Young narcissists

Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.

This quote has been popping into my head the last few days. Not the exact words as I don't have the book, or even parts of it, memorized. I kept thinking of it because I keep reading arguments that sound like it. Obama's arguments in favour of gun control, for example.

Let me be clear: there are good arguments in favour of some gun control. (I live in Canada where we have quite a bit of gun control and, while I think we might have a tad too much in some cases, I like it this way.) This is not about taking sides in that debate; it's about the quality of the arguments being marshaled in that debate. And, I'm sorry if this offends anyone, but the President's arguments were really, really stupid and, quite frankly, childlike in a bad way.

Like Holden Caulfield above, he seems more concerned with the the feeling of doing good than actually doing good. And it's not just him. Every time I talk to kids in university these days about what they want to do with their lives, I hear a whole lot about how they want to feel about themselves and the work they expect to do, the job they, in fact feel entitled to, but nothing about other people who are actually out there and what they might need.

Caulfield is an extreme example. There is no field of rye on the edge of a cliff with thousands of kids running around in it. Kids don't need to play in fields of rye because actual adults (and you'll notice that Caulfield has conveniently fantasized these away) have built playgrounds for them to play in that aren't on the edges of a cliffs.

Playing in the rye (or the corn as we used to do when I was a kid) makes perfect sense. Kids who were privileged enough to grow up in the country love doing that. You don't have to walk far into a field of grain of any sort before you disappear. Even better, you walk into a tiny, enclosed world where everything else disappears. Which is the whole appeal.

I mention all that because it's important to grasp that Caulfield's fantasy doesn't take into account what actual kids find appealing  about a field of tall grass, grain or corn. Other people don't matter to him. The only thing that matters to him is that he deserves some role that will give him the feeling of doing good.

A friend of mine used to say that there are some books that teens love reading that are immensely compelling until they get insane. The Bell Jar was her favourite example. At some point in the book, you should realize that Plath was clinically depressed and stop taking her seriously.

The goes in spades for The Catcher in the Rye (for pretty much anything Salinger wrote actually). At some point it should sink in that Caulfield is a narcissist and that he, and not the world around him, is the problem. It seems to me that we have spent the last few decades training kids to do exactly the opposite. To try and become Caulfield rather than reject him. And now one of them is the president.

Some gems from the last psychiatrist

He writes even longer than me. And, also like me, he has a tendency to circle an issue rather than going straight at it. And, man, is he good.

Here are some great bits from his latest:

The fraud women now believe is that it is wrong to look good for men only, as an end in itself; the progressive delusion is that looking good for men is synonymous with submissiveness, so while you're allowed to look good to men, it should always be secondary to looking good for yourself. This is madness. You are enhancing your outward appearance, which is great, but then you pretend it's for internal reasons?

And

"Ugh, women are not objects." Then why are you painting them? I'm not saying you have to look good for men, I'm saying that if wearing makeup not for men makes you feel better about yourself, you don't have a strong self, and no, yelling won't change this. Everyone knows you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, now you're saying the cover of the book influences how the book feels about itself?

Feminism has left women in a really weird place. Maybe that's okay. In the long run. But that is what it has done.

Finally, a point I have often made here:

The trick to the makeup debate is that it pretends to want to be free of male pressure, yet the pressure to look a certain way is actually much worse from women.

And he's just warming up. It keeps getting better after that. Read the whole thing.

Another image: What are they selling?

Rather than build up to the answer, I'm going to answer the question right off the top: they are selling hatred.

This graphic is ostensibly intended to prove that false accusations in rape are rare. There are two kinds of problems with it. The first is that the statistics it is based on are dubious at best and crassly manipulated at worst. I'm not sure it's worth it to get into the Alice-in-Wonderland world of rape statistics. Suffice to note that the largest group on the infographic is supposed to represent unreported rapes and that category is very difficult to quantify and anyone who claims to be able to do it with accuracy, as the Enliven Project does here, is lying, delusional or (most likely) a bit of both.

But even if we take the graphic at face value and assume it's based on sound statistics, it's still a great steaming pile of it. What's worse, it's a great steaming pile with a clear anti-man bias.

First of all, we might ask ourselves why the two little dudes labelled "Falsely Accused" are part of a graphic labelled "Rapists" in the first place. If they are falsely accused, then they aren't rapists. And notice that all the guys labelled "Reported" and "Faced Trial" are also labelled "Rapists". The presumption of guilt here is staggering.

