Reframing The “Man Up” Directive As A Male-Anxiety Problem – Very Slick, Wall Street Journal

Dalrock recently posted on a series of works by foul-mouthed professional divorcee Susan Gregory Thomas, who burst onto the scene with an article about how divorce was so bad for her and her generation that she did it to her kids too. Her most recent offering is another man-up shaming article examining households in which the woman earns most of the money. Stories like these are nothing new (I wrote about one last month), and usually focus on female frustration in “feeling like the man in the relationship.” However, every one of these articles is met with loads of dismissive comments by men, and some earnest confusion on their part that feminism was supposed to be about women who wanted to be high achievers and backing away from outdated male-headship structures, so what are they upset about? Every time they get less angry and more dismissive, indicative of men simply leaving the building and not caring about women’s protestations at all.

This obviously creates a real problem in the whining world – how to reframe female frustration so it’s more palatable and less susceptible to attack and derision? How are these women going to get societal comfort and validation from being unhaaaappy if their own words keep exposing the logical fallacies of their solipsistic philosophy? Thomas has found the answer: you dispense with the female testimonials and frame each anecdote as a male-anxiety problem, thus employing men as ventriloquist dummies for hard-charging women’s hypergamous anxiety. The key syllogism in the story comes here:

Perhaps because men of this generation were raised in the wake of the women’s movement, a culture that introduced values of equality, many of them don’t seem to have a problem with their wives earning more than they do.

There’s one caveat, though: The men want their own salaries alone to be enough, in theory, to float the family. When they can’t meet this standard, they can feel enraged, shamed, explosive. And their wives often feel resentful and pressured.

All the examples flow from this thesis, that men are insecure about their wives’ achievements (more “you can’t handle a strong woman!”) and being the abusive beasts they are, they project their anxiety onto their wives who then become neurotic in turn. There’s no discussion about the females’ core feelings about carrying the financial load (many articles have revealed that generally speaking, they don’t like it), only their reactions to the “pressures” put on them by men who feel inadequate.

I have to say that is some brilliant rhetoric. If you only quote the men (and a select group of white-knightey men to boot), you don’t have to confront the decidedly negative true feelings of women in fem-dom relationships where men are either on a much lower pay scale, are unemployed or have dropped out of the workforce entirely to be househusbands. Such confrontations expose feminist falsehoods that men and women are the same and undercut the key feminist mythology that men are insecure about their dicks and that’s why they are threatened by an empowered woman.

There’s a couple things going on with men’s concern for “providing.” First is that men are generally aware of hypergamy at least on a subconscious level, and so they can sense that falling back professionally will destabilize their relationships. Second is that men are brought up with a whole lot of white-knight indoctrination about giving stuff to women as a mating strategy, from picking up the check on elaborate dates to saving multiple months’ salary for an engagement ring to buying houses and luxury cars for their wives, so it becomes an ingrained part of a man’s identity. This is what produces perverse extremes like men who think their manhood is measured by their wives staying at home – “no wife of MINE is going to work!” (To which the quippy response is “I got news for you – your ex-wife isn’t going to work, either.”)

It’s important to note that these “I gotta provide for the family” types tend to represent the more conservative/traditional social outlook. This provides a critical rhetorical shiv. If you can slip it past the goalie that female hypergamy creates instability in fem-dom relationships, you can hit personal and political points simultaneously by presenting the argument that it’s not women’s fault that their feminist reams aren’t coming true, and instead fall back on blaming those evil judgmental “conservative, traditional” communities that are pumping out men programmed to “oppress women.”

I’m surprised they are just catching on now, though – it’s long been a feminist rhetorical tack to project female-induced preference as pernicious male pathology. For example, framing the missionary position (widely preferred by women as an intimate and softly-submissive arrangment) as an unholy instrument of a male need for dominance. Or complaining that women are saddled with housework that men refuse to do when in fact women are the ones who want fastidiously tidy houses in the first place. You’ll notice that in light of the articles quoted, the latter appears to be a big fitness test – she asks you to take on more domestic tasks, then resents you for being too domestic.

