Elsewhere (265)

“Most of the traits and behaviours that are likely found under the rubric of “toxic masculinity” are precisely those that most women find attractive in an ideal mate.”
But, but….wait!
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/08/women-are-having-different-fantasies-romantic-fiction-in-the-age-of-trump
““I woke up on 9 November and I was like, ‘I can’t write another one of these rich entitled impenetrable alphas. I just can’t,” says the New York Times bestselling author. “It was the story of that horrible impenetrable alpha evolving through love to be a fully formed human, which is a thing we do a lot in romance. And I just couldn’t see a way in my head that he would ultimately not be a Trump voter.””

I find the conservative/liberal empathy imbalance fascinating. I’ve noticed it throughout my polite discussions with friends; those who are big Corbyn fans take massive exception to any critisicm, while those on the right of me have no concern with my tilting at their sacred cows.
It’s become especially pronounced since I’ve started admitting to people that I voted for Brexit. Most right and centrist remainers have been understanding and interested in learning why. Those remainers of the left have gotten angry, called me a racist and unfriended me. I’m aware that I’m not alone in this experience.

I’m aware that I’m not alone in this experience.

Democratic voters are almost three times as likely to have “blocked, unfriended, or stopped following someone on social media” after Donald Trump’s victory, according to a study… The survey shows considerable splits along gender lines as well. Women were “twice as likely as men to report removing people from their online social circle because of the political views they expressed online,” 18 percent to 9 percent, according to the study conducted by Daniel Cox and Robert P. Jones… Meanwhile, 5 percent of those polled said they will alter plans to spend less time with select members of their family because of their political views. This, too, showed a partisan divide: 10 percent of Democrats said they planned to avoid certain family members, and 2 percent of Republicans said they would do likewise.

Joe Concha, here.

“In my undergraduate honours thesis I analysed the significance of Herman Melville’s allusions to the Book of Job in Moby Dick. I wanted to do more of that: studying and understanding the great works of literature. Instead I was asked to understand how “The Althusserian ‘ideological interpellation’ designates the retroactive illusion of ‘always-already;”
Sure, Althusser is evil garbage. But that doesn’t mean that analysing the significance of Herman Melville’s allusions to the Book of Job in Moby Dick for three years in grad school is time well spent.

that doesn’t mean that analysing the significance of Herman Melville’s allusions to the Book of Job in Moby Dick for three years in grad school is time well spent.
It does strike me as an expensive indulgence. Not terribly practical, shall we say.

A penny for your 2c’ worth
Regarding the asymmetry, I think Thomas Sowell gets to the nub of it.

It was the story of that horrible impenetrable alpha evolving through love to be a fully formed human…
Right, no conceit there, nosireebob.
Crossing the Line (Harlequin NASCAR)

The only home Garrett knows is behind the wheel of a race car, and now he’s on track to win a coveted championship. Falling for a hardworking mother of three isn’t part of his freewheeling bachelor plans, but how’s he supposed to resist the tempting package Grace is offering—a home, a family, the whole nine yards?…[knee deep in hot babes, three screaming sprogs – choices, choices…]

Mass Market Paperback
from £0.01
OK, I laughed.

Women hit hardest:

In case you’re tempted.
Hahahaha! A bodice-ripper! Although in this one, it’s his own he is tearing open.
No romance novels for this woman – I prefer Tolkien or Heinlein.
Romance is one genre that SJW types haven’t managed to ruin yet, like they have SF and fantasy. Interesting point he’s making.

“The Althusserian ‘ideological interpellation’ designates the retroactive illusion of ‘always-already;’ the reverse of the ideological recognition is the misrecognition of the performative dimension.”
I could not have said it better myself!

“Corbyn fans (and leftists in general) take massive exception to any critisicm”
I suspect this is because their arguments are, as our host would say, not load bearing.

Bret Weinstein on chickens and their residency.

More from Julia’s link on Romance Genre in the Age of Trump [cue the screaming horses]

But women’s fantasies may be changing in the current political climate anyway; MacLean says the blue-collar hero has become more popular (“Mechanics are really big”) while Boatman says career women have begun appearing more often in manuscripts. “The fashions of romance have always changed over the years – they change with the fantasies that women and men want to have,” she adds. “And maybe in the current climate, women are having different fantasies.”

