First things first, click here to follow me on Twitter. When I get enough people signed up I plan to do something fun and interactive with it. But I won’t discuss it in any further detail until I have enough followers.
One night in 1997 I went out with the fellas to a hip-hop party being DJ-ed by old school legend DJ Red Alert at a spot called Downtime in Manhattan. Nice spot, the music was great, the place was packed with just-dirty-enough chicks, my game was on fire, it had all the makings of a good night.
For anyone who doesn’t know much about New York, what you need to know is we’re renowned for our pizza, bagels, cheesecake and thirsty, thirsty thirsty ass dudes. I mean Sahara thirst. Just got out of jail, locked up in solitary most of the time with no lotion and a mouth too dry to even spit on your hand type of thirst. As a result cockblocking is out of control here, especially in the dog-eat-dog world of hip-hop parties. If you immerse yourself in enough of these spots, not only do you have to have your cockblock defenses up all the time, you have to refine your own cockblock game just to remain competitive. Luckily I had just returned to NYC from living in Buffalo for a few years, one of the few places on the East Coast with thirstier guys than NYC, so I was well ahead of the local game in my defensive and offensive cockblocking skills. It’s like doing combat in the Marines for a few years then coming back to your small town and joining the local police force. Buffalo is like CB Special Forces for real.
I’m dancing with some girl and this guy keeps hovering around us. He’s sticking to the periphery, hoping I don’t notice him. If I was a rookie I probably wouldn’t have, but as a graduate of Buffalo nightclub game I’m endowed with 360-degree cockblock vision so dude was on my radar right away, but I didn’t pay it much mind at first. The girl and I are dancing close, facing each other, and the pest keeps trying to stay out of my sight while catching her eye. He’s winking, licking her lips, doing all this slick shit. This annoys the hell out of me, especially after three songs or so. She doesn’t smile back or do much to acknowledge him because she’s busy talking to me. She’s basically ignoring him.
I finally ask, “Yo, who is that dude? Do you know him?”
She responds, “Oh, he’s a guy danced with for a song earlier who won’t leave me alone. I’ve been blowing him off all night.”
Dag, that’sthirsty. Worse, a bum like this isn’t just hurting himself, he’s contributing to blowing the girl’s ego out of control, which hurts everyone, most importantly me. He then positions himself real close to us the side with his back to us like he’s not paying us any mind. (Remember, he still thinks I’m not on to him) I notice his hand behind his back facing outward, moving closer to hers. Now I’m in a pickle: if I call him out over some girl I just met, I get into a dispute over a girl I don’t even care about and just boost her ego even more. Women love when guys fight over them. Even though the dispute would really be over his disrespect of me and would have nothing to do with her, that’s not how it would register in her brain. But at the same time the longer I let him stand there doing slick shit, the worse I look. The place is too crowded to just move elsewhere easily. I refuse to leave the girl alone for him to swoop back in just out of principle at this point. I didn’t care about hooking up with her at this point, I just wanted to make sure he didn’t (because I can be petty sometimes, sue me). When you are willing to crash and burn in the process of ruining another guy’s chances, this is known as the Kamikaze Cockblock.
I let my hand brush against his. He obviously thought it was hers and he took it (I have small hands for the record (not that that implies anything of course (no, really, it doesn’t))). Then this bitch-ass actually starts writing letters in my hand. This is the kind of desperation move thirsty guys do that just blows my mind, because not only is it horrendous but even if on the off chance it works, how can you respect yourself after? Even if you win you’re a loser. At life. So I tell her, “This nigga’s seriously writing letters in my palm right now. He thinks it’s you. Watch this.” And I start writing back, but looking straight ahead with a poker face. She starts cracking up, which just makes him think she’s loving what he’d doing to “her.” I see him start smiling too. She and I are just cracking on the guy for about five minutes like our own personal in-joke.
When I think I’ve let the guy dig a big enough hole for himself, I squeeze his hand firmly. He looks back, surprised. I slowly wink at him with a totally creepy deadpan expression, still holding his hand. The dude’s jaw drops and the girl bursts out laughing right there. The guy just bolts.
Fun fact: the average NY guy has become ten times as thirsty in the 10 years since this story took place. Especially in hip-hop clubs. A desert nomad couldn’t top the stories of NYC thirst I’ve heard in recent years. It really is no wonder a girl can be a strong 6 at best here and still walk around like she just finished booking the cover of Vogue and Maxim on the same day.
Later on I’m at the bar, its near the end of the night and I’m pretty drunk. On the dance floor is a couple dancing, and I notice the girl seems to be looking at me. She’s really attractive, with a slightly exotic look I’d discover later was a Puerto-Rican/Irish mix. I don’t pay it much mind, but each time I glance it that direction I can swear she’s looking at me. Her expression is blank, not flirty. She’s pretty far away, and the club is pretty crowded so she really could be looking at someone else or just staring in my general direction. It’s so far away I can’t even be sure she can see me clearly.
I think, “What do I have to lose? Let’s see what happens.” I put on my best Blue Steel face, lean back against the bar, cock my head back, raise my hand to my hip and do that “come hither” thing with my fingers at her. She just keeps staring in my direction blankly. Did that even register? Can she even see me from that far? I try it again, extra cocky this time. Nothing. She’s still dancing with the guy.
