A couple of things about Beyonce

I mentioned Beyonce a couple of times last Friday and there are a couple of things about her I'd like to note. The following is one of her most highly praised offerings but somehow I don't think you'll be thanking me for exposing you to it. The good news is that you don't have to listen to it all the way through to understand it as it repeats the same thing over and over again.



When I say repeats, I mean it repeats the same pattern with no variation and it wasn't that interesting a pattern to begin with. But critics loved it and so did the audience. Critics particularly praised the theme of "female empowerment". How exactly that works, as the song expresses values so retrograde Doris Day would have been ashamed to sing it, I don't know.

But girls and young women liked it and that is the really important thing to remember with songs like this; the audience and the market for music like this is overwhelmingly young females.

So the first thing to note is that for young women we are in a world that has not changed much since Doris Day and Rock Hudson made Pillow Talk. "Single Ladies" is a lot less sophisticated than Pillow Talk mind you but morally it is in the same groove. Doris Day says, if you want my hot body you have to marry me. Beyonce says, if you want exclusive access to my hot body you have to marry me. (And both ultimately tell women that their primary worth as women is to have a hot body, a point I'll get back to.)

The second thing to note is the heavily homoerotic aspect of it. A video whose primary audience is young women consists of three hot young women dancing around like strippers. And it's not just Beyonce. Look at just about most videos by female artists with a female audience and you'll notice a strong homoerotic aspect to it.

We don't typically notice this sort of thing because it is so common. For decades, women's magazines have consisted mostly of erotic photographs of women. And if you hook women up to a device called a plethysmograph that measures sexual response, you'll find that female fans actually respond to videos like the above by getting sexually aroused.

Women pick stars in a way that is not unlike how they pick friends. In any friendship between two women each has picked the other because she has something they do not. And one of the most significant qualities sought in in these mimetic friendships is eroticism. If a woman is highly affected by Beyonce she is responding to the particular kind of eroticism Beyonce puts out. And, pardon me if I'm blunt, it's not an eroticism that relies a heck of a lot on the quality of the expression coming out of her mouth. Quite the opposite: it says please don't pay to much attention to what I actually say or even how I say it.

Beyonce actually has a pretty good voice but her body and the shape she keeps it in is what really matters; her songs are primarily intended to show off that body rather than to express anything in particular. It's not just physical for Beyonce also touts her ability to have strong feelings but neither the intellectual content of what she is saying nor the quality of the delivery matters much. For her female fans. the proof that Beyonce really feels strongly is all in her body and how she moves it.

You might ask, "What does Beyonce know about love?" And that is a perfectly reasonable question as because even a casual survey of her life shows that she isn't actually much good at it. She doesn't seem to actually be able to pick a good partner and make a commitment to them which is the only real test of someone's ability to love. (Update: I got some pushback about this in the comments and I've come to regret this paragraph a bit. I still don't think that the Beyonce-Jay Z union, or just about any celebrity marriage, is a good example of what marriage ought to be but I can say I hope they prove me wrong about this.)

You might also wonder whether this sort of eroticism is even much good for attracting men. Beyonce fans really are overwhelmingly women. On the basis of her male fans alone, she would not be a star. Women consistently pick erotic ideals that are very different from what men pick. For example, and this is telling, the female models that succeed in markets aimed at women tend to be significantly thinner than the female models who succeed markets aimed at men.

I'm not saying men's judgment of what is desirable in a woman is superior. Quite the contrary, most men would probably pick someone like Serena van der Woodsen and she is hardly an improvement over Beyonce. But if the only thing that mattered to a woman was picking a role model that would make her attractive to men, Serena van der Woodsen is the model you want (and I'll explain why next Friday).

But that is to miss the point. Beyonce's legions of female fans are interested in something she does have and there is an important sense in which they can't wrong about that something. You may think that something shouldn't matter but it doesn't matter what you think for it does matter to women and it matters a whole, whole lot. And that is not going to change.

Womanly virtues Friday

See if you can guess how this turns out
A young woman tried an experiment:

Carolyn Owlett pulled her hair back into a ponytail, threw on a frumpy skirt, and walked around London asking if she could have everything for free, from a bus ride to a piece of cake. Most people looked at her like she was crazy. Then she curled her hair into shiny ringlets, put on makeup, a tight dress, and high heels, and did the same thing.

So any guesses about her results?  Congratulations, you guessed right: people gave her free stuff the second time.

