, I came across at least ten books written long hand on notebooks, which I’ll be probably sending to indie.  On “at least” note that there are more, but some are very old, and I don’t know if, once I’m done appraising them, I’ll recover a few book or more like a quarter or half.

No, I can’t send them for transcribing because there are portions of my handwriting even I can’t read and have to guess at,  (when I was in college, I took copious notes, then ignored them and borrowed someone else’s.  The process of taking notes concentrated the mind, but they were almost impossible to read.)  which is relatively doable for me but not for anyone else.  (As for the parts written on toilet paper with pen, when the kids were little and Dan would insist I couldn’t take the (then fairly bulky and cumbersome) laptop on vacation, for that I don’t know.  Some of it started near illegible.)

So once Guardian is in (Yes, I DO know it’s late, but cold from hell) I’m going to devote evenings to transcribing those.  Depending on the speed of my fingers and the whether I manage to escape another cold this year, there might be three or four before the end of the year, as well as the Dyce book, and I would like to finish (it’s really very close) and put up Royal Blood, the second of the Vampire musketeers.

Looking through the books I’m sure are salvageable with some editing, (and typing in) and a bit of elbow grease there seem to be: space opera; space opera with magic (I was young, and I have JUSTIFICATIONS.  Anyway, no elves, as that throws me out of a space opera); high fantasy adventure; YA space opera; mystery and UF.  There is also an historical romance set in the middle ages and an historical novel set in China, the last of which will NOT be put up, unless I transfer it to space or a fantasy land, as I’m not sure my research was…  Well, lets put it this way, you guys know how I research.  But China is not amenable to someone who has only read Chinese history for a few years, and I don’t know what I was thinking.

No, this will not get in the way of the other announced books I’m working on.  It’s just a winter evening activity, when I sit downstairs with my husband.

I will also I promise finish the two novels in progress here (Rogue Magic and Dark Fate,) as well as the one at MGC (Elf Blood) which were sad victims of my moves and illness.  But it might not be this month.

For next year, there are plans for hard science fiction YA with a friend who brings the science, as it were (I’ll let him reveal himself if he should choose) and plans eventually for a world-launching novel with Les Johnson (who also brings the science.)  Mind you, I used to be a scientific multilingual translator, so I’m not exactly innocent of scientific learning, but it tended to be an inch thick and a mile wide, i.e. enough to allow me to translate everything from engineering to chemistry or finance, but not enough to allow me to understand any of it in depth. Yeah, I’ve been given a reading list, which is my plan for my leisure time this winter.  I HEAR that after 55 in CO you can audit any courses for a trifling sum, but probably not this year, since I need to get my eyes fixed and be able to drive for that, or Dan needs to have time to take those courses with me.  (The second is more likely, at least for courses at night, since I’m still night blind and there’s no cure.)

 

Anyway…. I’m taking two hours off and reading an incredibly silly book which nonetheless is amusing me.

My posts at PJMedia, including last week’s which might not have been linked here are:

Slavery and Freedom

Quick, to the Victim-Mobile!

The Left’s Long Post-Election Tantrum

America Has Built the Most Comfortable Civilization in the World

Do try not to wreck the place while I’m AFN (Away from Net.)  I’ll drop by on breaks to make sure it hasn’t burned down.

 

Putting People in Boxes

By BAS

No, I’m not talking about undertakers. I mean, the natural human desire to categorize things, and how that’s been perverted by leftists.

This post is the result of a discussion with a friend about standards and definitions. (For the record, this friend really exists; I’m not attributing my thoughts to an imaginary person.) He is a deep thinker, and has a propensity for making mental models of situations and people he encounters. I think this is fairly common among Odds, when we’re looking for sense and predictability in an unpredictable world. It also had serious evolutionary benefits; when we were still living in trees, rapidly sorting unfamiliar things into very basic categories like: Do I eat it? Do I mate with it? Do I flee from it? kept our ancestors alive. It’s hard to work out the nuances of categorization when the cannibal tribe from next door is gnawing on your arm.

But the discussion sent me down the rabbit hole, and I started thinking about what happens when a person doesn’t conform to the model or fit in the box. What happens when someone doesn’t meet the definition of female/male/black/white/purple/whatever.

Sane people assume that the definition isn’t quite right, and adjust their mental model accordingly. They expand the box to include a person who would otherwise find it a tight fit.