I never was a huge reader of this genre, mostly books that my friends shoved at me and said OMG you gotta read THIS! but the idea of blue-collar hero isn’t new at all.
1976 … my sister and I went to the movies more than once to watch Sam Elliot in Lifeguard
Another favorite of the era was a made-for-tv romance movie Hardhat & Legs … professional woman & blue-collar man
These just off the top of my head, but template of “roguish guy of less social status than uptight woman, wins her over” has long standing in the genre.
Funny how history for some always begins with their own birth.

Sam Elliot in Lifeguard
[ Googles “Sam Elliot in Lifeguard.” ]
[ Tries to muffle sounds of laughter. ]

[ More muffled laughter. ]
[ Sound of wine being poured. ]

Romance writers may have to start their own publishing houses. As the Guardian article shows, the publishing field is infested with feminists, and if the books become too feminist-ized, women will quit reading them. Although I suppose the writers could turn to gay romances, all they’d have to do is change the sex of the heroine.
I think if I were to write a novel, I’d bypass the publishing industry entirely and just put it out there on Amazon. There’s a risk that you’d miss little mistakes, but it’s offset by not having your story forced into a stupid ideological box.
Once upon a time there was a blogger, (in)famous for his unbending policy of No Refunds, Credit Note Only. Then one day a handsome fellow wielding a kitchen blowtorch turned up, and…
The above illustrates the real problem with leftists: they’re boring. You and I could read the story of these two gentlemen and enjoy them as people. The leftists would turn them into stereotypes and have them oppressed by heteropatriarchy and blah blah blah.

Having now Googled “Sam Elliot in Lifeguard,” “Hardhat & Legs” and various romance novel covers featuring billowy dresses and shirtless pirates, my browser history is looking more damning than usual.

“See also this short clip of Jordan Peterson discussing women’s preferences in pornography.”
From the video: “five categories of most desirable male entity used most broadly in female pornography:…vampire, werewolf, billionaire, surgeon, and pirate”
I wonder if Dr. Peterson has heard of K/S (Kirk/Spock> porn, which is written by and for women. Would it make him laugh, wince, or both?

The Age of Travesties: https://www.city-journal.org/html/age-travesties-15750.html
Leading universities have turned themselves into hybrids of Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood and Mao’s Red Guards. They have become madrassas of identity politics, given over to dogmatism, indoctrination, the coddling of grievance, and the encouragement and manipulation of neurotic youthful insecurities for the purpose of consolidating political power. The effects of travesties being committed on American campuses, where the mind of the hard Left is embedded in faculties, administrations, and boards of overseers, will be felt for generations. The damage may be irreparable.

Various conservative figures have noted a plausible explanation for the liberal / conservative difference in understanding each other.
Conservatives are constantly exposed to, and must operate in the context of, a culture saturated in liberal ideas.
Liberals are not similarly situated.

…filthy ads for things ending in “uck” like this and this. And other ads for things ending in “eer” like this.

“The Althusserian ‘ideological interpellation’ designates the retroactive illusion of ‘always-already;’ the reverse of the ideological recognition is the misrecognition of the performative dimension.”
I’m reading that in English but it is somehow being translated into Swahili in my brain.
Can a native Swahili speaker please translate it for me? Pretty please?

Spiny Norman: “Hakuna bullshit.”

If the pirate’s shirt has been pirated, he’s perfectly sensible to put on the billowy dress. You can get a nasty sunburn out on the open sea.

perfectly sensible to put on a billowy dress
https://youtu.be/V36cnqFuVAA?t=49

. . . various romance novel covers featuring billowy dresses and shirtless pirates, my browser history is looking more damning than usual. .
And then there is Dislocating My Left Shoulder, and other book covers . . .

