What brings them in

The software tools that Blogger supplies let me keep track of the search terms that bring people to this blog. That interests me because every day a quite few people come in and read old posts.

Some of this stuff is deeply flattering. Today, as every day, there are several people reading their way through my posts on Saint Agnes' Eve, Brideshead  Revisited, and the various Jane Austen novels.

Some other stuff is strange. As I write this there is someone reading a post I wrote back in October comparing Sir Walter Scott to Count Basie. They got their because they did a search for a proverb that says "every tub must sit on its own bottom", which was a favourite of Basie's. It makes sense that it would happen once.

It's when these things happen again and again that sometimes gets me. There is a post I wrote once saying only that I wouldn't be posting much that day and it gets a five or six page views every week. I have no idea why.

The following word strings have brought hundreds of people to this blog. They all make sense in a weird Googly sort of way.  But it is still weird to think that there is not just one but hundreds of people who type  "Northanger Abbey sex"into a search engine. What do they teach these kids in university these days?

studiously uncool

mad men 666

if personality is a series of unbroken gestures

we're flawed because we want so much more

that's not sexy

gaudete sunday

gaudete sunday 2010

the silent generation

"northanger abbey sex"

we are flawed because


"good girl sex"

Marijuana and psychosis

There is a German study that finds evidence that marijuana use precedes psychosis.

If you haven't been following the science pretty closely, this may come as news to you so a little background. It has long been known that there is a higher incidence of psychosis among marijuana users than among the general population. You probably haven't heard much about it for two reasons.

Womanly virtues Friday

SAHG Rules
 There was a piece that had the feminist bar stools spinning last week about being a stay-at-home girlfriend. This is my second post on it. Short version, a woman lost her job and her boyfriend is paying the bills. She, her name is Quiana Stokes, has started living according to what she herself describes as "stereotypically Stepfordish rules to keep our relationships afloat and ourselves sane". And she has discovered that other women are doing the same thing.

Then she gives a list of her rules. Aside from bikini waxes, the list she gives sounds exactly like what an early 1960s housewife might have done. It is exactly what my mother did in the early 1960s except that she also raised four kids. Others born years after me had the same experience.

Some people are just railing. But even the defenders come off weird. They point out, for example, that the woman who wrote the rules "she doesn’t actually want to do".

I might add she isn't doing anything that a lot of college girls with and without boyfriends do. Because of where I live and work, I'm surrounded by them and if you eavesdrop on their conversations, you'll notice that they talk about doing exactly what Quiana Stokes does. Far from being some kind of throwback to an ugly pre-feminist past, Quiana Stokes represents the future.

But I'm a man writing for men, so what do we men have to learn from this? Well, there is good news.

1. The do it for yourself movement is dead. When 1970s feminism died, there was an awkward period when women collectively discovered that they really do want to wear bras and make up and nice clothes and generally, as Stokes puts it, "keep themselves up". But women's literature of the period sold these things as something a woman did for herself. They had no choice but to go along because women were doing all this stuff anyway but they insisted that you should never do this for a man. No bad idea can sustain itself for too long and this is another example of that.
2. The other thing that women seem to be collectively recognizing is that there are material advantages to being married. I know, I know, the article says stay at home girlfriend but the relationship she describes is a sort of marriage wherein two people are not mature enough to realize they are married, something I wrote about a short while ago. Yes it would be nice if there was some recognition that there is also something sacred about a couple but that too will come with time.

Manly Thor's Day Special

SAHG Rules
There was a piece that had the feminist bar stools spinning last week about being a stay-at-home girlfriend. This is the first of two posts I will do on it. Short version, a woman lost her job and her boyfriend is paying the bills. She, her name is Quiana Stokes, has started living according to what she herself describes as "stereotypically Stepfordish rules to keep our relationships afloat and ourselves sane". And she has discovered that other women are doing the same thing.