An increasingly vocal portion of the left assumes that the person isn’t quite right, and holds onto their precious definition by kicking the person out of the group. How many times did we hear that Sarah Palin wasn’t a ‘real woman’ because she’s a Republican? Conservative black people are insulted and derided, and the left screams that they’re not ‘real black people’, though they’d probably say African-American, wanting to show off how woke they are.

Combine the normal human desire to categorize with a knee-jerk tendency to exclude people who don’t belong, and ta da! Fireworks! And not the good kind. See, if a person doesn’t fit into one box, they MUST fit into another. That’s why we have 57 genders and an infinite numbers of races nowadays. One large box has become a zillion tiny ones, and woe betide anyone who thinks they’re too constricting.

Allow me a digression. I, though female, am not a girly-girl. I’ve painted my fingernails maybe five times in my life; I don’t care what my hair looks like as long as it’s not in the way; and for a few months when I was twelve, I had three sets of clothing. Until recently, I was fairly convinced that I would spend my life single, childless, and living in a cabin in the woods, surrounded by books, guns, horses, and woodworking tools and only interacting with other humans over the internet. Not exactly stereotypically female, is it?

I was blessed with sane parents, so they didn’t try to make me into something I wasn’t, aside from convincing me (mostly) that it was rude to read when other people were in the room and make me use a fork to eat instead of my fingers. But less sane parents might have encouraged me to think I was a boy or that I was a lesbian, because I built tree forts instead of playing with dolls and didn’t like the boys in my class (they were too childish for my taste).

My parents were smart enough to realize that, just because I didn’t fit into the box that our culture has labeled ‘heterosexual female’, I shouldn’t be made to find myself another box in which I would be an even worse fit. They were also smart enough to realize that, if they tried to convince me I was in fact, the opposite sex, I might have been persuaded. Not because I was overly gullible, but because I trusted my parents’ judgment and really wanted their approval (in some ways, I am stereotypically female).

Not everyone has sane parents, and perhaps more importantly, there is an increasing minority of people who believe that, just because a person steps out of their box or doesn’t fit perfectly in the first place, they shouldn’t be allowed back in. In its most benevolent form, this leads to 57 genders, one in each box, so everyone in the world fits into one. Have to make the little darlings comfortable, you know? And of course, people can only associate with like-minded people, right?

And if a person wants to step outside, finds that it’s cold out there and wants to come back in? Nope, can’t allow that. So you have people who try to transition from one sex to the other, regret their surgery and try to return to their birth sex, and they get crucified by both sides, transsexual and not. Many of them started their transitions when they were very young and didn’t know any better but were pushed into it by parents who a) wanted a child of a particular sex and didn’t get one or b) genuinely but mistakenly thought they were doing what was best for their child.

The same thing happens to black people who start out poor and pull themselves up into the middle class. Or immigrants who make good. Unless they abase themselves before the liberal gods- and even that’s not always successful- they become ‘traitors’ in the eyes of the people they left behind. Because they stepped outside the box, and in doing so, showed other people that it could be done.

Sticking people in arbitrarily defined boxes is emotionally simplistic, and when I’m the emotionally subtle one in a conversation, you know something’s wrong. For one thing, who decides the definition of a particular box? Is it one of those things that comes from a ‘collective subconscious’, whatever that is?

I think not. That sounds like a hive mind. Ants have hive minds. I don’t know about you, but I’m too big to be an ant and I don’t like being underground.

So what’s the solution? One option is to have individual sized wooden boxes, in which we can zoom around the universe, bumping into other people’s boxes, waving at our friends as we pass by, and challenging each other to box races. But individual sized boxes would necessarily be small, so as to be more maneuverable, and it’d be a tight fit whenever I want to snuggle with my honey. How would I cuddle the children (that I don’t have yet)? And I get terrible leg cramps when I ride in a car for too long; what do you think would happen if I was stuck in a teeny little box for my entire life? Let’s not even go into the fact that these things would bear a striking resemblance to coffins.

Ideally, I’d have a very large box with a long and complicated name (perhaps something in Old Entish, because an Ent’s name is essentially a recital of their life story), where people can wander in and out if they like. But it needs to be BIG. My books alone would take up half the space. It needs a corner where I can hide when I don’t feel like talking but it needs to be sturdy enough that I can use it as a stage when I want to. The walls can’t be very high, because I like to see out of it. And I need enough space to keep a few horses. Pretty scenery would be nice, too, but I get bored when I look at the same vista every day, so can I have a variety of views?