If I may, let me rise in defense of the study of literature, something which occupied the better part of a decade of my life. I concede that it’s difficult to perceive a utilitarian purpose for such things and further that the current state of literature studies is a far cry from when I was a grad student in the early ’80s. Still, there’s something to be said for diving deeply into the canon in an attempt to understand the author, his/her work, and the time it was written. Such study and contemplation allows us to have a better clue about Humanity as a whole. Without it, Huck Finn becomes nothing more than a travelogue about a float trip. Those insights need to be preserved.
That said, there’s no question that the current state of affairs is abysmal, primarily because literature and philosophy departments have been taken over by the SJW menace and have turned the study of literature and human thought into nothing more than Leftist Struggle Sessions where the New Progressive Orthodoxy must be disseminated constantly and all contrary views suppressed. This all started happening when it became fashionable to divorce a work of literature from its context, i.e. specifics regarding the author, world affairs at the time of its writing, and human society at the time of its writing, in order to make a work reflect the biases and political leanings of whomever happened to be reading it. At the same time came the explosion of “Angry Studies” Departments and/or “Oppressed Group Du Jour Literature Studies” classes which argued that “dead white males” had no insight into the human condition generally, and certainly none for whatever allegedly marginalized group was in the audience.
In sum, it’s not the study of literature which is the problem. It’s what’s been done to it.

While I agree there is value in the study of literature, I’m not sure it warrants college-level studies, unless you wish to become an author yourself. It is certainly worth some of your time, in the way studying history also tells you something about the human condition and the nature of societies. It can also serve as good mental exercise. Figuring out what Melville’s favorite books are by the allusions he puts into his own works can really get you thinking and opening up new mental pathways, but the conclusions you derive are still not terribly useful.
That being said, we do still need good authors, good historians, and good exercise coaches, so that doesn’t mean I fully discredit these college courses. I’m just not sure they’re good for more than that. Though, if you don’t claim significantly more than that, then I think we have no real disagreement.

Romance writers are like rappers: They’re in it for the money. They love to tell the stories, but they love the chedder, too.
A family friend used to work for Harlequin (a Canadian company, btw) writing the back cover blurbs. There are apparently a large number of men writing romance novels under pseudonyms because it’s steady, fairly easy work. Harlequin keeps this under wraps because women won’t buy romance novels written by a woman.

That being said, we do still need good authors, good historians, and good exercise coaches, so that doesn’t mean I fully discredit these college courses. I’m just not sure they’re good for more than that. Though, if you don’t claim significantly more than that, then I think we have no real disagreement.
There’s no question that a deeper understanding of the humanities is, dare I say, necessary for a life well-lived, IMHO. And for that, society needs a limited number of literature scholars. The problem since the late ’60s is that there is a surfeit of people chasing those limited billets. This leads to the lunacy our host has noted occasionally in the “publish or perish” atmosphere of modern academe. That, combined with the take-over of departments by the “Angry Studies” crowd gets us to where we are today.
(As I noted, my literature studies came at the beginning of all this and fortunately, I could see the writing on the wall. In my case, I noted that departments no longer were interested in males with an expertise in 16th-17th century German poetry, the Renaissance and/or the Reformation. Instead, the craze was for female German writers, which meant there were suddenly hundreds of specialists in post 1945 German fiction, but virtually none who knew anything about the literary influence of the Thirty Years War. Thus, shifted gears into a different career. Nonetheless, I don’t view my literature studies as a waste of time.)

“Fern Michaels” is a man who’s been in the romance business for 50 years or so. Fern says his wife helps him with the sex scenes so they don’t sound too masculine.

“Ah, slash fanfic. Kirk/Spock, Solo/Kuryakin, Harry/Draco … yep, mostly female demographic, but within that demographic majority non-heterosexual.” Another member of a group of Trekfen I hung out with (Argh!) forty years ago presented a draft of a K/S ‘slash’ story to a gay gentleman of her acquaintance, asking for his informed opinion of the ‘mechanics’ thereof. A week later he handed it back to her with the comment, “Who the hell wrote this? A teenage lesbian?” She denied it on a technicality: The authors were TWO teenage lesbians.

On and on and on the SJWs gibber, drone and drivel:
Via Samizdata:
https://www.samizdata.net/2018/03/samizdata-quote-of-the-day-1018/
this from The American Conservative: “Hating Whitey at Stanford”
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/hating-whitey-at-stanford/
(I hope I haven’t missed someone else posting these links.)