Oh well, it was worth a shot. I turn to the bartender and order a beer. Takes less than a minute. I turn back around and inches from my face is the same girl.
Her, half-defiantly, “You called me over?”
Holy shit, that actually worked?!?! I can’t believe it myself, but no way am I letting her know that. Even though in the years following I will disavow cockblocking in general as a dating concept, at the moment I’m particularly proud of this one. I play it off like this is my everday norm.
Me: “You know I did.”
Her: “Do I know you?”
Me: “You will.”
Little do I know I have just met the hands-down dumbest girl I will ever date.
For an archive of previous installments in the series click here.
Procrastinate on Things You Enjoy
Pick something you are really looking forward to and get much joy from. Now delay experiencing it. Or miss it altogether. Miss your favorite show. Don’t even tape it. That new blockbuster movie you were planning to spend the night outside waiting for to open? See it three weeks after it comes out. Procrastinate on the things you eagerly look forward to and do some chores you’ve been avoiding instead. Leave that dessert you’ve been craving on your desk and don’t eat it until the end of the day. American Idol results tonight? Live? Go home and go to sleep instead. Feel like taking a break to check email or Facebook or Twitter for the umpteenth time? Finish your work project first and take the break in about five hours.
The point here is training yourself to forego immediate gratification when you have to. The reason many of us don’t do the things we need to do to get long-term benefits for our lives is that our lives our filled with too many instances of succumbing to short-term gratification. These short-term gratifications are distractions from more important lasting goals.
AROUND 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment. He left a succession of 4-year-olds in a room with a bell and a marshmallow. If they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmallow. If, however, they didn’t ring the bell and waited for him to come back on his own, they could then have two marshmallows.
In videos of the experiment, you can see the children squirming, kicking, hiding their eyes — desperately trying to exercise self-control so they can wait and get two marshmallows. Their performance varied widely. Some broke down and rang the bell within a minute. Others lasted 15 minutes.
The children who waited longer went on to get higher SAT scores. They got into better colleges and had, on average, better adult outcomes. The children who rang the bell quickest were more likely to become bullies. They received worse teacher and parental evaluations 10 years later and were more likely to have drug problems at age 32.
Brooks then goes on to discuss how these findings on the correlation between self-control and future success could positively influence policymaking. He also notes the following:
Differences in the ability to focus attention and exercise control emerge very early, perhaps as soon as nine months. But there is no consensus on how much of the ability to exercise self-control is hereditary and how much is environmental.
The ability to delay gratification, like most skills, correlates with socioeconomic status and parenting styles. Children from poorer homes do much worse on delayed gratification tests than children from middle-class homes. That’s probably because children from poorer homes are more likely to have their lives disrupted by marital breakdown, violence, moving, etc. They think in the short term because there is no predictable long term.
The good news is that while differences in the ability to delay gratification emerge early and persist, that ability can be improved with conscious effort. Moral lectures don’t work. Sheer willpower doesn’t seem to work either. The children who resisted eating the marshmallow didn’t stare directly at it and exercise iron discipline. On the contrary, they were able to resist their appetites because they were able to think about other things.
What works, says Jonathan Haidt, the author of “The Happiness Hypothesis,” is creating stable, predictable environments for children, in which good behavior pays off — and practice. Young people who are given a series of tests that demand self-control get better at it.
This pattern would be too obvious to mention if it weren’t so largely ignored by educators and policymakers.
The scientists are hoping to identify the particular brain regions that allow some people to delay gratification and control their temper. They’re also conducting a variety of genetic tests, as they search for the hereditary characteristics that influence the ability to wait for a second marshmallow.
If Mischel and his team succeed, they will have outlined the neural circuitry of self-control. For decades, psychologists have focussed on raw intelligence as the most important variable when it comes to predicting success in life. Mischel argues that intelligence is largely at the mercy of self-control: even the smartest kids still need to do their homework. “What we’re really measuring with the marshmallows isn’t will power or self-control,” Mischel says. “It’s much more important than that. This task forces kids to find a way to make the situation work for them. They want the second marshmallow, but how can they get it? We can’t control the world, but we can control how we think about it.”
This will be a fascinating investigation to track. If Mischel is right, raw intelligence isn’t so much the primary cause of future success but rather one of a series of causes of future success, a series that begins with capacity for self-control and capacity for delay of gratification. Rather than focusing on intelligence and whether it is mostly hereditary or can be changed, it may be more beneficial to study self-control and whether that is mostly hereditary or can be changed. It sounds like a subtle distinction, but it’s actually quite the paradigm shift.
I think learning to delay gratification is an important trait that it is never too late to develop.
At the time, psychologists assumed that children’s ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”
At the time, psychologists assumed that children’s ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”…
According to Mischel, this view of will power also helps explain why the marshmallow task is such a powerfully predictive test. “If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television,” Mischel says. “And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.”
I would suggest examining your own capacity for delay of gratification and creating challenges for yourself. Can you have a bowl of your favorite candy in front of you and only eat a couple and leave the rest of the bowl sitting there? Or do you have to pick at them until they’re finished? If the season finale or most important episode of your favorite show is on your DVR, do you have to watch it the same night it aired or can you leave it sitting there all week long until you’ve accomplished the more pressing matters in your life and are ready to finally get around to watching it? If challenged, could you force yourself to not DVR-record it at all, knowing it won’t be repeated and you’ll likely have to wait around for the box set to view said episode? It’s good to practice gratification delaying exercises and seeing how they make you feel.