And since I’m a giver, I think everyone else should have boxes, too. They can decorate them however they like, and I don’t even mind if they overlap into mine. Just wipe your feet on the rug, don’t be a butthead, and don’t follow someone else when they try to move away from you.

If you must put me in a box, make it a large one. Earth sized at the very least. Multi-universe sized is better.

 

Most of humanity’s earliest stories are designed to explain “where do we come from?” and “How did we get here?”

Whether creation was from the slaying of Tiamat by the hero Marduk, or the more mannered tales of titans and wars with gods of the classic mythologies, stories were told children to explain “How did we get to where we are now?”  Because answering that question inevitably answers at least in part “what are we here for?” and “What is the meaning of life.”

The fun part about the top down societal engineering of the 20th century, a think that had never been attempted in that scale in the past (well, not in the west, though there were attempts, like those of Louis XIV and the Marques de Pombal in Portugal and I’m sure others) is that they knew this would have to be answered.  Humans like to know where they came from and where they’re going.  And the Marxists perfected a way to do this that answered the questions but was worse than no answer.  (The Nazis probably did too, but their influence over education didn’t last long enough to educate several generations.)

On the above keep in mind I said “in that scale.”  Just about every kind tried to do it, and there was a serious rewrite of history associated with events like Henry VIII’s break from Rome.

None of those attempts were as total or as successful as the 20th century ones, due to several things.  The first was that nations hadn’t had their spirits broken as thoroughly as WWI broke them, so people weren’t willing to lend credence to things spouted from on high with that much eagerness, and things leaked through.  HOWEVER the most important thing that the twentieth century had in hand to try to remake culture was this: public education, mass media, mass news reporting.

Did it succeed?  No.  The only result of trying to mold human beings into the utopian version of the man who would live happily under communism was 100 million graves, and an Europe that is dying of senescence and lack of reproduction.

However it succeeded brilliantly in not only separating, now, I suppose two or three generations from their roots, but also convincing them that they are superior to their actual learned ancestors, and somehow, yet, the product of the worst civilization of human history.

Western culture is dying of WWI partly because the “cure” imposed by state education apparatus, corrupted by Soviet agit prop and continued by “intellectuals” who know nothing except that they’re superior to everyone else, more enlightened, kinder, and that they should design society and the world to “improve” it.

The trick to this is not only to give them a fake history.  Every tinpot dictator does that.  The trick is to give them a fake history starting in kindergarten, that is painted in primary hues and comic-book complexity.  There are good guys (the oligarchs who would design society to be more fair) and bad guys (usually capitalists and greedy, they want to “exploit” everyone, which only works if you believe in fixed pie economics and that everyone gets a share at birth, an economic idea so stupid you have to be indoctrinated from birth to believe it.)  And everything is explained by “laws” and top down action.  Though this history talks about mass movements, and “the people” they don’t actually take THE PEOPLE into account, not with any depth and complexity.  The people in this narrative, the entire culture, in fact, is moldable, like butter to the sculpting knife of the powerful.

Societies don’t work that way.  Culture doesn’t work that way.  In fact culture is so persistent, so stubborn, it leads people to think it’s genetic.  (It’s not.  A baby taken at birth to another culture will not behave as his culture of origin.)  It changes, sure, through invasions and take overs, but so slowly that bits of older cultures and ideas stay embedded in the new culture.  It has been noted that the communist rulers of Russia partook a good bit of the tzarist regime, because the culture of the people was the same and that came through.  (They just dialed up the atrocities and lowered the functionality because their ideology was dysfunctional.  They blame their failure on Russia itself, but considering how communism does around the world, I’ll say to the extent countries survive it’s because of the underlying culture.)

Yesterday the critter in the comments who tried to educate us all in Marxist dialectic which for reasons known only to his psychiatrist he kept calling Aristotelian logic, was a case in point of someone raised on this comic book history.

He said something so bizarrely stupid in one of his early comments that though he read it, my mind refused to absorb it.  It wasn’t till my husband laughed aloud and read me what he said that I PROCESSED it.

He said Iberian culture, when it pertains to relations between the sexes, was changed in the 20th century “by Franco and Salazar.”

Keep in mind, this is said by a guy (man is a stretch considering he was raised with a gold spoon in his mouth and then married up, so he has never had to grow up) who was raised in Spain.

I don’t even know what he means by “was changed.”  I presume he thinks before that Iberian culture was …. egalitarian?  Matriarchal?  I’m sure he was taught some nonsense like that.

The thing is…. how can he believe that?

