The Rawness

I’ve done another guest post over at political blog Alarming News. You can read and comment on it over here.

Next week it’ll be business as usual back here, starting with a response to a reader letter I recently received.

I made a guest post today over at the political blog Alarming News. Click here to read it and make comments.

This morning I went on Ace of Spades conservative blog and found the following video:

This blog by a black conservative sums up the problem pretty well:

First of all. while Michael Jackson has been accused by quite a few people of child molestation, he’s never been convicted of anything. Secondly, this is a reach as the media’s coverage of Michael Jackson has nothing to do with dissing our troops. And yeah, at a time when the GOP is struggling, barely getting mention on the national radar, dissing a cultural icon is just the kind of lift it needs. Any wonder too why Blacks stay away from the GOP?

Really, this is just making conservatives look bad. And I think it’s worse than just alienating blacks, it alienates most of the rational world. It reinforces the stereotype of conservatives as the uptight soulless whitebread guys that were outraged by Kevin Bacon dancing in Footloose. It’s getting to the point of self-parody now guys.

Maybe you don’t want Michael Jackson to be the most famous and admired human being born in the 20th century, but that doesn’t change the fact that he was. Hence they’ll cover him.

Also, check out this 1994 GQ article about his child molestation case that makes a pretty strong case that MJ was framed:

http://www.usnewslink.com/framedjackson.htm

Now I know what a lot of people think, sure they found no proof against him in criminal trials, but if he was innocent why did he pay off the family? Glad you asked.

Little known fun fact: not only was insufficient proof found against him in both cases, the $20 million paid as a settlement to the first accuser was not from Michael Jackson himself but negotiated and paid by his insurance carrier, over the loud protestations of Michael Jackson and his legal counsel.

You can Google it yourselves and find plenty of corroborating links about this fun fact, but if you don’t believe me here’s one corroborating link from Daily Mail to get you started:

When Jackson settled out of court with his first accuser, Jordan Chandler, for more than $15million in 1994, his career went into a rapid decline from which he never recovered.

Jackson had not wanted to settle the case. I have obtained legal documents proving that his insurance company forced the settlement on him against his will.

The documents state: ‘The [1994 Chandler] settlement agreement was for global claims of negligence and the lawsuit was defended by Mr Jackson’s insurance carrier. The insurance carrier negotiated and paid the settlement, over the protests of Mr Jackson and his personal legal counsel.’

A Youtube video covering most of the flaws in the accusation cases that aren’t widely known:

Slate also did the research and came to the same conclusion:
http://www.slate.com/id/2120889/

So then comes the other questions: if he was not a molester, why was his behavior so off and why did he have a compulsive need to spend time with young boys? That is covered in my last post on his psychology.

Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Whatever happened to Americans being proud of its icons? The state of conservatism is already in a fragile state, why would they bother with a losing, ugly stance like bashing Michael Jackson every chance they get right now? What do they gain from it besides showing insensitivity to his fans worldwide, showing themselves to fit the stereotype of insensitive, unhip and uptight white guys and providing cannon fodder for those who love stereotyping conservatives as racists?

It’s just really ugly behavior and horrible PR for us on the right. Obviously, whether or not Michael Jackson means anything to you or not, he means a lot to the rest of the world and is getting covered accordingly. There’s nothing to gain politically by bashing the coverage of a man hundreds of millions loved worldwide. A man who sold more copies of single album than anyone who ever lived, a record that is likely never to be topped again. Ever. I mean, I never got the big deal about Princess Diana, but I respect the right of the rest of the western world to go batshit insane over her death.

Anyway, one more Michael Jackson post coming up and I’m done with the topic, promise.

Getting ready to head to Jaco, Costa Rica today. Should be fun. Going to take surfing lessons to boot. I’ll return to posting next week. Will be checking and responding to comments though.

This is something I’m going to do now and again, posting links to articles and interviews I find that somehow relate to topics and posts I did in the past.

First, Psychology Today had an interesting article called “The Appeal of the Bad Boy.” This is the part I found interesting:

From a Darwinian point of view, females are the choosier sex, and males compete for their attention. The result of this competition is that men have evolved strategies such as seeking alpha status.

The more likely a relationship is to be fleeting, the more likely a woman is to seek a man with high quality genes. Evolutionary psychologists define “good genes” for men as high-testosterone-fueled masculinity, symmetry, height, and, believe it or not, parasite resistance. Men who are blessed with these qualities tend to be confident and dominant. And able to get away with roguish behavior.

It’s not all a positive for them, since they are also more prone to taking risks and getting into fights and accidents. Still, they offer a primal appeal that would have been advantageous in the ancestral setting—fighting skills, passion, lust for the damsel.