Another huge problem with the graphic has been acknowledged even by Amanda Marcotte and that is that rapists generally have more than one victim. She cites figures that suggest that the average rapist has six victims. She further argues that the best statistics suggest that 54 percent of rapes go unreported as opposed to the 90 percent figure this graphic assumes. Doing a little rough math* that means that the 898 cases "unreported rape" implied by the graph should be only 117 rapes. If Marcotte's other figure suggesting that the average rapist has six victims, then that number of figures should be reduced to twenty rapists.

We can count all the guys who faced trial as singles for obvious reasons but the reported-but-not-tried category gets trickier. We couldn't honestly say that roughly one rapist is responsible for each six of those reported cases for the simple reason that being reported should sharply increase his chances of getting caught. Suffice to say, however, that the ratio of false accusations to actual rapists is higher than the graphic suggests.

Marcotte suggests that the graphic could be  made "clearer by just labeling the little dudes "rapes" instead of "rapists." Well, only if we reduced the total number of rapes to 219 from the current 1000 to begin with! And it would be even clearer than that if we gave all the stick figures skirts so all the little dudes were actually dudettes because what is actually being claimed here is the number of victims. Further, the two figures in the bottom right don't represent falsely accused rapists (a category that cannot have any members by definition) or rape victims but represent rather women who falsely accused men of having raped them.

Marcotte also suggests that the figures labeleld "Falsely Accused" would be more accurately be labelled "False Reports". I don't buy her argument but even if we did we would then have to throw out the unreported rapes altogether because false reports can only be meaningfully analyzed as part of the total number of reported rapes. This move, as virtually every aspect of the infographic above is a matter of comparing apples to oranges and claiming to produce meaningful data.

And we'd have to expand that for the apples versus oranges problem continues throughout. Notice that there are also a number of male figures labeled "Rapists" who only "Faced Trial". And you'll also notice that the graphic labels those who get convicted as "Jailed". Why not say "Convicted"? Well, because doing that would force them to acknowledge that vast majority of the "Faced Trial" were acquitted. Now given the burden of proof in the criminal courts system it is no doubt true that some of them were simply not proven but it is a certainty that others were simply innocent.

And that is also true of the larger category of "Reported Rapes". Some of these have to have been guys who were innocent and either falsely or mistakenly accused.

Now I appreciate that some are already saying, as I have already acknowledged, that rape is very hard to prove. But that knife cuts both ways. It is also very hard to prove a false report or false accusation. In both cases, there are certainly more of both than come to light. How many? Anyone who tells you they know is a liar.

The graphic isn't false because something being false requires it to make sense in order that it can be tested in the first place. Nonsense cannot be tested so it cannot even be wrong and that is the case here. But even nonsense tells you something about the people who created it and what it tells you is that they have it in for men.

Progressives and liberals desperately want to believe that crime is a social problem. In order to do this, they have to deny the blatant truth that virtually all crime is the work of a small minority called criminals. When that strategy is combined with feminist analysis of rapes, you get a tendency to blame all men for what is actually a tiny subset of men and, thus, you get the kind of nonsense presented as an information in the graphic above.

One question we might ask ourselves is, what do we know about the guys who are convicted of rape? They are, after all, the only guys in the big picture who we can say with certainty that they actually are rapists. If you really wanted hard, reliable data on rape, you'd focus on them. If I have counted the number of rows and columns correctly the total graphic represents 1000 claims of rape, many of which are dubious, only eight ten can certainly be said to be rapists. What are those eight ten guys like? I ask because if the answer is, "Very different from most men" then the approach most "rape activists" take to the problem is a complete waste of time and at least partly driven by a bias against men in general.


* Please note that all the math here is "rough" which is to say not intended to prove anything beyond following the logic behind the graph to its own absurd conclusions.

Relativism is an idol

I took part in a discussion tonight in which a very earnest young person spoke against relativism, speaking with more emotion than logic.

And then she was asked what "relativism" means and she began her answer by saying, "To me, it means ...."

If you put that into a movie or a novel you'd be accused of being heavy-handed and obvious.

On the way home the Lemon Girl said it was a sign of how pervasive relativism has become. People live it, even the people who think they are most fervently against it. But it's all just a giant time waster. It's the thing people do instead of thinking when they are asked moral questions; "Well, to me it means that ...".

Nowadays, mostly because of the power of Hollywood, the word idol has come to mean things that have power over us. In horror movies, for example, the mask, the statue, or the ancient curse is real and has real power. This notion would have struck the psalmist or Saint Paul as bizarre. For them, the problem with idols was that they were nothing at all.

The danger that went with idolatry then was that you'd waste your entire life on a nothing. And that is the real danger with relativism. The fear is not that you're going to accidentally convince yourself or others that rape, murder or cannibalism are okay. The chances of that are almost non-existent.