I grew up reading books written by Portuguese authors in the eighteenth and nineteenth century (some Spanish authors, too.  I mean, one has to read.)  I had a good relationship with my grandparents.  I read old family letters.  Surely these experiences aren’t blocked to most human beings, right?

The picture those paint is that, yeah, relations between the sexes in the peninsula did change under Salazar and Franco.  (No credit to them, though.  The change had been in progress for a while.) Women started being treated more like human beings; girls had an age of majority same as boys, and if the police still picked up your unmarried 30 year old daughter for running away from home, it was cultural habit in CONTRAVENTION of the law.  Culture changed a bit too.  I wasn’t considered a loose woman for looking out the window now and then, which I understand was a problem for my grandmother.  Sure, until the seventies married women still needed their husband’s permission to work…  I don’t know if that was a new law in the twentieth century, but the culture I saw up close and personal, it didn’t matter, since there wasn’t a chance of a woman working without her father’s/husband’s permission before.

Portugal is a very old culture.  Celts and Carthaginians, Greeks and Romans, Germanic tribes, Moors, French and British all influenced it, but in the end enough of the people remain to carry the culture.  To the extent that the present dispensation is imposing a narrative from above, and is total enough to push it, what it’s doing is what happens in occupied countries, where the enemy above provides a narrative: killing it.  There are o babies being born, certainly not enough to carry the country.  The resourceful young people are moving away.  If it weren’t for prolonged life spans, the place would be half deserted, because the elite above is trying to control every aspect of the culture.

And they do it, because their initial “why” questions were answered with comic book history and comic book logic, and they bought it.  Worse, because they were indoctrinated in this, they have no clue there’s something they don’t know and don’t understand.

They disdain the stories of their grandparents, old books, family letters, because why would they expose themselves to the unenlightened.

And then they try to act, as though the nonsense they were taught was true.

“A generation that doesn’t know history has no past, and no future.” – Robert A. Heinlein.

I’ll add it’s no better for a generation that knows only a fake, simplified, sketch of history.

It might be worse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Look, I grew up in a patriarchy.  No ifs, ands or buts.  You can tell by things like the seating precedence in a car.  It about broke my then 16 year old son’s head that when getting in a car with me and his grandparents, he was the one sitting next to his grandfather (the driver) because penis.  This gave him precedence over me and even over his grandmother, whom he assumed would sit next to her husband, of course.

Between that, and women backing to let him go through doors first, or just in general behaving like he was more important than older females, he ended up composing a satirical song called “My d*ck gives me primacy” which he sang EVERYWHERE much to the bemusement of those relatives who spoke English.  (Hey, he was 16.  At least the song interrupted his other schtick which was talking about how he was the king of the untidy streets.  Don’t go there.)

I’m typing this and wondering if my brother chances to read it (despite our divergent political paths, he reads my posts about every other time.  Hey, it’s good for him.  I hear it increases his heart rate, so surely it’s the same as exercise, right?) whether he’ll be upset by that description (truthful though it is) or laugh and say of course men take primacy in Portugal, because they’re not p*ssy whipped like Americans.  I rather assume the second.  It’s the Arab influence remaining in the culture, you see.  Oh, maybe the Roman, too, because you know, Romans weren’t exactly egalitarian in their treatment of the sexes, though all things considered, they weren’t bad for the ancient world.  However, you can see the band of countries occupied by moors for any considerable period of time, and the length of time being proportional to how deep the patriarchy is in those countries.

Yesterday on facebook, in reply to this Quick, to the Victim-Mobile!  a bright girl who must be about ten years older than I came to enlighten me about how important it was for women to tell their stories of abuse (rolls eyes) and about how some woman or other she worked with in 77, when they were both very young had been pressured into sex by the boss or she wouldn’t keep the job after the three months trial.  (As with forcing a reluctant baker to bake you a cake, why would you want to continue working for that asshat in those circumstances, unless, as I noted above it is one of the fields with many aspirants and stringent gate keeping, all of which are taken over by liberal asshats, who can get away with this.  Oh, she also told me it had nothing to do with liberal and conservative.  Rolls eyes.)  Among her pithy remarks, though, she said something about being so glad I was attractive and got lots of offers.  Implying of course that I’d never known anything but offers I didn’t want.  (Puts thumb on forefinger on either side of the bridge of her nose in the sinal salute.)

You know, she has been around my page long enough that you’d think she’d know where I grew up.  Maybe she does.  Maybe she’s so blinkered she thinks that the US is a patriarchy and any land where people tan is more enlightened.