A New Spin On “Man Up” Marketing

One of the more irritating and clueless cultural nexuses (nexi?) of the last couple of years has been the surfeit of “men need to man up” articles.

I spoke about this at length in two articles about City Journal writer Kay Hymowitz in response to her hysterical and anecdotally-driven Wall Street Journal piece. She has since been joined in the Pantheon of Man-Up Shaming by Peggy Nance, Bill Bennett and Spinster In Chief Kate Bolick.

Hymowitz is one of a class of commentators who claim to be concerned about the lot of men, but are only concerned to the degree that men’s issues affect the ability of women to get what they want – that is, men to finance and forward their dreams of status and comfort. This assertion is self-demonstrating: despite a generation of evidence that the effete, femcentric society rising in the upper classes was dramatically stunting the development of males, these commentators have only seen fit to bring attention to the problem now that the young women they spend their lives around have begun to complain that there aren’t any men they want to marry or who want to marry them. (Hymowitz uses the Judd Apatow film Knocked Up as an bookend fable to her argument, which really shows how empty her concept is of what young men’s lives are actually like.)

While it began as a male-to-male appeal to teamwork, the “Man Up” concept has long been a cultural default for women to exert leverage on men to do something not in their direct interest, via a dose of shaming. Shaming is an appeal to someone’s sense of being, suggesting that their actions cost them value as a person (or in this case, as a male person). [Double-hat tip to Ricky Raw, whose explicatory work on the human psychological system is without equal.]

Seemingly in keeping with the “Man Up” pop-sociology, there’s been a new surge of ads leveraging the concept. I’ve seen three campaigns in particular that employ the

Weight Watchers

• Tagline: “Lose like a man”
• Masculine concept: Using a pun to link sportmanship and competition with a program to drop pounds.
• Endorser: Former NBA player and “round mound of rebound” Charles Barkley

Dove (the moisturizer)

• Tagline: “I’m comfortable in my own skin”
• Masculine concept: Adapting the alpha-male values of confidence and congruence to literally making your skin comfortable.
• Endorsers: Charismatic retired hoopster Shaquille O’Neal, retired NFL quarterback and confirmed philanderer John Elway, Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson III

One-A-Day Men’s Vitacraves (vitmains)

• Tagline: “Chew like a man”
• Masculine concept: feats of strength and gluttony
• No endorsers, just a dweeby white guy

Obviously, these are strong doses of manliness to counter the stigma of female-oriented products. What’s interesting about these is that there is a distinct absence of invective about a man’s “duty” to others (save for a quip about taking out the garbage). Barkley directly engages his own competitive personality – “I hated losing, until now.” Elway is adorned with images of his football accomplishments, when he was one of the game’s best. Thompson tells a story about becoming like his father. Shaq simply shows off his larger-than-life persona.

Thus the key to the spots: buy this and you’ll feel good about being a man – your intrinsic masculinity will be flattered, not your “obligation masculinity” defined by serving others’ interests. We’re being asked to fork over the cash for our own sake, not because we owe it to our wives or children or girlfriends or whatever.

I realized that this motif was pioneered by another very well-received campaign. Most beer ads promote a sort of “drink this beer and women will have sex with you” concept. There’s a notable exception – Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man In The World spots. The Most Interesting Man is surrounded by women – not because he’s a crazy party animal at the time of the swilling, but because he is the end product of an interesting and well-lived life. The women are an extra benefit to his lifestyle of boating rescues, fencing, and lecturing a tiger while cooking. The spots appeal to a high-concept masculinity, like an aging James Bond, rather than a hangin’ with your bros diorama. It ain’t a Viagra ad with Bob Dole talking to other old men, it’s a older man addressing a younger man about how to be like him when he’s grown old.

There’s a context that people need to understand – marketers don’t know how to reach young men. Radio host Tom Leykis regularly emphasized that young men were his core listener base, and after a silly caller he would satirically intone “advertisers, you too can reach this prime demographic.”

Marketers know how to sell to young women…they can make women feel good about themselves by buying an expensive handbag, a pair of uncomfortable shoes, or a poorly-written book about an abortive BDSM experiment (I’m talking about The Hunger Games). But the most elusive consumer dollar is that in the hands of the 18- to 34-year old pre-middle aged male. They buy plenty of stuff, but the advertisers can’t figure out how to influence them.

