The devil you know

Yesterday, I argued that Woody Allen was being nihilistic when he said:

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering—and it's all over much too soon.

In the comments, Billy Carmichael contested this:

The joke says, 'Life really isn't all that bad, so lighten up a bit. You really love it and you know you do, you silly Malvolio, you.' I don't know where she gets being thankful for the bad from, but the joke certainly turns one away from the absurd obsession of bad and reminds one that we all love life and hope it never ends. This is not nihilism. 

In a sense I agree. I think Billy is quite right to insist that is the morally healthy reaction to the joke. But ... well, first, let's go back to the source.  There are probably a whole lot of people who have never seen Annie Hall, which is where it comes from. Here is the opening scene where it appears;



As you can see, the quoted line is not the joke but Woody's explanation of it. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is Alvy Singer's explanation for Allen is in character here.

Or is he in character? He talks like he isn't in character. He just appears with no set up, no context, so we naturally assume that this is Woody himself taking a few minutes to set the thing up for us. Even when he says, "Annie and I broke up," it could be real.

And the movie ends with Alvy directing a play which he clearly set up so he can have in "fiction" what he couldn't have in "real" life. Or is it the other way around? We're deliberately being teased with the notion that this could be real.

At the same time, we're deliberately being set up not to take it seriously. For example, after setting up this bleak nihilistic worldview, Allen then puts it into the mouth of a child so we can all laugh at it and we don't have to think, "Does he really means this?"

Imagine this, Phillip and Theresa are married. They lived together before the wedding but Theresa insisted that they live apart for the last week, "So it really will be different when we get married." And she goes up to her family cottage to increase the separation.

Years later, Phillip is at the lake himself and talking with Theresa's lifelong friend and ex-boyfriend Patrick and Patrick inadvertently reveals that he was also up at the lake that week. Phillip, trying to hide his nervousness, asks him if he saw Theresa that week. Patrick looks him right in the face and says, "Yeah, we had a wild, farewell fling that week." He then waits a moment for effect, and bursts out laughing as if it were all a joke.

Think of Baudelaire's quip that the devil's greatest trick was to convince us that he didn't exist.

We can take the joke about the two ladies in the Catskills any number of ways. Me, I would be inclined to take it the way Billy Carmichael does. But I don't think Woody does. When he says, "Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering—and it's all over much too soon," he damn well means it. That's the way he understood it. As Mia Farrow learned the hard way, you should worry a whole lot if Woody ever spent a week alone at the lake with a young and beautiful woman who means a lot to you.

Sorta political: On believing nothing

It was Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend and an old friend shared this quote yesterday:

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering—and it's all over much too soon.

Woody Allen               

Which is pretty bland and not very funny, which is, come to think of it, a pretty good description of Woody Allen himself these days. What really threw me was that she immediately went on to say that she likes the quote because it reminds her that she should be thankful for "both the good and the bad".

Really? Is she grateful for AIDS? Hitler? Cancer?

Then I pointed out to her that there was no way the words of that quote could be construed so as to make them mean what she thought they meant. There is not a hint of gratitude in that lame joke. She said she knew that but she didn't care, it was the way it made her feel. I went on to say that Woody Allen's larger point is that life is morally meaningless. And he isn't fooling around about this. He made two movies that went so far as to say that even murder has no moral significance beyond the initial shock it causes.

She'd stopped paying attention long before I finished. She didn't care, she had her quote that made her feel thankful for the good and the bad. And I thought of Corrie ten Boom in the concentration camp being thankful for the lice that infested the place because it meant the guards inspected the place less often allowing the prisoners to read the Bible they had hidden more often. Not because I can even begin to imagine what that is like but because Corrie ten Boom at least used words and sentences that actually meant something to express her gratitude.

I've often mocked the religion of SIMU (Shit I Made Up) but this isn't even that. It's a religion with no content at all not even stuff that was made up. I suspect my friend read or heard somewhere that it's good for you to be grateful and so she has pulled a random quote that she likes and associated it with gratitude "for both the good and the bad".

It's a sort of wimpy nihilism and I've written about this before.