You know that example above?  That’s just what my kid got to see on a two week visit.

Used to be from the age of twelve to about sixty, no woman could step outside without being hit with a barrage of sexual suggestions.  There was some bruahah not long ago of women complaining about getting cat calls from construction workers in big cities.  Since most construction workers in the US are Hispanic, I believed them.  I also wished they’d walk a mile in my country and time (it SEEMS better now, though to be honest I don’t go anywhere alone when I’m there, because family and not having a job/classes) of origin.  The one that sticks in my mind is when I got a group of men shouting felatio instructions at me, as I walked out of a store with a Popsicle.  I was twelve.  That one sticks in mind because it was one of the first times I went out on my own; because I didn’t understand half the words; and because I hadn’t learned to ignore them. Because it’s not just construction workers, but probably half the men.  Sure, it’s the uneducated/lower class males, mostly.  (Though I wouldn’t put it past students doing the same if out where their family can’t hear.)

After a while it becomes background noise.  Offensive, sure.  But it’s just words.

It was much worse riding public transport.  The moment I started having to take bus or train to the city for school, my older cousin gave me a hat pin and showed me the trick of putting it on the edge of a folder which I kept under my arm.  Not only could I then stick the guys trying to rub off on me, but I could do it and still act the innocent, because, you know, if you actually turned around and stuck them in the nadders with a pin, people would scream AT YOU.  After all, he wasn’t taking a piece off you. He was just having some fun.  Why couldn’t you pretend to ignore it, like all the other women did?

There were other things more material, which didn’t hold me back and rather amused me because I’m of a contrary disposition.  Like, the fact that in any mixed class the teacher would assume on the first day that the best students would be boys, and pass over you, while you had your hand in the air.  It amused me because after the first test, the teacher would hold the high-scoring one and scan the class in confusion wondering what kind of creative name this was, before calling out my name.  And nine times out of ten they’d say “This is amazing for a girl.  I never thought…”.

And yes, of course it influenced what women chose to do and how they acted.  By late high school unless you were a particularly contrary type of girl, even if you were going into a higher degree, like Medicine or Languages, you cultivated “womanly gifts” like crochet, and tried to appear dim in public.  I never had patience to pretend much.

So, do I approve of growing up like that?  Shrug.  In the panoply of human cultures, Portugal was and probably still is undoubtedly a patriarchy.  A lot of the experiences this leads to for a young female are less than pleasant and sure, of course, it can discourage women who would otherwise achieve… more than they do.  (There are other limits set by the culture.)

If America were like that, I too would be making remarks about the patriarchy and certainly teaching my kids to treat THEIR women better than average.  Not to mention lobbying for a patrol to clean up the “three guys leaning on the wall making lewd suggestions” that seem obligatory in any public thoroughfare in Portugal (or did thirty years ago.)

But America isn’t like that, and the chasm between what these people are talking about and even mild patriarchy like Portugal — let’s face it, it’s not Saudi Arabia — is so immense that when I hear heart-rending stories of clumsy passes or read the men now blackmailed into posting #Ihave I just want to cry.

If you have raped or sexually extorted women in the past, by all means, turn yourself into the police.  If you have made clumsy passes or, like a bright boy in a group yesterday THINK YOU MIGHT HAVE please stop it.  All you’re doing is encouraging the idiot feminists to think that all men are rapists, and providing cover for the real rapists like Weinstein or for that matter Bill Clinton.

I knew the US was a matriarchy from the moment in the airport when I was waiting for my plane to come over and get married and watched a very overweight, inappropriately dressed middle aged woman boss her husband and sons around.  (It occurred to me the other day that I probably now resemble her.  Eh.)

Only in a matriarchy are all men shown as idiots in every commercial; is every boss on tv a woman; are women treated like they have special and holy insight.

ONLY in a matriarchy can a bunch of women suddenly deciding that events thirty years ago still apply today (77 is not now, and now any guy saying sleep with me or else will be taken to court.  Unless he’s in Hollywood, publishing, the news or politics, and, oh, yeah, leftist) have men scurrying to come up with #Ihave.  When they OBVIOUSLY and painfully not only haven’t but couldn’t being to.

I disapprove of both matriarchy and patriarchy.  I believe in individuals.  I’m also aware I live in the real world.  And in the real world, a slight patriarchy — say the US before the present dispensation — is better than a matriarchy any day.  Why?  Because the matriarchy don’t STOP.