I might add she isn't doing anything that a lot of college girls with and without boyfriends do. Because of where I live and work, I'm surrounded by them and if you eavesdrop on their conversations, you'll notice that they talk about doing exactly what Quiana Stokes does. Far from being some kind of throwback to an ugly pre-feminist past, Quiana Stokes represents the future.

But what about men? Because what is really impressive about women like Stokes is that they apply rules to themselves and they do this for the sake of their relationship. And, whether feminists like acknowledging this or not, the vast majority of women will do exactly what Stokes has done at some time in their lives. That is they will sit down and say, "If I really want a man in my life what do I have to do to make myself the kind of woman that a man is likely to want to have in his life?"

You don't see men do their part so much these days. There are books, magazines and blog posts galore about how to get her, how to giver her good sex once you get her and how to tell if she is cheating and so forth. There isn't much about sitting down and evaluating your habits and, yes, your body and dress, and asking yourself, is this what some woman is likely going to want in a man?

One of Stokes' defenders insists that this woman isn't doing anything she doesn't want to do but that isn't quite true. Everything she does is done for the sake of the relationship and that is all about making herself a better person for him. Here's her list with some attempts to convert them into their male equivalents by me.

Don’t sleep in: She gets up with him in the morning rather than sleep in. This a good rule and easily generalized. Are we really in this together? Because if we are I should be getting up for the things that I don't necessarily have to be involved in. And I should do it so easily and naturally that she isn't aware of any special effort I made for her but rather I should ensure she takes it as something she has a right to expect. All Stokes' rules are about recognizing a man's legitimate entitlements and there are lots of those going the other way too.

Keep the place clean:  Nothing to explain here. But we should be honest here that women generally need less pushing here than we men do. And don't just keep it clean according to what feels good enough for us. If we really want to have a woman in our lives we should be aiming for the sort of cleanliness that appeals to women. The really important thing about the kinds of rules we should be setting for ourselves is that they should require living up to the standards of others.

Cook or order dinner every night: Again, self explanatory. In my experience men need less prodding here than women do. Women seem more inclined to care care about what is proper for every day (i.e. keeping the place clean) whereas men seem more inclined to care about what is proper when creating a sense of occasion. But, let's be brutally honest, the women in our lives do more than we can about keeping the place clean so maybe we could work harder at creating sense of occasion and maybe resent it a little less that she doesn't seem as enthusiastic as we are.

Keep yourself up: Let's be honest, no matter how far from perfect a woman may be, women generally are better at this than men are. And, again, keeping yourself up means keeping yourself up in the ways that matter to her.

Pamper him:  To be brutally honest, I think men are better at remembering to pamper women than women are at remembering to pamper men. I'd replace this with pay close attention to her needs so you can guess what they are. And I use the word "guess" advisedly. At the risk of getting tarred and feathered and run out of town, women send mixed and often bluntly contradictory messages about what they want and being a good man means learning women's behaviours.

As long as I'm being incorrect, I also use the word "behaviours" knowingly. What a woman says she wants is never the whole story and sometimes it is often the worst guide to what she really wants and needs.

Sexy Time: This may seem self evident but it isn't. One of the biggest dangers in a relationship or marriage is for her to let sex to become something she does for you. In a sense she does this out of laziness. It's much more effort for her to enjoy herself than it is for her to simply go along with your more persistent and consistent desires. And pretty soon she'll start to resent what is happening.

I've noted before that there is a multi-billion dollar industry designed to helping women indulge themselves sensually. That industry wouldn't exist if women didn't need all that help. She needs to learn how to enjoy herself. That's where you come in.

Not unrelated, there is also a billion dollar porn and semi-porn business (think of The Huffiungton Post if you want to know what semi-porn is). Anyway, it may seem like the easiest thing in the world for a man to learn how to enjoy a woman sexually.  But if that were really true we wouldn't need all that help.