Read Iceberg Slim’s Pimp book to read how he mastered women by excruciating bouts of practicing delay of sexual gratification.
An encouraging finding:
The early appearance of the ability to delay suggests that it has a genetic origin, an example of personality at its most predetermined. Mischel resists such an easy conclusion. “In general, trying to separate nature and nurture makes about as much sense as trying to separate personality and situation,” he says. “The two influences are completely interrelated.” For instance, when Mischel gave delay-of-gratification tasks to children from low-income families in the Bronx, he noticed that their ability to delay was below average, at least compared with that of children in Palo Alto. “When you grow up poor, you might not practice delay as much,” he says. “And if you don’t practice then you’ll never figure out how to distract yourself. You won’t develop the best delay strategies, and those strategies won’t become second nature.” In other words, people learn how to use their mind just as they learn how to use a computer: through trial and error.
But Mischel has found a shortcut. When he and his colleagues taught children a simple set of mental tricks—such as pretending that the candy is only a picture, surrounded by an imaginary frame—he dramatically improved their self-control. The kids who hadn’t been able to wait sixty seconds could now wait fifteen minutes. “All I’ve done is given them some tips from their mental user manual,” Mischel says. “Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”
Also:
Angela Lee Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, is leading the program. She first grew interested in the subject after working as a high-school math teacher. “For the most part, it was an incredibly frustrating experience,” she says. “I gradually became convinced that trying to teach a teen-ager algebra when they don’t have self-control is a pretty futile exercise.” And so, at the age of thirty-two, Duckworth decided to become a psychologist. One of her main research projects looked at the relationship between self-control and grade-point average. She found that the ability to delay gratification—eighth graders were given a choice between a dollar right away or two dollars the following week—was a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q. She said that her study shows that “intelligence is really important, but it’s still not as important as self-control.”
Start with small things you look forward to and practice putting those off or missing them altogether. Then challenge yourself to practice with bigger and bigger things.
But like the article quotes above say, the best way to achieve the gratification delay and build patience is by not thinking of the gratification and distracting yourself from dwelling on what you’re missing by focusing on something else. Here’s what you should focus on: Periodically make an ongoing list of long-term goals and short-term tasks you need to accomplish. Order them from 1 to 4, with 1 being “important and immediate,” 2 being “important but not immediate,” 3 being “unimportant and immediate” and 4 being “unimportant and not immediate.” The things in 3 and 4 more often than not are usually the things you need to procrastinate on but tend not to. Tasks and goals in 1 and 2 are usually things you should be doing immediately but tend to procrastinate. So as you learn to delay gratification and practice patience, usually with items falling in the 3 and 4 categories, use the new free time to distract yourself from what you’re missing by focusing on category 1 and 2 tasks instead. Eventually eliminate all the 1s from your list and strive to keep the list of 2s as small as possible and keep them from becoming 1s. And even then keep practicing patience and delaying gratification, because new temptation is always around the corner.
New York magazine has an article on the rise of binge drinking among today’s generation of young women. It basically asks whether notions of gender equality should extend to binge drinking.
[M]ore women are drinking, yes—more than 48 percent acknowledge having had at least one drink in the past month (up from 42 percent in 1992). But beyond that, the women who drink are drinking more. The number of women who identify as moderate-to-heavy drinkers has risen in the last ten years, while the number of women who say they are light drinkers has declined. At the same time, men are reining in their drinking, meaning that the gender gap of alcohol consumption is narrowing all the time.
This increase in drinking among women also includes a sharp increase in binge drinking as well, defined by the CDC’s website as follows:
According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, binge drinking is defined as a pattern of alcohol consumption that brings the blood alcohol concentration (BAC) level to 0.08% or above. This pattern of drinking usually corresponds to 5 or more drinks on a single occasion for men or 4 or more drinks on a single occasion for women, generally within about 2 hours.
The article gets better when it starts listing specific examples. I cringed with recognition of these types of boozy babes:
I’m out drinking one Wednesday night when I run into Gail and Melanie, two women in their early twenties who are well on their way to what my grandmother would call “past precious.” It’s their third bar of the evening, or rather they were here earlier, they left to go to a beer garden a few blocks away, and now, at 2 a.m., they are back. Both are tall and slender, both wear red dresses with their dark hair pulled up, and the bartender has been slipping both of them freebies here and there throughout the night when they weren’t being offered drinks by other eager men.
“They were like, ‘Oh. You want another beer?’?” Mel says, rolling her eyes about a group of guys who tried to get their attention earlier.
Gail laughs. “They totally admitted they were going to be outdrank by us.”
“He was like, ‘I didn’t drink until I was 21,’?” Mel continues.
Gail arches her eyebrows in disbelief. “This is how we grew up,” she says, nodding in the direction of her drink. “I’ve been drinking since I was 13, you know? We went into my friend’s liquor cabinet and mixed everything together, whiskey, vodka, rum. I remember after that being like, ‘Alcohol is really fun. I want to do it again.’?”
