What is this photo selling?

I'll grant that this one is not subtle. But I've come here to make a serious point and not to sneer. Iron X Fitness are a small, local company in a very competitive market. I don't know anything about them but I'm pretty certain they don't have huge amounts of money to spend on advertising and they have to reach a divergent audience with that limited advertising. They aren't communications experts and they don't have the deep pockets it takes to hire that sort of expertise. I think they've done a pretty good job.

"It's all about balance!" And "building a strong, natural and healthy body." They don't mention being able to spread your legs really wide but they hardly have to given that photo. If you check the company's web page, pole fitness is far and away their most popular offering and their clients are overwhelmingly women. There is a market for this stuff.

That it's about sex is pretty obvious but it isn't about sex the way you might think it is. Let's clear out some more of the obvious stuff. Everybody knows that pole fitness has its origins in pole dancing and that pole dancing is what strippers do. And you don't need to look at a lot of photos of women doing pole exercises to figure out that it's all about erotic display. Oh, and did I mention that its called Pole Fitness? But it isn't about getting sex. Fitness and appearance for women is rarely about getting sex. Most women know what they have to do if they want to get sex.

But suppose you asked a different question. Suppose a woman was perfectly happy with the sex she's getting and who she's getting it with but she'd like to think that she could, if she wanted to, get some guy of fairly high status to pursue her and, once she was in bed with him, really blow his mind. She almost certainly she won't actually do it but ... . That's not a question about sex; its a question about sexual status. In that case, you'd maybe sign up for pole fitness.

Some people will get angry at this, but a lot of the meaning of life for women comes from being sexually desirable. It's a good thing that there are companies like Iron X Fitness offering the opportunity to work on this in a safe, comfortable environment. And all sorts of good things come from this. You couldn't begin to tally up all the positive physical and mental benefits that come from the exercise these women will do.

PS: I was very fit in my twenties but I never could do what she does in that photo. In the unlikely event I'd managed to get myself into that pose, I wouldn't have been able to hold it for long and I certainly wouldn't have been able to smile while doing it.

Lupercalia

Today, is the Feast of the Presentation of The Lord for Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans and some Lutherans. It is also known as Candlemas and, more importantly for this discussion, "The purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary". Why did she need purification? Because the antique Jewish faith required purification anytime you touched blood or semen and Mary had given birth some forty days before. Forty was a number that signified completion. We will shortly begin forty days of Lent for our purification.

 

At the same time, this is one of many Christian feasts that were intended to replace a pre-existing pagan feast, so the Roman feast of purification Februa/Lupercallia, becomes the Purification of Mary. As a believing Catholic and a married man fond of ritual and domesticity, I still can’t help feeling that something has been lost here, that swapping a warlike Juno for meek little Mary, and that’s the the way we celebrate her today, was a bad deal. 

 

The photo at the top is a piece of driftwood from Pocologan, New Brunswick. I think it looks like, or can be seen as if you prefer, a pagan wolf.

David Brooks versus Jordan Peterson (1)

A week or so ago now, David Brooks confronted "The Jordan Peterson Moment". [NB: That's a New York Times link.] That headline tells you a lot. The person who writes a story is typically not around when a headline is written so, although it is conceivable that Brooks gets headline approval, we shouldn't hold him responsible for this headline. That said, it reflects something we find in the column. For Brooks and his audience, Jordan Peterson is a weird and unexpected thing, something foreign and threatening.

Brooks' discomfort is evident right from the opening line. He acknowledges a claim made by Tyler Cowen that Peterson "is the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now." The thing you need to know to grasp what is happening here is that Brooks would love to be a public intellectual but is not. He got close with his first book but he is mostly a newspaper columnist. His books are well-received and reviewed inside a certain narrow social sphere but he will never reach the audience Peterson is reaching. Another way of putting this would be to say that Brooks is an establishment figure. No other kind gets to write for the New York Times.

As an establishment figure, Brooks spends a lot of time papering over the cracks in conventional thinking. This column is interesting because he is confronted with the biggest crack, the San Andreas fault that underlies modern progressive thought that all good progressives try not to think about in the hopes that it won't cause any problems in their lifetimes at least. It can be stated this way: every liberal society in the world has decidedly non-liberal foundations. You can make an authoritarian society into a liberal one but what you can't do is take a situation where no society exists and make a liberal society out of chaos. Brooks wants to deny that. He wants to believe that you can start out with love.

Much of Peterson’s advice sounds to me like vague exhortatory banality. Like Hobbes and Nietzsche before him, he seems to imagine an overly brutalistic universe, nearly without benevolence, beauty, attachment and love. His recipe for self-improvement is solitary, nonrelational, unemotional. I’d say the lives of young men can be improved more through loving attachment than through Peterson’s joyless and graceless calls to self-sacrifice.