But what is the hypothesis here? At the link above we see one possibility: for in this question there is an implied hypothesis:

Have you witnessed the ways society rewards conventionally beautiful women or experienced them firsthand?

But that implied hypothesis is false. To test that one you'd have to get two separate women—one conventionally beautiful and one not—and dress them in similar if not identical ways and see how people respond. This experiment was conducted with the same woman dressed differently.

In fact, the conclusion that the woman who did the experiment draws is so ludicrously wrong that no one could possibly believe this unless they were willfully missing the point, which is exactly what is going on.

What the experiment proves is that any woman who takes the trouble to present herself as a sexual being will be treated better by men than the woman who does not. She doesn't have to offer actual sex to anyone, she just has to be a clearly sexual being.

To go back to the link above, I'd like to consider this conclusion for a moment:

The results of her one-woman experiment are depressing, but also fascinating to watch.

Depressing? Really? To believe that these results are depressing, you'd have to believe that things should not be this way. What would you believe to the contrary? Well, you'd have to believe that women should be loved just for being what they are. If you watch the video at the length all the way to the end, you'll see that that is what Carolyn Owlett clearly does believe.

The experiment tells us something just about anybody could have guessed: if you put a little effort into your self presentation people will treat you differently. I can vouch for that: any time I put my best charcoal-grey suit men are more respectful (although sometimes intimidated) and women, especially young women, are more attentive.

What is new is that women like Carolyn Owlett and the blogger I link to above find this depressing. They believe they should be loved regardless of presentation. "Love me for who I am," they say and even suggest that there is something terribly unfair about the notion that we might expect others to make some effort with their self presentation.

Other people will treat you better if you make an effort with your appearance. That is what Carolyn Owlett has proved. For some reason she thinks that is terribly unfair.

I got spammed in the comments

Only for the second time so I can't complain too much. I deleted the original but here is what the spammer wrote:

Business analysts who review the business plan funding account does not actually read all of the business plan.

I know, why delete it just to paste it in one of my own posts? Because the actual text is pretty harmless. It doesn't make any sense.

What I liked though was that the spammer has set up a bogus account at Blogger and that bogus account has a user profile. Here it is:

About Me
Ever stop to think and forget to start again......?

That's it. That is the whole profile. But is brilliant in its way. It's not about him (it couldn't be about him because he doesn't exist being just  a front to send out spam). The profile is about you because it gets you thinking about yourself. I may have to use this as a future uncool quote of the month.

Update: Apparently A.A. Milne said this first and that rings true. It's vapid enough to be Milne. But it's not the source of the quote but the intent that makes it brilliant. His profile is really about the person reading it and that makes it inherently fascinating.

Manly Thor's Day Special

There is a news story out there ...
That I am not going to link to.  The story about how a man in his thirties may or may not have done something really stupid to attract the interest of a much-younger woman he should not have been interested in. Okay, if you are reading this today, you can probably guess which story I am not linking to.

But here is the thing, if someone were to search up this post ten years from now and didn't notice the date they might well think  it about some then-current story. Because the truth is that there is almost always a story like this.

Leaving aside currently unproven stories, why does this keep happening?

Part of it is the way we see young women. Or, more accurately, the way we refuse to see young women. It takes two people to get into an inappropriate relationship. And when a young woman gets into an inappropriate relationship with an older man, most of the real power is usually on her side, not least of all because she knows that she will be presumed innocent in ways that he won't. And power gets abused because that is one of the few things you can actually do with power.

But that really shouldn't make any difference if you are a man. The drug dealer on the corner also initiates the contact but you know better than to go anywhere with that one.

And, regardless of what women do or don't do, there are all sorts of men who mistake casual flirting from women as invitations for more. I had a friend back in university who was firmly convinced that every waitress who ever served us was coming on to him. He was otherwise an okay guy for a casual university friend but that one trait was really irritating.

The point here is that you really don't want to be that guy. And if you are that sort of guy, the problem starts with you.

It starts with a certain set of attitudes towards sex. The first attitude you don't want to have is the belief that an opportunity to have sex is a terrible thing to waste. And you'll meet guys who think that way all the time.

I've been that guy myself now and then. If you give just about any guy the opportunity he will tell you about the missed signal and the woman who told him, years after the fact, that she was his for the taking. But so what? Did you really need to have sex with every woman you might have had sex with?

The fact that we are even inclined to ask the question tells us how easy it is to get going down the road. But you can clear it up, put the question in the mouth of your wife or girlfriend or, if you aren't currently attached, imagine how some future partner might react to the issue. Would you expect the woman in your life to be happy knowing that your attitude before you met her was to never let an opportunity for sex to go to waste? Would you be happy to learn that had been her attitude?