Mel agrees. “I started drinking at a house party when I was going into eighth grade. I ended up throwing up Doritos in the bathroom. Not that that was fun, but from there, I was like, ‘I’m curious.’?”
Then comes the stats. None of them are surprising based on things I’ve seen or anecdotes I’ve heard, but to see them all compiled in a few short paragraphs even gave me pause…for like all of a second.
One-third of all women in the U.S. have their first alcoholic sip before they enter high school. Almost half of high-school girls drink, and more than a quarter binge drink. Then throw in college. For many women, heavy drinking might be only a blip on the radar, a youthful folly, if it weren’t for higher education. The transition from high school to college marks the greatest increase in substance abuse among women, and the more educated a woman is, the more likely she will be to drink throughout her life. “College campuses are the place where drinking norms are set for educated individuals,” says Jon Morgenstern, a professor of psychiatry and vice-president at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. “The rate of drinking is astronomical. College is really a training ground for becoming an alcoholic.” And these days, the gender gap on campus is reversed: Fifty-five percent of college students who meet the clinical criteria for alcohol abuse are female.
“I’m pretty sure college was a great time,” my college roommate likes to say, “but I remember none of it, sadly.” Not incidentally, we started college at the tail end of the nineties, the decade that invented the alcopop, otherwise known as “chick beer,” and MTV Spring Break. If the alcohol industry was conspiring to attract drinkers like us, it succeeded. The rate of frequent binge drinking increased by 124 percent between 1993 and 2001 at all-female colleges. When Amstel Light began marketing directly to women, its sales volume reportedly went up by 13 percent. Suddenly, alcohol commercials weren’t just of the big-breasted, mud-wrestling lineage. A Dewar’s ad from the era showed a lovely young woman donning her work clothes while a bare-chested man slept in the bed beside her. Tagline: “You finally have a real job, a real place, and a real boyfriend. How about a real drink?” I didn’t have any of the above but thought Dewar’s would suit me just fine.
That was back when the industry was just warming up. Dr. David Jernigan, the executive director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, believes that the real onslaught—and its effect on the beverages women consume—didn’t reach critical mass until the turn of this century. “For decades, we’ve assumed that the beverage preference for underage drinkers is beer because it’s cheaper,” he told me. “Boys are more likely to drink beer, but starting in about 2001, the girls shift. They are decisively more likely to drink liquor. This shift in beverage preference is a really big deal because it takes a lot to change the beverage preference of a group of people.”
The change could not have happened without a calculated effort. At a time when the number of cable channels and their appeal mushroomed, alcohol ads appeared during thirteen to fifteen of the most popular shows among teenagers and increasingly in women’s magazines, where according to Jernigan, in 2002 girls 12 to 20 saw 95 percent more ads for alcopops than women 21 and above. New alcopop flavors proliferated, Jell-O shooters showed up in grocery-store aisles, and companies rolled out vodkas in increasingly exotic flavors. “How many guys are going to drink a strawberry vodka?” Jernigan asks. “There’s a clear effort by the industry to create products for female drinkers. And it has had an effect.”
Not that marketing should get all the credit for a woman’s relationship with drinking. Once an introduction to alcohol is made, the affair usually flourishes all on its own.
Given that modern feminism automatically equates gender equality with progress, so long as it’s in an area that men reap benefits from (for example feminists don’t really seem to be clamoring for the chance to get on the front lines of a raging battlefield oddly enough), it’s no surprise that today’s vapid feminists of the Jezebel.com and Feministing.com variety view women increasingly engaging in the hard partying and harder drinking lifestyle traditionally associated with men as some sort of gender progress. Similarly many feminists, especially those of the Sex & The City variety viewed females embracing male-style revolving door urban promiscuity as some sort of gender progress also in the late 90s.
To see what all the recent waves of feminism from the second wave through to the Sex and the City wave to the Suicide Girl wave have combined to create, take for example the following horror story from the article:
Jezebel.com, a Website that is an avatar of a certain of-the-moment brand of feminism appealing to women too young to remember the heyday of Ms. magazine. Jezebel is very pro-alcohol. Last summer, the site stirred up controversy when a well-respected media personality invited two of its writers onto her Internet show “Thinking and Drinking”—typically a classy, semi-Socratic affair—and the younger women got so visibly shitfaced and the conversation so disturbing that some critics referred to it as “The Night Feminism Died.” (When asked why she didn’t prosecute her date-rapist, one of the young women, woozily clutching her can of beer, answered, “Because it was a load of trouble and I had better things to do, like drinking more.”)
The onslaught of criticism that followed, however warranted, failed to take into account the fact that, for better or worse, drinking has become entwined with progressive feminism. “I don’t think that the drinking in and of itself is feminist, but I do think that it comes from a feminist place, that it can bolster one’s sense of herself as liberated,” says Jezebel editor Jessica Grose. “You know, the whole point of Third Wave feminism is that individual choice should not be judged. If you choose to opt out and be a stay-at-home mom, then that’s your choice.” And if you choose to drink yourself unconscious in some random guy’s bed, that’s also your prerogative. To say that you shouldn’t would be paternalistic hand-wringing, implying that a woman needs to be protected from herself.