I suppose it’s another way of saying men are a lot less susceptible to social pressure and social proof in their preferences. And in keeping with what’s been covered already, they are the least susceptible when they are young and single, and have neither a wife and kids they are expected to provide for (the shaming angle), nor a midlife crisis to cause them to hunt for masculine meaning they can no longer capture on their own.

Lots of male-centric advertising appeals directly to the married-father role, suggesting it is his “manly duty” to the family to buy whatever product in on the make. Cf. ads where Daddy is shuttling the family around, or fixing the family’s gutters, or cutting the lawn or something. Subtextual is the idea that his time and pleasures should be sacrificed for the nebulous “good of the family” – more extreme examples were a guy selling his season tickets because they had a new baby, or a guy being browbeaten by his wife and realtor into buying a house he couldn’t afford.

In what is probably a more effective campaign, companies also market products TO wives that are intended to be consumed BY their husbands. With women controlling something like 80% of a couple’s spending, it’s probably a lot more efficient of a pitch in the boardroom.

However, with the marriage rate going down and the age of marriage going up, maybe the marketers are getting ahead of the game and going directly to the large pocket of single men who don’t (and for some, won’t) have wives to buy their vitamins for them.

Another Damn Girly Song About Game

Following on the heels of “Call Me Maybe,” which Vox correctly typed as an archetypal game motif of the unattainable woman driven wild by an unattainable man, comes “Give Your Heart A Break” by one smoky-voiced Demi Lovato.

I’ll just go through a few of the lines and the loyal Badger Hut readers can shirley fill in the rest of the analysis.

The day I first met you
You told me you’d never fall in love
But now that I get you
I know fear is what it really was

Game principles: solipsism, rationalization. The woman cannot bring herself to accept the man’s words at face value, and instead constructs an elaborate counter-narrative that he is insecure and afraid because it allows her to avoid the reality that he’s not going to get attached.

Now here we are
So close yet so far
Haven’t I passed the test
When will you realize
Baby, I’m not like the rest

Game principles: attraction to aloofness, snowflaking. Frustrated by his preternatural emotional distance (which she has tried to invalidate as per above), she attempts to argue that she is the one special woman who is not going to hurt him.

Don’t wanna break your heart
Wanna give your heart a break
I know you’re scared it’s wrong
Like you might make a mistake
There’s just one life to live
And there’s no time to wait, to waste

Game principle: living in the moment. It feels right right now and has to be capitalized on!

The world is ours if we want it
We can take it if you just take my hand
There’s no turning back now
Baby, try to understand

Game principle: projection. In her mind, his mental model is the one that is busted. If only he understood her – if only his brain worked like hers did and he did what she wanted – then everything would be perfect, life would be so cool.

Capturing the wild and unattentive man is one of the most powerful female fantasies beamed through our popular culture, inextricably entwined with the “women civilize men” narrative. (Dalrock wrote about it this week, a great complement to his early gem on the other primary female fantasy of the “choice” narrative). But any game-aware man or woman who has been paying attention to the evidence in the field knows that it’s not just songs and shows – the “I can change him” modus operandi is epidemic among women in real life. Yes, even among “smart girls” and “good girls.” Like Jeff Spicoli with Forest Whitaker’s sports car, she plaintively intones “I can fix him!” Even women writing in the Manosphere are absolutely obsessed with a panty-soaking fantasy of making the aloof hunk realize that he should let his guard down and give in to his feeeeelings because she just really loves him so much.

Despite all the hand-wringing about how much women want “relationships,” women tingle for unavailable and uncommitted men, for those traits specifically, and project all sorts of stuff onto those men that obfuscates the basic truth – he ain’t in love with you and he’s not going to be.

There was even a study a couple months ago that during ovulation, women think their bad-boy flings are great father material. If there was ever something that should disabuse every bootlicking white knight of his delusional fantasy that putting on the Fred MacMurray act was going to get him to the top of the sexual heap and win the heart of his damsel forever, this is it.