I have offended the spam filter *sad face*

There’s no question that a deeper understanding of the humanities is, dare I say, necessary for a life well-lived, IMHO. And for that, society needs a limited number of literature scholars.
Maybe it’s just a case of personal aptitude and finding some subjects much easier than others at school, but unlike, say, chemistry, I always found literature lessons easy and the content on offer insufficient to justify years of university study and an enormous bill. In that, while teachers of chemistry and physics seemed to have a reservoir of knowledge and expertise to tap – stuff I couldn’t just intuit or figure out autonomously, at least pre-internet – teachers of English literature seemed to have a fairly limited bag of tricks. Tricks that you could pick up quickly and repeat as necessary with little supervision. There are only so many ways to parse, say, Shakespeare before you venture into baseless conjecture, and then absurdity.
And from a lecturer’s point of view, there’s a career pressure to be unobvious, as if one had a vast reservoir of hidden knowledge. This obligation to be unobvious can lead some to make claims that are original only insofar as more realistic people would not be inclined to take them seriously, and which may explain how quickly and irretrievably the humanities have been degraded and in large part rendered ludicrous.
As Thomas Sowell put it,

If you’ve mastered the writings of William Shakespeare and convey that to the next generation, who have obviously not mastered it, you’re performing a valuable service. But, that’s not going to advance your academic career. You’ve got to come out with some new theory of Shakespeare. You’ve got to go through and show how there is gender bias or the secret gay message somewhere coded in Shakespeare. You’ve just got to come up with something.

And so things have to be problematised and politicised, and subject to the “woke” fashions of the day, often in laughable ways, and we get professional educators – professors of Medieval Literature – denouncing whitey and theorising about the preputial connotations of aluminium cans.

It all depends, does it not, on how rigorous the course is? Up to recently (20? 30 years ago?) an Arts degree usually required reading and absorbing much information and writing many essays.
Again, this may just be a function of my own aptitudes, and blind spots, and maybe there are students of engineering or chemistry who find parsing literature a deep and mysterious business. But pondering literature always struck me as something any reasonably intelligent person could do with minimal steering and supervision. I’m not questioning the potential rewards of mulling literature, so much as the need to spend a fortune, and several years, on someone telling you how to do it.

If someone asked about DST before, it was probably me. Sorry!
If someone asked about DST before, it was probably me. Sorry!

Amanda Marcotte, sort of the American version of Laurie Penny, intuits that “classical liberal” is just another term for “alt-right”, counters a valid criticism with snark about “gaslighting”.
Also, she says, if you’re not in favor of heckling, you’re not in favor of free speech after all. Checkmate, alt-right wolves in classical-liberal sheep’s clothing!

As Thomas Sowell put it
Where is that from? I’m still trying to accumulate all of his books, but haven’t seen that passage yet. It reminds me of a point Damon Linker once made:

Professors are trained as graduate students to become scholars — and scholarship in our time is defined as an effort to make progress in knowledge. The meaning of progress in the hard sciences is fairly obvious. But what does it mean to make progress in our knowledge of, say, English literature? One possibility is to find obscure, previously neglected authors and make a case for their importance. (This could be described as making progress in knowledge by way of expanding the canon.)
Another possibility is to bring new questions to bear on old, classic texts. But where will those new questions come from if not the concerns of the present? This is how professors end up publishing reams of studies (and teaching gobs of courses) on such topics as “Class in Shakespeare,” “Race in Shakespeare,” “Gender in Shakespeare,” “Transgender in Shakespeare,” “Intersectionality in Shakespeare,” and so forth. To tease out those themes in texts that have been read, studied, and debated for centuries certainly constitutes progress in knowledge, since those who publish the research have said something genuinely new about something old and familiar.
One reason why conservative scholars tend not to conduct this kind of research is that they’re not especially interested in questions of class, race, gender, and related issues. But that’s not because they’d prefer to achieve progress in knowledge by bringing a different, more politically conservative set of questions to bear on classic texts. (“Supply-Side Economics in Shakespeare”? “Hawkish Foreign Policy in Shakespeare”?) Rather, conservatives are usually drawn to the study of the humanities with a very different goal in mind — nothing less than pursuit of the timeless human wisdom they believe can be found in the great books of the past. What kind of research and teaching does this motivation produce? Studies of, and classes in, such topics as “Love in Shakespeare,” “Friendship in Shakespeare,” “Justice in Shakespeare,” “Death in Shakespeare,” and “God in Shakespeare.”