It’s a more maverick form of feminism, sure, and perhaps misguided—something akin to the type of reasoning that paints Girls Gone Wild participants as sexually liberated. But the paradox of a woman exerting her power by making herself, to one degree or another, incapacitated does not read as a disjunction to most of the women I spoke with. On the contrary, a woman’s control over her life—and the decision of when and how to lose that control—seems to be the point.
Reading about this trainwreck interview is one thing, but really, actually seeing it in action is a whole other level of clusterfuck to behold:
“Daddy, are you proud of me? That college education really paid off! Look Mom, progress!”
I’m kind of torn on seeing chicks like this be so candid. In some ways it’s good because it shows the other side of the gender war that the media likes to overlook. We only see men behaving badly stories but not women behaving badly. I know a lot of women may read this and tell me, “Oh, they’re exceptions,” and maybe when taking the whole country into account that is true, but in NY and the other U.S. urban centers, these type of women have become the new norm, especially in the 18-34 age range. When I was younger, had a lot less game and even less standards, these types of chicks were a godsend because they meant easy banging with mininal skill and effort. What young guy with raging hormones and little patience wouldn’t love that? But as I got older I realized these women are really just the equivalent of slapping a great paint job on a shitty car: sure it’s more than a lot of other people have, but it’s still nothing to be especially proud of. And if you have any sort of standards or self-respect, you realize your shitty car with the nice pant job only impresses people not worth impressing, which makes it an even emptier feeling after a while. Or even worse, after a long enough time lowering your standards and fucking slutty drunks, lowered standards go from being your last resort game to being your A-game. And sure enough you become one of those low-class losers who are not worth impressing.
When you lower your standards on a regular basis and only bang women you don’t respect, you think you’re getting over and proving something, but in actuality it sends a message to your subconscious mind about who you are. Just like you are what you eat, you are what you fuck. And since you’re fucking trash, your subconscious mind starts to absorb the message that you must be low value as well, and as a result starts influencing your conscious behavior accordingly. Thus you start lowering your standards on how you look (slovenly, sloppy, unkempt, unimpressive, bland) and you lose all self-respect (desperate chasing of women, putting up with crap you shouldn’t, hooking up with unattractive women just because you’re both drunk and the opportunity is there). That’s why so many of the guys who regularly hook up with the types of chicks like the two Jezebellers in the video above, the hipsters they deride and mock, look like unshaven slobs (lowering their standards for themselves) and regularly are at ease with making spectacles of themselves (no self-respect). That’s why hipsters reach the point where they eventually feel no shame looking like the botched drive-by abortions found on Look at This Fucking Hipster website or are proud to be written up for engaging in crap like this or this for example. It’s also why I started turning dow n one-night stand opportunities with stumblebum broads who were incoherent and sloppy, even if they were hot. It was just tacky, unenjoyable and embarassing when I brought home a girl who was excited about sleeping with me, but by the time we got to more intimate settings she was nodding in and out of a stupor while taking off her own clothes. So I’m drunk, my hormones are exploding like a volcano and my dick’s hard enough to cut diamonds and crack walnuts. What do I do? If we’re both drunk is it rape? If we both start having sex and she seems awake and responsive in the beginning but at some point she becomes semi-conscious and out of it because her liquor intake is catching up with her, do I stop stroking or would that be rape?
The recent movie Observe & Report actually has such a scarily accurate scene, where [SPOILERS] Seth Rogen and hard-drinking Anna Faris go on a date that culminates in the type of sex I just described (and lived a few times). He’s pounding away at her at the end of their date and she looks passed out drunk. Slowly it hits him that she may not be conscious any more and he might be raping her. He slows down and then stops, unsure what to do and slowly feeling disgusted by himself, wondering if he is a date rapist. And Anna Faris’ character immediately slurs, without looking up or opening her eyes, “I didn’t tell you to stooppp motherrrfuckkerrr….” Like, is it rape if she was conscious and slurs something that rhymes with “Yerrssh” when you started fucking but sort of kind of passed out before you finished? When you actually start having to ask those types of questions, it’s time to raise your standards. Real men need at least need a little bit of a challenge in order to feel proud of an accomplishment. And it’s scenarios like this, which are much more commonplace than older generations know, that probably cause the girls to be so nonchalant toward their “rapists.” Because these women are fully aware of how grey and vague the issue of consent is in such mutually drunk and debauched scenarios, especially when slutty behavior is thrown into the equation. Shit, one of them even wrote a column for Gawker.com titled Slut Machine and had a blog called One D(ick) at a Time, so I don’t think I’m out of line calling their behavior slutty.