Bad Game Is Really Difficult To Watch

For most guys, it’s tough to watch another guy get rejected. It’s another matter, however, to come to an advanced understanding of game and thus be able to predict epic disasters on sight, and have to live through powerlessly watching the trainwreck.

It’s a bit like when I saw “Apollo 13,” and despite knowing no real details of the mission, I knew there was going to be a disaster somewhere. Thus the opening of the film was forty-five hellish minutes in which I tried to ignore the general tone of glee and waited for the other shoe to drop. Once the oxygen tanks blew off the side of the spacecraft, I relaxed, able to finally enjoy the sci-fact thriller I knew I had lined up to see.

I got that same feeling of nauseous anticipation when I saw “Alpha Male vs Beta Male,” a short clip commissioned by Roosh illustrating the contrast of chumpism and game. In each clip I knew the beta male was going to humiliate himself. It was all I could do to keep from covering my eyes.

The same feeling happens to me at a bar when an inveterate beta is at the next stool in vicinity of a lady, or when I see a pair on an obviously awkward “date” at the next table in a restaurant. Bad game is really difficult to watch for a number of reasons, one being that it reminds me of a bygone era of my own abject failures and not the least of which being that bad game is largely avoidable and preventable.

It is fun and interesting to hear Roosh’s exact lines from his book “Bang” said out loud by a guy on camera.

Don’t Get Jealous Of Another Man’s Quarry Unless You Really Know The Score

The wise and mirthful Dogsquat (who I amazingly haven’t linked yet, welcome to the blogosphere amigo) riffed on the difference between what outsiders see in a relationship versus the actual reality, only experienced by the people inside.

Over about a two year period, I was involved with:

-A stripper
-An architect
-A cocktail waitress
-A psychology grad student
-A yoga instructor
-A semi-pro model/sommelier
-A professional modern dancer

All of these girls were attractive.  Most were fun.  Some were smart, a few were funny.  I had a reputation for dating beautiful women.  Once a week someone would say,”Dude, how do you do it?!” On the surface, I was doing great.  My acquaintances were envious.  My very close friends were ready to pack me off to a monastery.  Why?  Here’s a more accurate list:

-A stripper (‘nough said)
-An architect with an eating disorder
-An alcoholic cocktail waitress
-A psychology grad student with poorly controlled bipolar disorder.
-A yoga instructor with daddy issues and pronounced gold-digger tendencies – come to think about it, she had some issues with food, too.
-A cokehead semi-pro model/sommelier who’s abusive ex-boyfriend/dealer tried to stab me
-A professional modern dancer with sexual identity problems (weird, weird shit, man -  not suitable for children, the aged, or the infirm.)

The sequence reminded me of “The Cheerleader Effect,” coined by How I Met Your Mother‘s dashing ladies’ man Barney Stinson. In the episode “Not A Father’s Day” (in which Barney invents a holiday to celebrate the resolution of a pregnancy scare), Barney lectures the rest of the gang that a gaggle of women at McLaren’s are not actually attractive.

“The Cheerleader Effect is when a group of women seems hot – but only as a group. Just like with cheerleaders – they seem hot, but take each one of them individually? Sled dogs.”

Barney notes other names for the phenomenon: ”The Bridesmaid Paradox; Sorority Girl Syndrome; and for a brief window in the Nineties, the Spice Girls Conspiracy.”

This bit of sexual-marketplace wisdom was punctuated by a panning shot of the girls in question, revealing grievous faults in each of them which were invisible when seen as a group. The only clip of the scene I was able to find is in Italian, but it illustrates the point just fine.

DON’T MAKE COMPARISONS

It’s very tempting to get into comparisons when you’re sharpening your game. It’s easy to pat yourself on the back for your successes over your pals, or to mope that so-and-so has bagged more notches since he got into the game than you have.

I’m here to tell you, it’s a very self-destructive pattern, because it takes your focus off of improving your own game and moves it over to copying someone else’s. It’s also pointless, because as the above shows, there’s an inside story to every couple, and it’s often a lot less rosy than we want to believe.