 Brooks admits more than he realizes when he writes "sounds to me". He is admitting that he can't prove his side of the argument. Ultimately, progressivism rests on something like religious faith.

If you grew up in the west, you might share that faith. Alternatively, you may think as Peterson does. Want to find out what you really believe? Open your eyes and look around, do you see a universe full of  "benevolence, beauty, attachment and love"? I'm sure you see some of that, especially if you live in the west. But do you think that is the natural state of things or do you think it's something that was created at the cost of sacrifice and self-denial? Those aren't rhetorical questions.

They aren't rhetorical because I know that some readers, perhaps most, are going to want to answer that order is the natural state of things. Others, like me, are going to want to answer that chaos is. That isn't just Brooks fundamental dispute with Peterson, it's a fundamental question that has driven western political thought since at least Thomas Hobbes.

All I'll say for now is that it's a lot easier to believe that the world is full of benevolence, beauty and love from inside a functioning liberal society. Go outside and watch a little animal predation—watch an eagle kill and eat a really cute puppy, for example—and your confidence will be shaken. I would say rightly shaken.

What is this image selling?

I haven't done one of these for a while.

I'll start by admitting that I'm not entirely certain how this one is supposed to work

What I am certain of is that it's a sexually charged image. It's selling sex. It's selling sex to men who feel powerless.

But there's a problem. Is it supposed to be selling sex to men who feel powerless and want to change that? If that's the goal, they picked the wrong image.

To see why, let me remind you of something you already know.

That's a detail from an ad selling lingerie.

That's another

Yup, another detail from a lingerie ad.

I'll mix it up with a detail from a nineteenth century painting. She's standing by the piano. The painting is composed so that you feel like you've just walked into the room and she turned and gave you that look.

Another 19th century painting.

That one is selling a dressing gown.

 Erotic images of women feature three, and only three, facial expressions. There are warm, friendly faces that signal a woman who is easy to approach. There are slightly dazed looks that signal a woman who is sexually aroused. And there is the hard, challenging look:

This is the same model as the third from the top only she has a done her hair differently. She is literally looking down at you.

As is the model in the ad at the top.

I know what they were trying to do. The ad is promoting a service to help you get out of debt. The idea was to reach out to guys who feel inadequate because they are unable to pay their bills. It's a good concept but that is the wrong image to sell the idea. No man ever regretted a woman looking at him like that.

Rule three

Rule 3 Make friends with people who want the best for you

A friend of mine died of complications arising from anorexia nervosa a couple of years ago. The specific complication that killed her was congestive heart failure. That's a common outcome of persistently eating too little and it kills a substantial number of people with anorexia every year.

One of the many things that still troubles me about the years leading up to her death is the way her friends supported her in her self-destructive ways. She built a network of supporters. These people would unfailingly come to her aid in times of difficulty. No one, however, challenged her on her eating habits. To do that was to be excluded or semi-excluded, which was what happened to me.

The first sign that something was wrong came in her fifties when she began to suffer from what she called "chronic fatigue syndrome". She claimed her doctor had diagnosed this but her doctor actually sent her to see a therapist which doesn't match up with that. One day my friend let slip in conversation that what her doctor was actually concerned about was chronic depression. Depression frequently occurs in people with anorexia. No one knows whether that is an outcome of the disease or one of the causes of it. My friend's doctor noticed the depression because she noticed my friend's attitudes. She was, unfortunately, in no position to accurately assess my friends eating habits.

None of us were at first. My friend and I used to go to a Mexican restaurant near the university where she taught. She'd always eat a full serving. What I didn't know until years later was that she'd then eat nothing else for a full 24 hours.

She responded to every health fad. The last one before she died was gluten intolerance. She, like a lot of people, self-diagnosed. The net effect was that she ate a whole lot less. This was after she had been actually diagnosed with congestive heart failure.

One thing that still haunts me. About five years before she died, my friend read that some fat consumption was good for you. So she set about eating fat. She decided on two sources: avocados and olive oil. She started eating an avocado every two weeks or so. Olive oil she used in salad dressing. When you did the math, it turned out she was getting maybe a half teaspoon of olive oil at a meal. That's about 20 calories or 220 calories short of the bare minimum she should have been eating every day.

I don't know that there was anything anyone could do about it. A professional intervention might have made a difference. Then again, it might not. In any case, no one was in a position to bring such a thing about. You had two choices: either continue to support her in her struggles with the consequences of her disease without ever bringing up the fact that the root cause of all her problems or be excluded from her life. I sort of chose the latter.