One interesting thing about the videos above and the Whimpster piece is how the women who date hipsters seem to hold them in total utter contempt and scorn them. When I see hispter couples I see this emasculating scorn dynamic going on too. What girls like the Jezebellers in the video and the woman who wrote The Whimpster piece don’t get is that yes the men they date are tools, but these men are tools that they created. They have this love-hate relationship with hipster men. They date them because on a social level they like them for being enlightened enough to accept their batshit crazy and ill-defined form of reactionary feminism and they accept their desire to be equal to men and they aren’t intimidated by a “strong,” defined as abrasive, narcissistic and shrewish in their world, woman. Plus these men have no desire to be macho and try to lead them or ever pull rank on them or ever try to boss them around and take charge forcefully. So these guys are the perfect complement to their socially constructed sense of identity. Yet on a primal, unconscious level, they hate them because women are genetic hard-wired for hypergamy (meaning they don’t want a man who is equal in status but one who is higher), are hard-wired to seek out leadership in a man (meaning they don’t want a man who gives them 50% of more input on everything and is too democratic) and are hard-wired to respond with a dripping crotch to displays of machoness and assertiveness, because it satisfies their primal need to feel protected and secure (meaning on a primal level they don’t like guys with the same height, weight and muscle tone as them). So for all those reasons, they don’t respect these men even though they are a perfect fit for their social side and they even grow to hate them with time. Yet since the guys these women do respond to primally and hormonally to are socially forbidden to them by their religion of radical feminism, and more importantly, would have no tolerance for their radical feminist ways in return, they are forced to deal and make do with the type of hipster men that are cool with their radical feminist religion, even if everything else from their subconscious primal mind to their hormones to their genes utterly loathes them. (And with time this hatred will start to surface on the conscious level too)
So look at the videos and read the Whimpster piece again. They date and fuck these guys, yet appear to hold them in utter contempt as well. One girl is basically calling them out for being nonassertive, but says that at least the way they rape is more acceptable because it’s not the macho kind of rape a frat boy would do. Who is she complimenting and who is she insulting with this train of thought? Does she even know? It’s funny in a fucked up way, but it turns out even the way hipsters rape, using surreptitiously slipped drugs and inebriated and deranged (by feminism and college) targets is passive-aggressive. But the irony is, they created the Whimpster and then want to punish him for having all the traits they continually reward and none of the “frat boy” or “macho” or “traditional” traits they openly deride every chance they get. Yet they want to turn around and bash them for being exactly what they encouraged them to be, and continue to engage in the exact same behavior and subscribe to the exact same beliefs that encouraged them to be that way. Because the alternative idea, that radical feminism sold them a bad bill of goods that created more problems than it solved for them, is impossible for them to even consider because they have devoted so much of their identity and so many years and resources to the ideology. This is what’s known as a “sunk cost fallacy.” Marshall McLuhan once said about humans “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.” It works for this context as well: yes these guys are tools, but these women shaped them, and now these tools are shaping them back, and the vicious circle that has been started is turning out to be a pitiful race to the bottom.
Huffingtonpost.com, a site for smelly granolas I never expected to link to in my lifetime, has some of the best highlights in print form:
These Jezebels recommend birth control methods:
Moe: Pulling out always works for me”
Tracie: “And I know it’s an irresponsible thing to day, but it’s (Pulling Out) The Most Fun Way Not To Get Pregnant”
The Jezebels on sex with total strangers:
Tracie: “People are always saying it’s not safe to go home with strange men, blah, blah blah, like Mr. Goodbar whatever”
Moe: “What’s gonna happen?’
Lizz You could get raped”
Moe: That’s happening too, but you live through that.”
Lizz: “Sometimes you don’t”
Moe: “That’s true if they have weapons.”
The Jezebels define the “rapists of our generation”
Tracie: “I live in Williamsburg, there aren’t very assertive men there”
Moe: “The thing about the rapists of our generation, is that they all use drugs, they all have some sort of drug they use on you, so it’s good to feel, and I don’t know if this has happed to me or if I just drink too much…
Moe: “It’s really hard to prosecute them (rapists), so you should try to avoid them at all costs.”
Tracie: “I once paid someone to rape me once.”
Tracie: “Well, I didn’t pay for it, I had a magazine pay for it
Tracie: “I moved here when I was 18 and you think you would encounter more rapists in a big city like this, but, I don’t know, I just haven’t.”
Moe on sexual regret:
Moe: “I guess, I like, regret being date raped”
Moe: “It seems like in terms of bad sexual experiences, that you have, the worst ones are in, always seem to be in countries where sex is not accepted. That is the good thing about New York, I’ve never has any problems with anyone here.”
Moe: “I guess third guy, I ever had sex with, date raped me, and I got very mad at him, but I wasn’t gonna fucking like turn him in to the police and fucking go through shit..
Lizz interrupts: “Why not, you see that’s the problem, why not, I am just curious?”
Moe: Because it was a load of trouble and I had better things to do, like drinking more.”
Tracie on why she has not been raped
” I think it has to do with the fact that I am like, smart”
“I don’t hang around with frat guys”
Moe on how she felt about her rapist:
“I always felt very like, safe around this guy even after he date raped me”
Moe on what women can take home from reading their blogs
If any of you guys use the pullout method, but you read you know, anything I wrote about Ben Bernanke, or you know, what ever, at least y’ll go to the grave with your syphilis, slightly informed, that’s all I care about
I suggest that the next writer who chooses to do a piece about the popular meme of how today’s urban young adult men are stunted man-children who refuse to commit actually take the time to learn about the boozy train wrecks they’re refusing to commit to. The marriage stats will make a lot more sense then.