Lots of men have had either or both sides of this experience: being jealous of another man only to find out later that the girl he was dating was batshit crazy, orbeing the envy of your friends with some hot or sweet or wicked thing on your arm, only to feel a growing pit in your stomach dreading the breakup because you’d get so much crap from your in-the-dark friends.

Sometimes, people get together with or even put off breaking up with toxic partners because of this social pressure. Sometimes, sadly, the participants themselves are blind to the pitfalls and neuroses of their partners.

SOMETIMES ENVY IS A JUSTIFIED RESPONSE

There are some moments where it’s OK to sit back and say, “that guy has it good.” So long as you understand that every pair has caveats, there are some couples you can look at and think their model is something to shoot for.

Like Athol Kay, for instance. His wife Jennifer joins with him in making a great home, enables him to act as a quality husband, abhors yelling and conflict, and (of course) indulges with him in a highly active sex life, which she’s OK having plastered across the Internet for the benefit of other couples. (Jennifer copyedits every MMSL post.)

If anything were to happen to him, his blog is a full-length advertisement for her fitness as a wife to another deserving man.

I’ve noticed that almost every guy I’ve known with a great wife has said he was lucky. I never took this as an indictment of his value, or as a sign of pedestalization that he thought his wife was better than him – rather, I saw it as an acknowledgement that it’s hard to find a good woman, and you have to be lucky as well as good to get one.

Don’t Pay Attention To Psych Surveys That Amount To Self-Fortune Telling

Frequently, news stories herald the results of “studies” that involve asking people to discern:

• How they would act or react to certain situations
• Rational reasons why they made certain decisions which are most likely made emotionally and subconsciously and then rationalized after the fact

“Study: 41% of men would lie to get sex”

“88% of Millenials would rather be respected than wealthy”

“Women say they prefer equalist marriage to male-leadership model“

(These are made up from my head but analogous to what you’ll see in media headlines.)

I have completely stopped paying attention to these studies that query people with hypotheticals. Their theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, their methods are sloppy and their conclusions are highly questionable.

Context: In reviewing this Dalrock piece for my last post, I came across a comment from “Lily” that linked to the summary of a book entitled “Why Men Marry Some Women And Not Others.” The book had the provocative (to women) but rather simple (to men) thesis that there are strategies women can employ to increase their likelihood of becoming married, and behavioral traits a woman can exhibit that will greatly increase the chance that a man will want to make her his wife. In other words, girl-game for ladies-in-waiting.

(It’s funny how much crap women at large give the idea of game, when in fact guys teaching other men how to be attractive to the opposite sex is simply copying the blueprint that women have used for generations.)

Dalrock found the piece interesting, but reminded us that “he is going on surveys which have the problem of people answering why they think they did something.”

I have three major objections to this kind of junk science.

1. People can’t predict with their minds how their gut instinct will react to a choice; only when the choice is put in front of them can they be sure what they’ll choose.

As I have commented several times around the Internet: if people could accurately predict their responses to decisions and stimuli, the entire field of research psychology would not exist at all. We wouldn’t have to run experiments to examine how our minds operate if we could just trust people to ascertain and then reveal the exact mechanisms of their operation.

Salesmen understand this as a core aspect of their trade – that customers can be influenced through social traits like reciprocation, likability or social proof to make decisions against their rational self-interest in a dollars-and-cents way. They walk onto the lot to buy one thing, or “just to browse,” and walk out with a purchase. Whether we want to admit it or not, we make decisions with our right brains far more than with our left brains. Rationalization is the art of convincing oneself that you’ve made a left-brain decision when in reality your limbic system did all the work.

Much of research psychology concerns itself with constructing creative head-fake experiments to keep the participants from catching on to what is actually being studied, and thus invoking their rationalization engines. I’m convinced that this focus on actually performing the science is part of the reason so many psychology majors seem wholly clueless as to the actual imperatives of human behavior.

One very famous study, the Milgram experiment, involved telling subjects they were participating in a study of memory when in fact the researchers were examining the response of people to authority when asked to abuse other human beings.

This experiment was spoofed in the opening sequence of Ghostbusters, in which the cynical and opportunistic Peter Venkman hit on a woman while giving electric shocks to examining “the effects of negative reinforcement on ESP ability.” The effects according to the male subject, was “pissing him off.”