No, the danger of relativism is that you will spend your entire moral life doing nothing at all while under the impression that you are doing something.

A little light culture: Out of the nice guy trap Pt 1

I see that nice guys are in trouble again. There was a Tumblr set up to mock guys who used a dating service called OKCupid and whose profiles featured bitter statements about the women who weren't putting out for them because they were "nice guys". Lots of fun was had mocking them and, even better, getting all self-righteous about hating them.

And it's easy to mock. The guys being mocked are driven by a sense of entitlement. They have been nice to girls and, instead of getting sex, they are being relegated to "the friend zone". In the bitterness that follows, they suggest that women only want sex with bad guys.

So there was much mockery.

Hey, I have an idea, why don't we match up all these bitter nice guys in their twenties with all those still attractive women in their late thirties and forties who can't get a date? Heh, heh, heh.

Well, no, you're not supposed to mock deluded women. Only deluded men are fair game.

The Friend Zone is a bullshit, misogynistic, make-believe land Nice Guys have come up with to demonize women for not wanting to date them. They use it as an excuse to ignore the fact that there are Actual Reasons behind their decision to not pursue a relationship or have sex with this guy.

That's a very good point, but the exact same thing could be said of the woman who wrote the next bit I cite. She too can't see that there are "Actual Reasons", and good reasons at that, why no one wants to date her.

Because when I look around at my girlfriends - bright, attractive,successful, fabulous women in their 40s who are single - I sincerely begin to wonder: Is there even one solvent, kind, desirable,heterosexual single man in his 40s left in Britain? 

My friends and I have a horrible suspicion that the answer is no.

The answer is "no" because desirable, heterosexual men tend to get married in their thirties.

I don't think it's a coincidence that attitudes of the women who can't find love exactly mirror the attitudes of the men who can't. The men claim that women just want to be friends with the nice guys while giving sex to bad guys. The women claim that the guys who are available to them are either just players who only want sex or determined partner-hunters who only want the best choice available to be the mother of their children.

Here's a wacky thought. Imagine there was a social revolution, let's call it "the sexual revolution", wherein we attempted to throw all the conventions about sex out the window so that everyone could now have sex based solely on whatever any two (or more) consenting adults could agree upon. One of the first things you would expect to follow from this would be that lots of people, probably most people, would take a time out from pursuing more permanent relationships to see how much fun they could get out of this. Love and marriage wouldn't disappear but people would think, I'll see how much fun sex I can get first; I'll experiment and do all the stuff I want to do.

What harm could come from that?

Well, you can decide for yourself what does or doesn't count as "harm", but it is pretty easy to predict one set of consequences. First of all, the age that people will get married at will rise. In the mean time, women are going to be interested in having sex with the highest status men available to them and high status males are going to return the favour by eating up the easy sex they offer them like honey. But that isn't going to be an equal match up. High status men are going to discover they can have lots of partners available and they are going to be more interested in multiple partners than women are. And men, being interested in multiple partners, are going to be less exacting about how high status the partners they seek are—they'll want some high status partners, particularly as regular dates, but they'll cheerfully settle for much lower status partners in between or even coinciding with their higher status partners. Meanwhile, because the marriage age is older and high status men can always find partners from a younger age group if their current partner disappoints them (while most women don't have this option), a lot of women are going to run out of time in which to find a partner while their status is still relatively high. All of which is to say, you very quickly are going to get exactly the world that all those "nice" guys and all those "bright, attractive,successful, fabulous women in their 40s who are single " complain about.

Put up your hand if you've never known women in their twenties who have had sex with guys who obviously have lots of other partners and equally don't have the slightest intention of being in a relationship with them simply because that guy is really attractive to them?

The losers in this situation are going to be men who don't have enough status to get sex and women who have just enough status to get sex from higher status men and spend their time pursuing those relationships until they lose their status end up single and unwanted. And that, not surprisingly, is exactly the groups the people complaining bitterly come from.

And maybe that's just fine. Life is under no obligations to be fair and if you think it is you might want to consider the next severely handicapped person you see and ask yourself what his or her love life is like. Some people just get crapped on in life and maybe you're one of them.


I know, that's not very kind of me. But how could a culture based on everyone freely pursuing the kind of sex life they think of as best for them be any different?

Voice lessons

That is what I was doing today. It's something I have been meaning to do for a while now; one of those things on the bucket list. It's also one of those things that tests your confidence. That's why no posts today (aside from this one). Too much nervousness.