In real life, though, being a martyr for nihilism is a grim and depressing choice so we find ways to make the second choice look morally admirable. You sit in the audience and watch the nihilistic movie and then you go to a party where you and a bunch of your friends collectively pretend to be edgy and transgressive and a whole lot of other words that mean a little less every time you think about them. The nagging doubt that you are just being dilettantes is always there but you are still alive and you can even have quite a bit of fun.

But what about the politics of such people? According to Pew, they make up one fifth of Americans. They probably make up more than that, truth be told, as there are lots of people who go to church regularly or semi-regularly whose beliefs are about as fuzzy.

I suspect that virtually all of these people think of themselves as liberals. Not because liberalism is nihilistic or deeply flawed but because it's what the cool kids believe and therefore is the place where people with no real beliefs of their own are most likely to land. Ask them to explain what liberalism is, however, and they won't have a clue what to say beyond arguing that it is what people with common sense and decency believe.

Romanticism?

I'll start with a juxtaposition:

1. Camille Paglia is at it again. She has a piece up in the Wall Street Journal called, "How Capitalism Can Save Art". The gist of it, and it's far from crazy, is that industrial design has produced far more of great worth than the art world the last few decades. You may or may not like Paglia's specific examples and taste, I certainly don't, but I still think her basic argument is irrefutable. The art world is decadent, corrupt and moribund.
2.  In an oddly related vein, we have a piece wondering why hipsters love obsolete technology. And they do. But they're right to do so. They can't bring themselves to love the latest products of industrial design but they love the old stuff. And, again, they are right to do so. Someone could, and they'd also be right, construct an argument explaining this in terms of motive. Two decades from now, when it too is obsolete, hipsters will celebrate the iPhone. They can only love this stuff once it has a history; they can only love it once they can associate it with lives and loves, battles won and lost ...

But here is my question, what about romanticism. The official art world hates neo-romanticism and the latest technology doesn't sit comfortably with it. And yet, the art that most people love is romanticism. And there is a huge market for fantasy fiction that tries very hard to make new technology fit into romantic tales.

So the question I have is this: Is it time to embrace romanticism again?

Serious writers will rush in now and point out how vulgar and unsophisticated current romanticism is with its princesses, rural revival fantasies, hopelessly exaggerated emotional upheavals and much else. And all that is true but you do have to wonder if that isn't in large part because serious artists refuse to try their hand at it.

I think a big part of why I like Proust and Waugh's Brideshead Revisisted so much is that they are both late romantics. I feel the same way about Mahler.

A little light culture: Casual feminism

Casual feminism is the most common kind of feminism but the type that receives the least critical attention. And it's not hard to see why when you look at it. Consider for example, Samantha Escobar who writes about leg shaving over at the YourTango site.

The article is ostensibly about a survey of readers habits. The survey itself is of dubious value but that doesn't matter as I am most interested in Escobar's treatment of it. The first thing we see of that treatment is that she falls over herself trying to make the article say the opposite of what the survey says. Here is the introductory paragraph:

Recently, I've been thinking about how the changing seasons affect my beauty habits. A few examples: I wax my bikini line during bathing suit season, I don't exfoliate as much in the winter and I wear a gel moisturizer instead of a cream one in the summer to avoid oiliness. But one that I've noticed myself and many others tend to do is shaving less during the colder seasons, when we can cover up our stubble (or forest) with long pants or tights.

You have to read well into the piece before you find out what readers actually said and, given all the build up, it's a bit jarring to read that "88 percent of respondents said they remove hair from their legs year-round". Oh well, so much for that theory. But why spend so much time dwelling on it if you know it's false? It's perfectly acceptable to say, we expected X but learned Y but Escobar simply drowns the results she didn't expect with exposition of what she did expect.

An unkind person might wonder if Samantha Escobar believes what she thinks is more important than actually reporting.

Okay, so we know that readers of YourTango—a group overwhelmingly dominated by young women—mostly shave. And that isn't terribly surprising is it? It's exactly what you would have guessed. Who is to blame for this? Well, we know who Escobar wants to blame:

But seasons aren't the only factor that played a role in shaving routines. Many respondents also said their shaving habits depend on their relationship status.