His colleague Dr. Egon Spengler performed more sadistically absurdist research in Ghostbusters II, inviting a couple to “marriage counseling” and then forcing them to sit in a waiting room for hours while steadily increasing the temperature in the room.

2. There’s never a true binary choice to be made, the choices are among people with a range of traits we are trying to balance.

A major failure mode of popular studies is trying to examine a trait or a tradeoff in isolation.

Guys get asked stuff like “would you rather have a girlfriend who is sexually attractive or very intelligent?”

I don’t care what your teachers told you, there are stupid questions and this is one of them. People just don’t make decisions based on an isolated factor or pair of factors to the exclusion of everything else. Anybody in the sexual marketplace is looking at a range of traits in each potential partner and trying to balance them to get the optimal combination that’s gettable.

Women get asked stuff like “would you rather date a doctor or an accountant?” It’s impossible to answer the question without considering the other traits of the two men (not that the answer would be expected to be accurate, see point #1 above). What if Bradley Cooper wants to do her taxes and the doctor is C. Everett Koop?

Another silly variant of this binary-choice idea is “all else being equal, would you prefer X or Y?” There aren’t two men of exactly the same personality and job status except one is bald and the other has a mullet, or two women with the same nurturing traits and chocolate addictions but one has big boobs and the other has great legs. You’re going to get bad data if you ask people to choose in the frame of non-existent option spaces.

The one caveat to this is that almost no one will date someone who doesn’t meet a minimum threshold of attractiveness, so that trait absolutely has to be met.

However, the bar for attraction in men is not that high; once you meet that standard, it becomes a battle of relationship fitness. In other words, if you want a relationship with a guy, you don’t have to be hotter than the other girls he’s considering; you just have to be hotter than the least attractive woman he’s willing to be with. Which unless he’s a guy with a lot of options, is usually pretty meager. Hungry men gotta eat and all that.

In short, I’ve very rarely heard of a man who picked the hotter girl for a relationship on that basis. Commitment is earned by others means (see that book about who men want to marry).

On the other hand, modern young women seem to mentally separate men into hopeless betas and dashing alphas at a moment’s notice. Roosh actually just tweeted to that effect tonight: “The game is so fucked up in USA that if you push the wrong button on your phone and accidentally call her, she may write you off completely.” (I have many thoughts on this issue that are better suited to another post – TL;DR: an entire generation with daddy issues.)  This means they price themselves out of the opportunity to take advantage of the wide spread of alpha-beta balance options. So women are often observed to date men of poor long-term fitness, because by the time she’s found a man who meets her attractiveness standards she’s committed herself to sacrificing almost all other considerations. There are men who exhibit a range of tradeoffs between core attraction and comfort traits but most of them are invisible to the Millenial girl.

3. People tell pollsters what they think they should say, and what flatters their own sensibilities and self-concept

Finally, there’s the problem that we don’t want to admit our wicked thoughts to other people. We instinctively want to give answers that fit our egos, that flatter the pollster so we can please them and avoid upturned eyebrows and dirty looks. I’m such a noble person!

Interestingly, I’ve noticed personally that this effect doesn’t disappear when you take away the in-your-face questioner. Even on anonymized Internet surveys or work feedback sheets with no names, I find myself asking “is this how I want to answer this? Am I the type of guy who would say this?”

My experience is backed up by a celebrated study (analysis liked here) that suggested that women dissemble about their partner counts even in anonymous surveys. (The differences in men’s counts were concluded to not be significant.) It appears this effect can be mitigated by introducing the spectre of objective truth via a polygraph or something like it.

JUST SAY NO

So those are three reasons to not put a lot of stock in these person-on-the-street style of surveys, even the ones done in labs under the guidance of PhDs. They don’t qualify as anything close to scientific or even informative; all you get with these studies is a good idea of what people will say when asked questions about a particular topic, not what they really think or how they will truly act.