Women, being smaller and slighter and weaker than men have no built in brakes.  If we go to war, we go to war till the enemy is pieces.

The feminists who convinced American women that men were the enemy, at least as far back as I’ve been in the country, unleashed a monster that most of them didn’t anticipate or understand.

Ain’t momma happy ain’t nobody happy.  And momma knows that she can’t hold her men by force, so she must berate them and berate them and berate them, until they confess to things they wouldn’t dream of doing.

The problem is that in so doing they give cover to the real predators.  In the midst of the chorus of #Ihave the ones who really have will be assumed to just be guilty of the male gaze or something equally stupid.  Even when they’re really serial rapists.

The world is not going to ever be comfortable for anyone.  Not really.  All of us suffer aggravation and annoyance and disparagement.  It’s part of being human.

I want a world in which I and my sons, and my grandsons and granddaughters are all treated as people and not forced to confess to the sins of OTHERS.

Right now the danger to that world isn’t from the vaunted patriarchy but from the very real matriarchy.  Mother should take an aspirin and go to bed, and big sister in particular (she’s a bitter spinster, even if she’s married.  She never got over the envy of not being able to pee standing up) should shut up already.  And dad and brothers should know that no #theyhavenot.

And then we can start, sensibly, trying to figure out what problems still exist for women (if any) and what new problems there are for men.

And behave like grown ups.  Any American woman who thinks that she lives in a patriarchy should be dropped in Spain for three months without an escort or help.  (And that’s because I’m kind.  Notice I didn’t say Saudi Arabia.)  Any American man who thinks he might deserve to post #Ihave should call his local police station and confess, or see a decent therapist not known for implanting false memories.

We should adult already, and, btw, stop laying guilt trips on innocent children just because they were born with a penis.  They don’t need special treatment, either.  Boys and girls just need to know #allhumans. And #victimsaren’tspecial.

Time and tide wait for no man.  Them as don’t work while young will have to work as old people.

I was raised on all these aforisms, but it meant nothing much at all.  When you’re young time stretches before you, if not infinite a close facsimile thereof.

When my brother turned twenty five he wrote a rather fatuous poem about how half of his life had gone. Even then, from the height of my 15 or so years, I rolled my eyes at it.  Because after all, even in the village when I was younger the life expectancy had been mid sixties, and by 1977 it was stretching to the seventies.

But young man are fatuous and at some level I knew that.  And yet, maybe from that poem, it created in me an habit to look ahead and see what I had left.

Not that anyone can know what they have left.  We have friends our age dropping off suddenly (will you people stop that?) and for them 25 was about the halfway point of life.

By family history I should have another 30 years.  If I’m very lucky I might have 40 or so.  But if the asthma continues attacking me suddenly (middle of the night, I swear to bob) when I don’t have a rescue inhaler (need to order another one) it might be much shorter than that.

RES in the comments has lamented many times that he will die with books unread.  Scary, as he’s not that much older than I.

And I will probably die with books unwritten which is very scary because 15 years ago, when I was in ICU attempting to die of inter-cellular pneumonia, what weighed with me was the worlds I’d carried in me for years that would now never live in other people’s minds.

The world is only eternal if it can escape its creator’s mind.

It used to be only chosen (by gatekeepers) worlds would live, but now…  Now I feel an obligation to them.

What I didn’t count on was my body, which has been trying to kill me since I was one, would go on expert mode.

But I have no intention of dying with these many books unwritten.  They’d either haunt me on the other side or flap around like a flock of carnivorous birds, and land on some unsuspecting writer embryo, who might not be able to handle it.

So how long do I have left?  I don’t know.  None of us does.

All I know is in the time I have I must write, so that afterwards I might rest.

I’ve known that since the kids were little, when writing time was something I snatched like stolen pastry.

BUT now a new thing joins in.  Given my body’s proclivities, I must husband time to have time.  I must give time to my body — to exercise, to rest — so I can write.

This is annoying but in our present study of geriatrics can’t be avoided (I don’t mind the lifespan.  It’s the falling apart that annoys me.)

I must stop treating my body like an inexhaustible, unbreakable machine, and trading pain and effort for achievement.

Instead I have to treat my body as an aged servant, and give it only what it can do, and give it time off to take care of its needs, so it will serve me longer.

Which means changing the habits of a life time.

But if it must be done, it must be done.  Because I must have time to birth more worlds that will fly away and live in other minds, and maybe, in their own time, in those minds birth new worlds, world without end.