By the way, Tracie Egan really did pay someone to rape her, as you can read here. Believe it or not, I don’t hate the article. It’s well written, honest and indirectly confirms a lot of my beliefs about radical feminism that a radical feminist would never admit if I asked her directly. If you don’t believe my recurring theories that women don’t really want to be equal in power to a man in a relationship, or even worse more decisive than the man, check the opening paragraph where she describes why she wants to be raped:
I blame my recurring rape fantasy on the fact that I’m a feminist. I’ve never made any bones about getting boned in exactly the fashion that I want. But as a girl, my equipment can be trickier to manage, therefore I need to be a boss in the bedroom to ensure I get worked the right way. It gets really tiresome always being the one in charge, and don’t shrinks say that people usually fantasize about the opposite of their reality? I guess that’s why I find myself wishing that my typically sugary-sweet sexual encounters were sometimes peppered with assault. I decided that the best way to forfeit that control—while still holding on to a modicum of it for safekeeping—would be to hire someone for the job. Not to put too fine a point on it, I wanted a male whore to rape me.
Kind of like how when a person who loves food denies himself food too long he ends up wanting to destructively binge on it at some point, I guess when your ideology causes you to avoid assertive males too much, you end up going to an extreme to find assertiveness, like rape. You can read her blog here, where she used to regularly chronicle her promiscuous lifestyle and sexual exploits, at least until she announced she was engaged to be married last Fall. You can also read her take on the fallout to the above interview. To her credit, she’s a fantastic writer.
The modern writing I currently admire the most is Vice magazine. Like any New Yorker, I have an annoying urge to be the elitist prick who’s the first to declare anything as being “over” the moment it starts to gain popularity and recognition, yet as much as I’d like to bash Vice as being cliched or a parody of itself, I simply can’t. Because their obnoxious prose never gets old to me. Every time I pick up an issue to check if it’s lost its edge yet, it’s still awesome.
Sometimes I read Gawker.com and think I hate snark. Then I read Vice and realize, no, I only hate snark that tries to hard, snark as a substitute for insight or wit rather than as a way to enhance good insight and wit. When you’ve got the acerbic insight, acidic wit and street smarts to back it up, snark can be awesome. Kind of like how we as a society claim to hate cockiness and narcissism, yet forgive it in the truly talented at the drop of a hat. I read the prose in their record reviews and get insanely jealous that I can’t write like that. Not ashamed to admit it.
I love this piece on fashion they had by Christopher Bollen called “I Love Fashion,” especially the following insights (emphasis added by me):
Fashion has often been noted for sucking the meaning out of subversive signifiers and peddling them as popular wares, thereby destroying their once-volatile expression—when even avant-garde designers like Viktor & Rolf use safety pins in their Fall 2008 collection, they are appropriating punk without keeping true to its trash rebellion, its spectacular refusal (even with “no” written across the models’ faces). Of course, one part of fashion is business. Let’s admit this now. Fashion has to dress the world’s population and likewise pay for all of the mills, designers, retailers, clerks, magazines, and advertisers invested in it. But subversion is fashion too. Mainstream and subculture work as strategic dance partners here. The point of subculture is always to fight against the hegemony, and when their signs become appropriated or outdated, the resistant have to find new, unexpected, jarring visual methods of revolt. If this game of invent-and-take weren’t built into the system, most women today would still be wearing house dresses, and a leather jacket would still mean trouble. You can’t dress up in the revolutions of your parents.
Not all creative radicals work outside of the system. There are plenty of groundbreaking designers who indeed advertise, make money, and sell on the third floor of Barney’s who are still following a vision of art and exploration. Even elitists need to recognize that real change (that word these days!) succeeds best when it meets the world with some sort of handshake. Is fashion art? Really, the more interesting questions is “Has art become fashion?” So far that is still the ugly unaskable. Fine art makes a critical stink about being compared to fashion because it knows how close that gets to admitting what really controls its revolutions—the market. Is it more dubious to create with the full acknowledgement that, yes, this will be tagged with a price, it is part of an economy that does dictate it to a degree, or to pretend that you are still employing liberatory gestures outside the order while you and your gallery are getting fat from the byproduct? I almost admire the honesty of the fashion world. It makes no bones about recognizing how much the market plays a role in its developments. Art could use a more honest mirror in its dressing room.
Ultimately the downside of fashion is the fetishizing of the ever-shifting object. But the upside is that it still can be an individual play of decisions. If we have to walk around in these balls of fabric, those willing to roll the dice can use them, screw with them, turn them into billboards or bellwethers. Even to hate fashion is still to realize its power, and anything that has power can be used, appropriated, or rechanneled. We do not want our lives to become lifestyles, as luxury brands are quick to create. But the best way not to become slaves to fashion is to embrace its potential. Slaves don’t hug their masters. Refusal isn’t revolution. Try that one on.
Sometimes I have to wonder, what is it exactly young people want to revolt against so badly here in America? Too many apps available on their Iphones? I mean outside of just some vague concept of “the establishment,” which really comes down to a proxy for whatever unresolved parent issues from our teenage years we’re to petty to let go of. I know it’s not perfect here, and there are things that are worth fighting to change (too many taxes is my bugaboo), but I’ve spent some time abroad in some real shitholes, and I have to admit, we’ve got it pretty good.
Why do so many people have to convince themselves something is anticapitalist, nonconformist or part of an imaginary “revolution” before they give themselves license to enjoy it?
I had threaded comments for a while because I liked how they looked on the site Stuff White People Like, but unfortunately no threaded comments plugin I found looked as neat and user friendly as the one Christian Lander has on his site, so I’m just aborting it altogether. Back to a regular comments format.
Threaded comments were a failed experiment. Live and learn.