 Notice, first of all, that Escobar will not let her pet theory that women don't shave in the winter go even though the survey says they do. Reality doesn't play a big role in her beliefs. Okay, but what of her claim that "many respondents" do it for their boyfriends?

In fact, 12 percent stated they typically only remove leg hair for special occasions and another 10 percent said that they would likely never shave if it wasn't for their significant other. Forty percent of respondents, however, informed us that a significant other played no part in their shaving routine; they simply did it because they wanted to — while 36 percent said they did shave, but their significant other wouldn't mind either way (lucky).

Uh, only 10 percent said that they shave because of their boyfriends wishes and the conclusion is that "many" say "relationship status" plays a role? I don't think so. Here is a lesson in journalism and interpreting statistics for Escobar; how that paragraph should have been written. Before I begin, note that Escobar is confident that the groups do not overlap. She says "an other 10 percent". The percentages in her example add up to 98 percent, the missing two percent being result of rounding.

The  largest group of women said that their boyfriend's opinion has no influence on their decision to shave their legs. Fully 76 percent said they would shave anyway. Forty percent said they do it because they want to and 36 percent said they shave anyway even though their significant other "wouldn't mind either way". Twelve percent said they shave only for special occasions and only ten percent said they wouldn't shave at all if it wasn't for their significant other.

In fact, Escobar's own attitudes give the game away. She doesn't like doing it at all but she does when it might show. She says she waxes her bikini line in the summer meaning, when she is on the beach and a whole lot of people will see her she doesn't like the idea of her pubic hair sticking out around the side of her bathing suit. What she cares most about is what complete strangers might think of her and not what her boyfriend might think.

Here is a little not so idle speculation. Suppose Escobar was invited to a girls-only weekend at an isolated cottage with a very private beach such that she knew the only people who were going to see her in her bikini were other women. Do you think she'd wax her bikini line before going? I don't know her but I'd be willing to bet it's an absolute certainty that she would.

What's operating here is our old friend shame and, as The Last Psychiatrist would add, it's semi-regular companion narcissism. Escobar cares little about the desires and feelings of some "boyfriend", that is she cares little about any other person at all except insofar as that might affect her social status. She treats pleasing another human being—one whom, in theory anyway, she is supposed to be in love with—as a burden and inconvenience but willing does what it takes to complete strangers from thinking her gross or laughable. You couldn't get a clearer example of narcissism than that.

Here's some fun

In what appears to be a slap in the face for gender equality, the report found the divorce rate among couples who shared housework equally was around 50 per cent higher than among those where the woman did most of the work. 

It's only a "study" so it probably means nothing at all but why let that stand in the way of fun?

 I've often wondered how keen women really are to share the housework. I know they say they are but my experience has been that there is always some aspect of housework, usually an unpleasant one, that women will cling to. And, as with a lot of feminist aspirations there is a lot of passive aggressive stuff at work where women say they want these things and then work to undermine efforts to make it happen.

And then there is this suggestion from one of the study's authors:

• “Maybe it’s sometimes seen as a good thing to have very clear roles with lots of clarity ... where one person is not stepping on the other’s toes,” he suggested. 

Ya think?

Sorta Political: "The new superbug that is going to ruin blowjobs forever"

That headline appeared at one of those sites aimed at young women. You know the ones, twenty-five salacious articles about sex, twenty-three of which are designed to inspire young women to be more promiscuous and the remaining two are designed to scare them into thinking they will be raped, beaten or infected by their partner. This one fit into the latter category.

The new superbug is an antibiotic resistant form of gonorrhea that has sprung up. This is not a surprise, medical authorities have known for about a decade now that such a thing was inevitable given antibiotic abuse and other factors. And it is worth remembering that this disease will cause incredible suffering, particularly in the third world, by which I mean that the risk of, "ruining blowjobs forever" is perhaps a little trivial by comparison.

And it won't so much ruin blowjobs as it will ruin a rather odd kind of recreational sex in which young single women service young single men so that they can both get some kinds of thrills without much physical or emotional  risk. With an incurable form of gonorrhea about to make the scene things won't ever be the same again.