It’s interesting to note that while we in the Manosphere are quick to criticize women who give rationalized, face-saving and bogus answers to these sorts of surveys or to classic questions like “what do you find attractive in a man,”  in the case above case Dalrock (and me) are calling the veracity of men’s answers into question. (The cheap joke here would be to posit that married men are habituated into saying what women want to hear.) The fact is, however, that there’s only a limited amount of rank dishonesty going on; seriously, what is the overt incentive to lie on a survey? Rather, the nature of the study itself intrinsically taints the results with cognitive biases that are almost unavoidable.  It’s like driving in the snow without chains – it doesn’t matter if you’re a Rain Man level of excellent driver, it’s just a fundamentally flawed setup.

MCA Is Dead, or The Genius Of Sabotage

Word went out Friday that Adam Yauch, of the persona “MCA” in the New York-based white hip-hop-rock trio Beastie Boys, had died after a three-year fight with cancer.

As I discussed in detail in this post and again in this one, I came of musical age in the alternative fever swamp of 1994, an incredible time of musical development and variety, both on the radio and on MTV (which at the time was still playing music videos as a primary service offering). The Beastie Boys were a big part of that, bringing the notoriety of hip-hop to the mainstream in a way that was palatable to rebellious suburban white kids who were more interested in pissing off their parents than idolizing gun-toting drug dealers.

I want to draw some attention to one of the iconic videos of that time, the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage.” Directed by Spike Jonze, the video matched the angry punk-funk-rock energy of the song with a campy pastiche of 70′s cop-shop images billed as a show called Sabotage. The band wigged their hair, put on sunglasses and acted out classic scenes of car chases, violent interrogations, disguises and chasing a target into a swimming pool.

A nice touch was the use of fictional fictional characters, where band members didn’t portray the characters directly but actors playing the characters (“Alasandro Alegre as the Chief…Fred Kelly as Bunny.”) MCA played two of them.

One of the funniest bits in the film was the cops stopping for donuts during the song’s tacit break.

The song (along with Sure Shot and Get It Together) was one of the crown jewels of the band’s 1994 album Ill Communication, easily one of the best records of the era. “Sabotage” is notable for exemplifying several key factors of the alternative breakthrough – the allusion to classic popular culture and past musical styles, the carefully-tweaked and intentional eschewing of production values and pedagogy in favor of lo-fi rawness and fusional music, the lack of self-consciousness, and the willingness to push the envelope. They were guys having fun making music, just like my early-teen band was, and it was easy to feed off of their vibe.

Apropos of nothing, the video formed a visual bookend with the summer blockbuster Pulp Fiction which also featured a campy retro kick.

Fifteen years after getting snubbed in five categories at the MTV Video Music Awards, “Sabotage” was the first winner in the new category of “Best Video (That Should Have Won A Moonman).”

RIP MCA. Thanks for the memories.

Now one more time, MCA come and rock the sure shot:

 

Female-Directed Adult Films Feature More Aggressive Women

Eric Barker muses on a study of male- and female-directed pornography (emphasis his):

We conducted a quantitative analysis of 122 randomly selected scenes from 44 top-renting adult videos in 2005 (half male- and half female-directed). Findings revealed that all films shared similar depictions: Verbal and physical aggression was common, women were the primary targets of aggression, and negative responses to aggression were extremely rare. Compared to male-directed films, female-directed films were significantly more likely to portray women-only scenes and sexual acts. Even when controlling for main characters’ gender, female-directed films showed significantly more female perpetrators aggressing against female targets and significantly more depictions of women as perpetrators of aggression.

To restate the most salient point:

• Even when controlling for the gender of the participants, female-directed porn features significantly more instances of women initiating and escalating.

I take this to mean that in male-female scenes, women are more featured as logistical escalators and sexual perpetrators, and in threesome/group scenes, women are more featured as escalating against each other rather than simply responding to male sexual aggression.

Even with all of my red-pill reading and writing, these results surprised me…I had bought the “conventional wisdom” that female involvement in porn would skew the content towards soft lovemaking, non-aggression, emotional support, relationship commitment, pillow talk, tasty omelettes, you get the idea. I had blocked out the ideas taught to me by the Internet, conversations with women and my own personal experience – that many women want to have dynamic, high-energy sexual experiences, that they often seek playful dominance in the bedroom (disregarding how they conduct themselves in “real life”) and that they will exhibit aggression if there’s enough comfort or lack of judgment to make it safe to do so.