Also, note that there is now a topics suggestion page. It’s primarily for essay topics for a book, but you can also use it for personal advice or blog topic suggestions too.
My laptop is still down, but I can still squeeze in a few short posts here and there when I can. Ordered my Lenovo laptop and it should be here in a few weeks. My laptop repair guy swears that it’s the best PC laptop you can get, although he swears I should give up PC laptops altogether and get a Mac laptop. Maybe later in the year.
Also, don’t forget to check out this post and comment on what kind of essays you’d like to see me tackle in a book, whether it’s new topics or expansions of previous blog post topics. I’m currently in an outlining stage.
Anyway, on to the current topic. Look at the picture below:
It appeared in New York Magazine’s Look Book Section a while back. As I flipped through the magazine quickly I had to stop and do a double take when I hit that page. It stopped me a cold because at first glance when I saw that shit-eating smirk, confident aura, great fashion sense and sick, dominant swagger I was impressed. It’s rare to see an American bourgeois bohemian white guy with swagger like that these days. (For an idea of what a bourgeois bohemian is, click here, here or here to get a crystal clear idea). Usually such couples featured in mainstream NY mags has a unassuming, wispy, languid and ironically dressed whimpster geek with a more dynamic and attractive female specimen that is outshining him that is clearly wearing the pants in the relationship (aka the Brooklyn Bobo couple). See this Jessica Valenti story for comparison, picture below:
Now that’s the type of unassuming whimpster I’m used to seeing as the male half of these bobo power couples. The kind of guy you’d never see dominating the forefront of the shot with his arm confidently gripping his woman, exuding cockiness and swagger as his woman just fawns and melts all over him, dripping with adulation, reverence and lust. No, he’s meant to be tolerated for being as inoffensive to her feminist views as possible. If you don’t believe me read the accompanying story.
But back to the first picture, when I did the double-take and flipped back to it, I realized that they were a lesbian couple and not a man-woman couple. At that point it all made sense. I have no proof to back up this claim, but I bet that Allison Michael Orenstein, the dapper dan butch in the first photo, is the more hardcore lesbian while her mate, kissing up on her cheek, Simone Saint Laurent, was probably straight for much of her life and got ”turned out” by Orenstein or a butch similar to her. The reason I assume this is because of what a butch lesbian who excelled at “converting” straight women once told me: that metropolitan straight women, living in this world of feminized bobo whimpsters, are getting so starved for traditional masculine swagger to activate their primal lust triggers and make them feel safe to be a submissive woman that they’re even increasingly willing to turn to another woman to get their dose of macho swagger. This butch claimed to me that the sensitive wuss has been the biggest boon to her lesbo recruitment game, and looking at the two pics I believe her. It’s even worse when you read the stories accompanying both pics. I also think the bobo whimpsterization and swagger deprivation of urban white men has also played a major role in white women’s increased openness to the idea of dating minority men, who tend to have a lot more swagger on average as well.
Read the story accompanying the lesbian couple’s picture and the story accompanying Valenti’s story, and ask yourself, who is more likely to be a follower of The Renaissance Man Philosophy, the butch lesbian in the first story or the bobo whimpster guy in the second? The lesson here is that real women who are in touch with their natural feminine side want a man who, while capable of being sensitive if necessary, conveys that he is confident and can protect, dominate and lead them at will. If you can’t convey these things, or worse don’t believe them about yourself, you will end up with women like Valenti. Women who are too insecure to let themselves be led by a man. Whose are more interested in competing and dominating a man than being a complement to him. Women who have deep rooted issues with masculine strength and feel the need to neuter any indication of it in our society and emasculate any man in their immediate vicinity to feel comfortable. Basically, a shrew that defines herself by her radical feminist ideology. She’ll have you walking on pins and needles and constantly double checking the toilet seat and making sure you organized the recycling bin right in fears she’ll chew you out mercilessly. National Corner also did a great piece on her.
Don’t be that guy. And don’t be too proud to take lessons from a lesbian on male swagger if need be. We need all the role models we can get these days.
Good news, Costa Rica is awesome. Jaco is a nice enough place but not really my cup of tea personally, but the rest of the country is sweet. Or maybe my expectations were just too high following last year’s vacation. I might dedicate a longer post to it at some point.
Bad news, the heat here overheated my laptop. As in, it was so hot that even with the computer off and screen closed, the laptop totally overheated and shut down. I’ve never seen anything like it. Motherboard is fried. Utterly shot.
Since blogging at work is a no-no, I’m going to be down until I get a new laptop in a few weeks. I have to use a friend’s computer just to make this post.
Since my computer access is going to be extremely limited, I propose this: A while back, I asked you guys to give me ideas on what type of book I should write. The most popular suggestion was a collection of essays, so that is what I am going with. My next question is, what subject matters would you suggest I write about? Which topics do you like to read from me the most? It will help me get an idea of what the range of topics should be. I am currently at the stage of outlining it and the subject matter needs a little more focusing.
Also, tell me what you would least like to see. For example many of you say the political stuff is too divisive, so I’m going light on that. One essay at most.
Thanks.
UPDATE: Doesn’t have to be a topic or even subject area I’ve already covered. It could be something I’ve never discussed in the past ever but you still want to hear my take on.
[/caption]