Elizabeth Wurtzel's latest piece about herself is actually shockingly well written

I know, I know. I understand the anger. Go ahead and call New York magazine and tell them you have written five thousand words about yourself and see if they publish it. Wurtzel not only got published, they spent big money to have a photographer take a picture that uses all the resources available to the art to make Wurtzel look more like she used to than she does now.

The key point in the article is when she suddenly starts talking about how her parents weren't rich. That's the thing about Wurtzel; she is part of an elite but she doesn't like to think of herself as part of an elite. She likes to think she earned her place in life.

Then she goes on to talk about how that elite life is about to disappear and how it's a sad thing that the rest of the world isn't subsidizing it anymore. That's important because New York magazine did publish her article and they did so for a reason.

But let's go at this from another angle because you know Elizabeth Wurtzel. I am going to be crude here. She had, and you can still see traces of it in her latest photo, what my friend Alison once called "a blowjob face". She once said of an ex-girlfriend of mine, "Guys will put up with endless bullshit from her because you love to picture that face looking up at you when she's giving you a blowjob."

That's the thing about Wurtzel that no one wants to say out loud. Wurtzel is a talented writer but she gets rated higher than she deserves because of her looks. (Wurtzel mentions that Harvard has published a circular in which she is the only female famous alumnus mentioned under the heading of "literature". Think about that. Harvard put her, and no other woman, in the same category as " T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, William S. Burroughs, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Norman Mailer, John Updike, George Plimpton, David Halberstam, and Henry David Thoreau".)

As I say, you know her. You've met the woman who cruises through life getting jobs and good marks easily because she has sexual power. She isn't hot enough to be a model or a actress but, unlike them, she is right there in the room with you. And that matters to everyone, even other women. No matter what she does, the men and women around her continue to have hope in her. We want her to succeed.

As a consequence, women like Wurtzel are always forgiven for what they do and never have to forgive anyone else. Notice the contrast between the self-righteousness in these lines,

I am committed to feminism and don’t understand why anyone would agree to be party to a relationship that is not absolutely equal. I believe women who are supported by men are prostitutes, that is that, and I am heartbroken to live through a time where Wall Street money means these women are not treated with due disdain.

Then contrast that with the incredible self-forgiveness a paragraph later,

For a while after my first book came out, I went home with a different man every night and did heroin every day—which showed my good sense, because the rest of the time I was completely out of control.

The arc of a life like hers is not hard to predict. In a Jane Austen novel it would work out just as you would guess. Nowadays, the critical view is that we have shaken off the shackles of the classic English novel. Nowadays, we write stories that are grimmer but, we like to insist, freer because they acknowledge the randomness of life.

And yet, life has a disturbing tendency to play out like an Austen novel.

It had all gone wrong. At long last, I had found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City, because at 44 my life was not so different from the way it was at 24. Stubbornly and proudly, emphatically and pathetically, I had refused to grow up, and so I was becoming one of those people who refuses to grow up—one of the city’s Lost Boys. I was still subletting in Greenwich Village, instead of owning in Brooklyn Heights. I had loved everything about Yale Law School—especially the part where I graduated at 40—but I spent my life savings on an abiding interest, which is a lot to invest in curiosity. By never marrying, I ended up never divorcing, but I also failed to accumulate that brocade of civility and padlock of security—kids you do or don’t want, Tiffany silver you never use—that makes life complete. Convention serves a purpose: It gives life meaning, and without it, one is in a constant existential crisis.

It isn't hard to imagine Mary Crawford saying something like that if we were to track her down twenty years after the events described in Mansfield Park.

Wurtzel wrote this piece because of her desperate need for attention as opposed to any desperate need for money; which is to say that neither Crawford's life nor Wurtzel's is likely to be tragic. Their lives just won't be as good as they once seemed. All that rich promise their lives seemed to have, for others as well as themselves, when they were young and still had sexual power is now gone and it all gets kind of sad from here on in.

One temptation is to read the practical issues as moral ones. One reason to hate Wurtzel is because you believe she is finally getting the comeuppance that she has long deserved. (Or, for feminists, because the defiant role model they once loved is now an embarrassment.) This is misguided because life works out the way it does and morality will not ensure practical success. The thing about both Elizabeth Wurtzel and Mary Crawford is that they are both aware of and savvy about the practical consequences of their actions in a way that Lydia Bennet or Sid Vicious, for example, are not.

Wurtzel and Crawford defy convention not because they hate it but because they see themselves as above it. It's not so much that they don't see that the practical consequences of life will apply to them but that they feel that they should not.

Even now, I am always in love—or else I am getting over the last person or getting started with the next one. But I worry about growing old this way.

Well, now she worries.