“Women intuitively get attracted to brave acts of altruism more than to altruism per se,” says Daniel Kruger of the University of Michigan, principal author of a study on “dads and cads.” “A distinction between long-term and short-term relationships is important for understanding women’s partner choices.” A love of boldness helps women find strong males as mates. Secretly they harbor the fantasy of turning their genetically gifted cads into loving dads who stick around long-term, long enough to help raise the kids. Think Warren Beatty and Keith Richards; fairy tales sometimes come true.

But wait; don’t all women want a kind, understanding guy? Of course; it’s just that nice isn’t a high-caliber turn-on in the short term, unlike bravado. Says Kruger, “Women want their emotions activated.” And audacity grabs attention, even if only in the service of marshaling good genes.

A clue to female psychology emerges in a study examining the cheesy best sellers that set millions of women on a Harlequin high. The male protagonists are invariably studs on steeds who morph into devoted dads by novel’s end. That is, the women get the best of both worlds.

When women want it all—great genes, and a reliable breadwinner—the odds of finding satisfaction grow slim. It’s human nature to want it all; what man doesn’t want a gorgeous young woman who is equally devoted to having sex and washing his car? But it’s a slightly elusive proposition, because in reality we have forced choices.

Trade-offs are the stuff of economics, evolution, and, of course, sex. We rarely get it all, or if we do, it won’t be for long. That’s not so bad, since romantic goals and appreciation evolve as we age. Women, for example, can cavort with cads at little cost when they’re young, but may later need to tighten up their standards for what constitutes a good relationship when they feel the urge to raise a family.

The part that was most interesting to me was that altruism didn’t do much for women on its own unless accompanied by brave or bold actions that excited their emotions. It makes sense but I never thought about it much before.

And of course, there is the opposite of the bad boy, the infamous “Nice Guy,” not to be confused with the genuinely nice guy. Heartless Bitches International (HBI) have done a great series discussing why many women don’t like “nice guys.” Although they screw it up occasionally when switching into a riotgrrl feminist stance, they do hit the target a lot.

First comes from HBI the parable for “Nice Guys” entitled “The Man With No Spine.” HBI also has “10 Reasons Women Date Jerks Instead of Nice Guys.”

Psychology Today had another article called “Nation of Wimps” that I think everyone should read. It’s by Hara Estroff Marano, who later expanded it into a book A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting She also has a blog discussing how overparenting is making the next generation of kids into wimps. One part that really jumped out at me from the Psychology Today article:

Just Whose Shark Tank Is It Anyway?

The stressful world of cutthroat competition that parents see their kids facing may not even exist. Or it exists, but more in their mind than in reality—not quite a fiction, more like a distorting mirror. “Parents perceive the world as a terribly competitive place,” observes Anderegg. “And many of them project that onto their children when they’re the ones who live or work in a competitive environment. They then imagine that their children must be swimming in a big shark tank, too.”

“It’s hard to know what the world is going to look like 10 years from now,” says Elkind. “How best do you prepare kids for that? Parents think that earlier is better. That’s a natural intuition, but it happens to be wrong.”

It gave me pause because I suspect it’s the exact type of parenting I would be guilty whenever I have kids.

There was an article in Daily Mail over three years ago called “How Feminism Destroyed Real Men.” It was notable not only for its astute insights and acidic barbs, but for the controversy-generating curveball ending of the piece, which was a pretty damn ballsy way to end the thing.

Some of the insights that stood out to me:

At a dinner party recently, I encountered the depressingly familiar sight of a dynamic thirty- something woman accompanied by a nerdy male sidekick that she’d browbeaten into proposing to her.

I felt instant recognition when reading this line. In white yuppie and bourgieous bohemian gentrifying Brooklyn I have seen an insane number of these couples, with many of the men emasculated to the point of seeming gay. I was even having a discussion with some friends about how often we met a couple we thought was a single woman and her fag hag only to find it was her fiance or her husband. We wondered if on average these men attracted the women because they were already emasculated or if they were emasculated from being with the women.

Now, over a decade later, women are waking up to the fact that these [post-feminism] men are drippy, sexless bores. The feminisation of men hasn’t produced the well-rounded uber-males women were hoping for.

Instead, women are now lumped with flabby invertebrates, little more than doormats, whom they secretly despise but are too proud to admit it.

This is a key point. Many of these women who bought into radical feminism wholeheartedly can’t bear to admit they hate the feminized Frankenstein monster they created, so they still pay positive lip service to the phenomenon. This in turn encourages more men to remain that way, which leads to more enmity from the women who hate them but can’t admit it out of feminist pride.

These women consider themselves to be alpha-females, but they are nothing but a pathetic sham.