For, really, the guy who keeps getting into trouble, like guy in the news story I'm not linking to, is the guy who always thinks in terms of sexual possibilities.

And I say this as a guy who is pretty tolerant on the purity front. That someone might slip up strikes me as understandable and forgivable. But there is no good reason to even begin to think of a woman other than the one you are in a relationship with as a possible sexual partner. Even entertaining the thought in a casual, purely hypothetical, way is going too far.

Of course you will at least once in your life. And then you have to stop yourself. 

Why we don't like talking about needs

The thing about needs is that they are needs. If I deny your wants, you may get angry about it but you'll survive. If I deny your needs it will make you sick and ultimately may kill you. You only want the things you want you actually need the things you need.

Sex advice columnists may sincerely believe that they are doing women a favour when they tell them to tell their partners about their needs but they are doing anything but. A human being's sexual needs, insofar as we have any, are actually things that make us vulnerable to others. Heck, even our wants, especially our strong wants, make us vulnerable to others. And this is something women have no trouble figuring out without anyone telling them.

What we don't want to learn from pick up artists

If you've ever gone fishing with guys, you will know that a fishing trip satisfies two distinct sets of desires.

• Most obviously, it satisfies the desire to actually go fishing.
• Less obviously, it satisfies a desire men have to be recognized as a competent fisherman by other men.

And the second desire is often much stronger than the first. Pick not just fishing but any sport you like and you will find a significant subset of men in it are motivated more by the desire to successfully demonstrate competency in front of other men than by any love for the sport itself.

And oftentimes, they can and will fulfill this desire by simply talking about it with other men rather than actually doing the sport.

The parallel with sex is, I hope, so obvious I don't need to spell it out. The crucial thing is that an awful lot of sex advice is really some guy trying to establish his competency to other men. Any time you read anything (including anything I write) you want to be asking yourself, "Which of the two desires is really being satisfied here?"

It's always worth remember the anecdote about the honest stock analyst who supposedly said, "If I really knew what the market was going to do I'd be using that knowledge to make millions instead of sitting here talking to you."

What we can learn from pick up artists

I don't, as I've said before, think pick up artists are completely crazy. I think that at the centre of the whole PUA culture is one absolutely correct claim and it's worth knowing. And it's a truth that we officially spend a lot of time trying to deny. You might say that it is like the emperor's new clothes.

What they have noticed is that over and over again the supposed experts on human relationships mislead us. It jumped out at me a while ago when I found myself with an extended period to get through with no one to talk to for large sections of the day, no computer and no television. What I did have was a stack of magazines about two feet high. These included magazines for girls and women ranging from CosmoGirl to RedBook and men's magazines ranging from Men's Health to Esquire. And I noticed something interesting about the sex advice columns. Something so interesting that I got out a notebook and pencil and read them all one after another taking notes this time.

Here is the thing I noticed.

• Any time a woman wrote to say she was unhappy with her sex life she was was told, "You have to make sure he understands your needs.
• Any time a man wrote to say he was unhappy with his sex life he was was told, "You have to understand her needs."

On this model, it is the woman's needs that should drive couples' sex lives. That men might have needs isn't even acknowledged. At most we have wants and these wants are relatively unimportant things that can and should be changed as required. If your partner doesn't like what you want, then your want needs to be sacrificed to her needs.

What the  pick up artists have noticed is that in real life it works exactly the other way around. Men have wants and it is these wants (and not anyone's needs) that drive just about everything about human sexuality.

Now you may not want it to be that way. You may feel very strongly that it would be better and fairer if it were otherwise. But it isn't otherwise. And all you have to do to see this is look around. An anthropologist from Mars would figure it out in about two seconds.

Look at the way women dress. The only way we could describe this as satisfying their needs is if we said that women dress the way they do in order to satisfy the feeling of power they get when they successfully provoke a response in boys. That clearly is something that women pursue for whatever reasons but that pursuit is driven by men's wants.

And everything about human sexuality works this way.

Now you may, as I say, wish it were otherwise. You are in good company if you do. An awful lot of the smartest people in our society wish it were otherwise and will often pretend that it is right down to writing sex advice columns as if it were otherwise. But if you really want to meet women, you are much better off presenting yourself as a strong man with strong wants than you are presenting yourself as a sensitive guy who is willing to subjugate his wants in order to respond to a woman's needs.