Rule three comes from Jordan Peterson's 12 rules for life. No one, least of all Dr. Peterson, would recommend you run your life according to rules. These are just meant to be helpful guidelines and I think they're pretty good for that.

The rule gets even better when you read it in context of the others. You only have to add one additional rule to the context for the sense of it to expand in a good way.

Rule 2 Treat yourself like you would someone you are responsible for helping

Rule 3 Make friends with people who want the best for you

My friend was very good at rule three. If she'd been just a little better at rule two, she'd probably still be alive today.

The thing that always gets left out by feminists

Megan McArdle lets the cat out of the bag.

If you cast an eye back over history you’ll see that what most societies have actually come up with is the social equivalent of a cartel: if you want the sex, you’re going to first have to invest in some sort of relationship, because it’s not (readily) available any other way. Those regimes, of course, were often quite punishing to women, but then, that’s how cartels often work; when a cartel member cheats by selling below the fixed price, it is the member, not their customer, who suffers retaliation from the rest of the cartel.

Which suggests an uncomfortable possibility. No, not a neo-Victorian morals police to force morally loose women out of town. But a decision by women to force better behavior from the men who offend them, and even to browbeat other women into going along.

No one, of course, lets the cat out of the bag. Cats hate being in bags and fight hard to get out. What people  do is fail to keep the cat trapped in the bag. The cat in this case is that, in order to succeed, feminism requires women to change as much as it needs men to change.

The problem McArdle is attempting to solve is the unhappiness many women feel about sex. An unhappiness that runs so deep they are attempting to criminalize bad sex. We saw it most recently in the case of "Alias Grace" and Aziz Ansari. Grace flirted with the much-more-famous Ansari after meeting him at an event. She went on a date with him, went back to his apartment, willingly got naked and willingly performed oral sex on him and then got uncomfortable about sex. She then sent some, decidedly ambiguous signals that she thinks implied a lack of consent. I don't think she's lying about that. Nor is she lying about his response: he missed them entirely. I suspect he missed them for the simple reason that he wasn't looking for them. It's like seeing motorcycles on the road, you have to train yourself to see when a woman is uncomfortable with sex and then stop and ask her if something is the matter.

As I say, this is all true. Trust me on this one: women will go along with sex they don't really want. That's always been the case and it always will be. A tiny number of exceptions aside, relationships between men and women involve the man having a lot less sex than would be the case if it was only up to him and the woman having a lot more sex than would be the case if it were only up to her. It's a difficult challenge but most of us find a way to make it work because we want very much to be in a relationship of some sort.

Things have been stirred up lately by a situation that has cropped up on university campuses. I'll let McArdle explain.

In part because casual sex was so risky, there was still a robust dating culture, which gave women alternatives to the nightly chase. Most of us chose those alternatives, which in turn limited the ability of heterosexual men to choose the nightly chase over dating.

This does seem to be different now. AIDS is no longer invariably fatal; apps like Tinder have made it easy for men to pursue frictionless hookups; colleges have shifted from majority-men to majority-women, which plausibly would lead the college culture to revolve more and more around the casual sex that the scarce men seem to prefer.

If you're a female college student, men have much more power because there are fewer of them. If you don't give him sex on terms he likes, he can go out with someone else. Women no longer have a choice between being in some sort of relationship with one guy as opposed to another, they now have to choose between giving a guy sex on his terms or staying home and studying for four years. Let's go back to Alias Grace a moment. Ansari is a celebrity. It's not at all unusual for a woman a decade younger than him to offer him sex. He may or may not be looking for a girlfriend but, even if he is, he isn't going to be looking among star-struck 23-year-olds for one. Alias Grace could be with him on one condition and one condition only: if she was willing to settle for sex with very little in return. I suspect she started to send ambiguous signals about whether she wanted sex right around te time the awful truth finally struck home. On a modern university campus there are a lot of women in Grace's position. Understandably, they are very unhappy with this. And feminists, always desperate to remain relevant, are listening to these women.

The problem, the cat McArdle lets out of the bag, is that some women are not unhappy with this situation. For them college is just a four year adventure prior to settling down. They easily accommodate themselves to the prevailing morality because most people easily accommodate themselves to the prevailing morality. They spend three or four years giving men sex on the terms those men like. It probably never even occurs to them to question the situation. They easily adapt their expectations to deal with the situation. They have a few great years and then move on to something else. If anything, they cherish the memory. There are lot of women who see things this way.

Anyone worthy of liberty should be able to stand up for themselves

I propose these principles for men.

1) Don't be a male feminist. It's condescending and insulting to women. They're perfectly capable of running their own liberation movement.
2) Their challenges are their challenges not yours and not society's.
3) Take a critical attitude: don't accept irrational arguments or assertions just because a woman or some women says they matter to them.