And here, courtesy of the Center for Disease Control, is why:

Latex condoms, when used consistently and correctly, can reduce the risk of getting or giving gonorrhea. The most certain way to avoid gonorrhea is to not have sex or to be in a long-term, mutually monogamous relationship with a partner who has been tested and is known to be uninfected.

"Reducing the risk" sounds like a good deal when the worst you might have to face is a few weeks on antibiotics but how far do you need to reduce the risk before you feel comfortable with the thought of "incurable"? As it stands, I'd bet good money that most young women probably aren't currently insisting on condoms and this for a simple reason, they hate the things. In a sense it really will ruin things for them.

Recreational sex with multiple partners hasn't turned out to be such a great idea has it? And it's not just disease. The emotional damage it has caused is just as real.

But, as I say, this has been inevitable for some time now. It's odd that it took the Center for Disease Control to suggest the one solution—" to be in a long-term, mutually monogamous relationship with a partner who has been tested and is known to be uninfected"—that our cultural leaders have so desperately tried to pretend doesn't exist these last few decades.

Gena the hooker cont'd

If that song and/or video makes moral sense to you, something has gone deeply wrong with your character.

I had a post up last week about girls who advertize for sugar daddies and how deluded they are. The really interesting thing here isn't that some young girls get sucked into what is just prostitution so easily. What fascinates me is how much self-delusion involved.

Here is another example of what I mean. There is an article in a publication called Psychological Science in the Public Interest about online dating. Social scientists have studied the services offered and found they don't work. You can listen to a podcast about the article here.)

In discussing reasons that online daters don't have a high success rate, the researchers suggest that the chemistry of the online interaction isn't right, that the algorithms that the computers use to match people up aren't as good as was thought and that there are key bit of information that aren't being evaluated. No one, however, wants to say the key thing out loud.

Because if there is one thing that everyone who uses online dating has in common it is that they have not been able to make a relationship work any other way. No one picks online dating as their first choice to finding a partner. It's the thing you go to when the normal ways of doing this haven't worked out for you.

Sinatra once did an album called Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely. I mention this because, he'd originally planned to call it Sinatra Sings for Losers at Love. It's not hard to figure out why he changed the title. No one wants to be thought of as a loser.

More importantly, the people who most fear being thought losers at love are ... well, they are losers at love. And, sorry to hurt anyone's feelings, that is what people who use online dating are. They think they tried the usual stuff and it didn't work but it was them that didn't work.

Okay, "loser" is a harsh word. Put it that way and, well, "Are you telling me there is something wrong with me?" No I'm not. Life is.

You could try changing. Work on your appearance a bit, your social skills, your moral character. Maybe your expectations are out of whack with your actual status.

But no one wants to face that so we don't start thinking about our appearance, our attitudes and our expectations. We blame circumstances instead. "It's so hard meeting people these days." No it isn't! You walk by hundreds of people every day. You work with people. You live next door to people.

I'm sorry to have to put it this way, but most of us meet people we could easily fall in love with without trying. I'm married and most decidedly not looking for someone and yet I meet women and start talking to them casually and bang, something clicks. It's at that point that I make some excuse to casually bring up that I am married.

Which brings me back to Gena. Why does she, and why do the other women (girls really) using these find-a-sugar-daddy services need to advertise in the first place? If she as really as hot as she says she is, likely sugar daddies would pursue her. All she'd have to do is smile at the man making eyes at her at Starbucks and then start a conversation. Any stupid comment about the weather would do.

Gena's primary problem is that she isn't nearly as hot or desirable as she thinks she is.

Let's try coming at it another way. Why does she want this relationship? It's not because the sex is going to be so good. Is it for the gifts? The answer to that is that it's not for the gifts themselves but for what they symbolize. They are her market value. If an older man is willing to spend the cash on dinners, shows, nice clothes and stuff, then she must be really desirable. She must be worth it.

She's not getting this from boys her age. They just want sex. They don't want a relationship. Hell, they don't even want to ask her for a date on the way to getting it.

Or maybe she has a boyfriend but she thinks he only tells her she is hot because he is in love with her. She needs attention from other boys to validate her sense of self worth.

Whatever it is that she needs, she isn't getting it. And she thinks the the problem is all these barriers. It's not her. Never think that.