Leave the house: Socialize with other people. Here I would disagree with Stokes a bit. She talks about getting out with other women and it is good for women to get out with other women and, she would presumably say, for men to get out with other men. But I'd argue that both do a lot better if they socialize with mixed groups and even with other members of the opposite sex. Other people keep us sane and not just in the sense that they keep us from going stir crazy. They also keep us thinking about and evaluating the rules that we apply to our relationships.

Life's lessons

The squirrels are mating. Squirrels have a way of doing this that either is or isn't just like humans. You can be the judge.

When a female squirrel is in season, a whole bunch of males start chasing her. The problem is that none of them can mate with her because the other males will prevent them. So the female leads them on a merry chase until all the squirrels except one are too tired to do anything. And so he mates with her. And then she leads the remainder on a chase until the next one gets lucky. And she keeps doing this until she is out of heat, at which point she turns bare-fanged on any remaining males and chases them all away.

Anyway, it's happening all around the house right now. There were five red squirrels—four males, and one female—in our Butternut tree yesterday. The acrobatics were very impressive.

And then there was a harsh life lesson for a crow. Crows are big, tough birds with little reason to fear most other birds. It turns out, however, that it is a very bad idea for a crow to take on a blue jay. Since yesterday at 11:30 AM there is a crow over by the river who now has only one eye who'll tell you all about it. It was not a pretty thing to watch I'll tell you that.

Do you ever get the feeling ...

... that the cool, sophisticated people are actually complete rubes?

I will confess that I had never heard of Melissa Leo until yesterday and, with any luck, I can spend whatever time I have left on this earth without ever hearing about her again. But, like everyone else, I heard about her letting the F-bomb drop into her acceptance speech at the Oscars. And I could not resist clicking on someone's video of the moment.

Here is the thing: that "slip" was planned from the start. It was a deliberate act of self promotion by a woman who, according to what I've read elsewhere, is well practiced at self promotion. There are only two possibilities here: people in the industry are either naive or they are all playing along because they don't care. Either way, that's about all you need to know about these people.

Corporate flunkies

There was quite a bit of chatter online about this chart which makes it looks like the music industry has sudden downturn just these last few years. It seemed to contradict all sorts of narratives. The chart is useless, however, because it doesn't adjust for inflation or population growth. Others have already done the heavy lifting on this so I won't repeat it here.

But I think it is worth noting that one of the things the criticisms of the chart underlines is just how heavily the music industry relied on album sales and particularly on big hit albums.

And that is fascinating because the prime boomer myth is that the rock music of the 1960s and 1970s was a force for non-conformity. And yet the entire music industry of that era was based on getting everyone to buy the same records. And, like so many sheep, everyone did.

And if we look at the actual profit margins on sales, we find that the music industry made much more money on album sales than they did on the sale of singles. Well, again, if you go back and read any history of popular music of that era, you will see the groups who moved from producing singles to trying to induce their fans to buy whole albums portrayed as great rebels against the market. In fact, Bob Dylan, The Doors, The Byrds, The Beatles, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, The Grateful Dead and The Rolling Stones did exactly what their corporate masters wanted them to do.

They weren't rebels; they were just corporate flunkies working for the man. The whole musical "rebellion" of the late 1960s was a fraud from beginning to end and side to side.

Now this is, in a sense, a bit of a turkey shoot. It is always easier to point out how stupid "they were back then" because they-back-then are, figuratively speaking, tied to a post. (Although there are still a lot of parents, journalists and university professors peddling a lot of snake oil about the 1960s.) But here is the question:

What supposed rebels out there right now are actually really just serving entrenched interests of powerful people while deluding themselves and others with a bunch of fantastic nonsense about fighting for freedom and dignity?

I know where I'd begin to look for these people. I'd look for the people who have built their entire lives around the idea of protest. The more people identify themselves with an ideal, the more closely we should examine their claims.

Update: This may be the most prophetic thing I've posted as we have had the Occupy movement come along and serve entrenched interests while pretending to be rebels.