A true Amazon couldn’t stand the company of a supplicant male, let alone marry one. Real alpha-women are the ones who can more than hold their own with an alpha-man.

Deep down, women love men who stand up to them, who won’t be pushed around. They love men who will look them in the eye and tell them to shut up when their hormonal bickering has become too much.

Exhibit A:

Long ago, I realised it is unhealthy for a man to embroil himself in arguments with women.

While men want an argument to make sense and have a rational conclusion, women solely want the argument itself: it’s a pressure valve for their emotions, and once they get started there is no stopping them.

This is just good advice I tell people all the time and deserves to be highlighted. As the article proceeds it gets bolder and more controversial.

Like I said earlier, the type of browbeated emo man it was describing above was very recognizable to me, as someone living in Brooklyn. And I don’t think any subculture celebrates this type of guy as much as the hipsters here do. And here is a great piece called “Meet the Whimpster: The Manipulative Asshole in Sensitive Clothing” that does a great job of describing and calling them out. This one is so good I can’t even isolate one part to quote. It’s all golden.

And finally, a Salon article interviewing Susan Squire, author of the book I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage.

She talks about the role Martin Luther played in our modern image of marriage:

By the time Luther came around in the early 16th century there was a lot of hatred of the church — [its] greed and [its] antisexual notions. Even popes were famous for having out-of-wedlock children and millions of mistresses.

Luther came out of a monastery saying that celibacy was a depraved state and that marriage was a holy state. He said this even while he was still a monk and still celibate. God wanted marriage, because God said “be fruitful and multiply.” He was going back to the original Genesis stipulation.

He also said that marriage should not be primarily about reproduction or property, that its highest value was emotional comfort, affection, companionship, not necessarily passion.

Luther popularized this idea that middle-aged men should not marry teenagers, that there had to be some compatibility in age and background, and that the people who were getting married should not be forced into marriage by their parents. This brought up this idea of choice in marriage. Marriages were arranged for many, many, many centuries up and down the classes, because young people were not considered capable of making such a huge choice that was going to impact on generations.

Luther said the bride and groom should have some say in who they’re marrying — at least they should have the power to say “no” to a match — and that they should be compatible, and that they should work on developing affection, and realizing his concept of married love.

But he went along with all the centuries of thinking that men were superior to women, and that men ruled the family and ruled their wives. Nobody in society up to that point, men or women, could really visualize anything but a hierarchy in marriage. That would have to wait until the democratic revolution.

Luther said that couples should be compatible and be friends and have affection for each other, but he didn’t take in the fact that you can’t really look to an inferior as a great companion. Society embraced the idea of love in marriage before people were able to come around to this idea that women and men should be partners, that women’s brains were no less competent than men’s brains. This is an attitude change that’s very recent.

She also adds about love and marriage:

We should know going into it that the nature of love and sex changes from what it begins as, and that a great love affair doesn’t necessarily make a great marriage. It might, but you have to look for other things, too.

So much emphasis, certainly in movies and pop culture, is placed on falling in love and getting married. But then everyone kind of shuts up and doesn’t really look at what happens during married life, and how married love is very different from the premarital love that got you to the altar.

We could learn a lot about what is in the nature of marriage and separate that from what our personal problems might be. We could probably have fewer divorces if people realized that some of the problems have to do with the nature of married life. It’s the only relationship that is both domestic and sexual. It’s very hard when you’re living day in and day out with one person. That’s the antithesis of passionate sex. Passion withers in a daily routine. It just does. It doesn’t mean that you don’t desire each other. It doesn’t mean that marriage isn’t hugely rewarding.

The life span has more than doubled since 1900. We’re talking about marriages that at best lasted 18 years before someone died. Now you’re looking at 50 years of marriage to one person. That’s a great thing and a terrible thing, because there are going to be bad times.

And finally, if you liked the Madonna/Whore Series, check out these two posts by Alpha Dominance, “Question For the Ladies: Why do you raise your son to be a ‘Nice Guy’” and “Could Humans Become Parthogenetic? Why Culture Needs Men.”

Laterz.

I’ll be there five days. Anyone ever been there? If so, please share your experiences. Am going to try to know out on

Also, I have a Twitter account, I used it for a little bit last year and couldn’t quite see the point and lost interest. Plus I had phone updates and my phone was always blowing up with texts. I’m going to try again and see if I like it any better this time around. All those trendspotting magazines always try to call it the next form of blogging or miniblogging or the thing that’s going to make real blogging obsolete…maybe I’m just following the wrong people but it always just seems like a bunch of blast text messages from bored people.

Anyway, it’s http://twitter.com/ricky_raw. I’m prepared to give it another shot.