We may have to sedate Darleen.
oh my… it’s gotten a bit warm in here …
definition of a man

Amanda Marcotte, sort of the American version of Laurie Penny Ah Mandy Mandy Mandy …
I don’t whether it is a good or bad thing that she has blocked me from Twitter for years.
She was scribbling for the now defunct blog, Pandagon when I first started blogging. How I came to here attention, I don’t know but she wrote a snark-filled ‘review’ of my views even attacking the little stories of my first grandsons (twins) who were toddlers at the time. She especially hated when I related that my husband had surprised me on my birthday with a box of chocolates in which he had put a necklace with my birthstone pendant.
I commented asking her why my quite conventional views and experiences were such an object of ire to her.
She remarked that I was a problem, that I was happy being married and that marked me as someone who didn’t have an authentic voice because I “let men own my vagina”
I snarked back, “and you let them rent yours”
I was forever marked as being a female misogynist and generally as an Un.Person by St. Mandy of the Vagina ever since.
In 14+ years her writing has never changed … she is still a profoundly angry and unhappy person.

In 14+ years her writing has never changed … she is still a profoundly angry and unhappy person.
I wonder how much of that is also due to her being out of the limelight. Early on, she was somewhat of a darling on the Left, but after crawling from the trainwreck of the Edwards campaign, her star faded quite a bit. I’m sure she still has her acolytes, but she doesn’t seem to have the exposure she had years ago.

R. Sherman
I’m sure that may have something to do with it … but she has never changed her style or come up with any original thoughts since. She clings to the rad-feminist Leftism as if she could find the right combo of magic phrases and all fame would come to her.
Heh…she’s the Ray Manzarek of feminist bloggers, forever recycling her past connection to fame.

a few years ago the Globe Theatre was rebuilt and there was a brief push for staging Shakespeare as historically consistent as possible
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/
and:
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/shop/category/cds-dvds/148
Sweet.

I am not sure how cats, nice little critters who mind their own business, became associated with feminism. I’m in the cat-lady age group so I know several, and none of them are particularly feminist. One, in fact, is a dumb-blonde type who’s always hip deep in men. She has between 8 and 10 cats—the number fluctuates as they get run over and she replaces them. The two characteristics that I observe in cat ladies are that they like to collect things, and they have higher-than-normal maternal instincts (certainly not a feminist trait) or a normal level of maternal instincts that were never fulfilled—they remained childless for some reason.
The association between collecting and cats is probably because it’s a lot easier to hoard cats than dogs—cats don’t make much noise if they’re fixed so you can collect many more cats than dogs before the neighbors finally get local authorities to do something.

So boil those broccoli stems into submission before you eat them.
You might try this, instead:

1. Skin those broccoli stems the same way you skin cucumbers (potato peeler?)
2. Slice those broccoli stems longitudinally into quarters or eighths the same way you slice cucumbers.
3. Salt those broccoli stems to taste the same way you salt cucumbers.
4. Those broccoli stems no more need boiling than cucumbers do.

I am not sure how cats, nice little critters who mind their own business, became associated with feminism.
There’s an interesting theory that toxoplasma gondii plays a role. Not with feminism, but with self-destructive behaviour generally.
Then again, one could argue feminism is self-destructive behaviour.

they aren’t challenging anything any more, just reaffirming their own little worldview bubbles and preening for their peers.
Pretty much.
If an artist or would-be artist is preoccupied with “disrupting” my “worldview” – if that’s the goal, the measure of their ambition – then there’s a very good chance that they aren’t doing their job, and may not even understand what their job is supposed to be. Making something beautiful is a much humbler ambition, compared to all this worldview disrupting, and generally much more difficult.

Nobody here likes cucumbers, so they’re not here to be thrown into the trash. I only buy cucumbers if I’m lucky enough to be making the salad for a potluck (easiest role you can have next to “I’ll bring the paper plates!”)
If you get stuck with Bread and Rolls, get sick the day of the party. Nobody eats the Bread and Rolls anyway , and you save a lot of money.

Why has that Tyson guy been anointed the real-life Ludwig von Drake, expert on everything? Just once I’d like to see him quoted as saying, “Gee, I’m sorry, that’s not my field, I don’t know anything about that.”