(Incidentally, I think that is what a lot of this cheap alpha hookup sex we’ve been talking so much about provides – when it’s with a guy who is semi-anonymous, and you’re being cheered on by your friends, and there aren’t all these personal commitment expectations swirling around, it’s a lot easier to push your boundaries without being nervous he’s going to judge you or smear your reputation around your social circle.)

One layer of the onion here is the last bit of the abstract:

We highlight the importance of economic forces, rather than director gender, in dictating the content of popular pornography.

I take that to mean “directors give the market what sells, not what they think should sell.” Remember we’re talking about “top-rented” films here, so ipso facto the study results are taken from what the market wants.

We also have to consider that there’s a difference between female-marketed pornography and female-produced pornography. A woman behind the camera isn’t necessarily only seeking to address female interests in her craft. We do have to note selection bias…the type of woman who wants to direct an overtly pornographic film is herself more interested in graphic depictions of sex than in the romance-novel style of emotional pornography through the written word. And there’s probably a sex-poz feminist streak in those directors as well, which motivates them to portray women as sexually alive and assertive rather than following a man’s lead. In this way, some of these films are sexually political in nature.

Another question: are these results a matter of director gender itself, or are there underground factors that indirectly link director gender to other factors which themselves correlate to the artistic and character style of the movie? Perhaps certain movie houses that happen to cater to certain tastes also happen to have a gender skew on their film staff? It could also be the case that women engaging in girl-on-girl or fem-dom roles on film are more comfortable working with female directors, and the director gender is instead a proxy for the preferences of the actors and the needs of the script rather than being a determiner of those things.

There’s also the matter of how much influence the director has on what goes on in the movie. Is the director an auteur of sorts who controls all creative aspects of the film? Or is the director simply blocking and filming the scenes that a separate producer and screenwriter have already planned out, like a high school theater teacher bringing Guys and Dolls to the local stage? My knowledge of the operations of the porn industry is slim, so I’m guessing this varies by studio, size of project, and the director in question.

At Least She Values Literacy

From the always-educational Texts From Last Night:

All I want is for every tall lanky young guy who is reading in a Starbucks to go balls deep in me. That’s all.

Going to start doing more of my reading at coffee shops and pubs.

Tom Leykis Returns To The Radio Today

Not too much to add to the headline, but radio host Tom Leykis is returning to the business starting today (if I recall correctly, the day after his contract with CBS Radio was up) in an Internet-only format. Details are available at http://blowmeuptom.com/The_Tom_Leykis_Show.html and the direct streaming link is here. Start times are slated for 3PM PT/6PM ET.

Tom, who went off the air in February 2009 when his flagship station switched formats, was without a doubt the best-known public promoter of the so-called Marriage Strike*. A four-time divorcee, Leykis asserted that men could get almost all the benefits of marriage without actually marrying, and advised marriage only for couples who wanted to have children.

Leykis promoted a series of dating rules for young men known as “Leykis 101,” including such tips as don’t date single mothers, never spend more than $40 on a date (zero is optimal), always wear a condom, and stop dating her if she won’t sleep with you by date #3.

He’s never used the game terms like alpha and beta (and now that I think about it I’m not sure he ever once mentioned Neil Strauss or Mystery on the air), but he is an original red-piller and has long been spot-on in identifying and correcting the most common flaws and mistakes of men in the SMP – boners like scarcity mentality, getting too “cuddly,” eschewing manliness, playing the chump, marrying too early and not focusing on their life dreams. He also frequently cited structural and social roadblocks to male actualization, including divorce law, high-pressure religious dogmas, entitled women, cultural trends towards feminizing society and popular culture that shamed masculinity.

He billed himself as “the father you never had” and was often greeted by callers with “hello Dad,” a trend that followed from his assertion that the generation of men listening to his show were raised without fathers or with weak fathers.

Crudity was a key part of his radio program shtick. He disposed of callers by “blowing them up” (a sound effect of a bomb going off) or “taking them out” in a style such as Kurt Cobain (a shotgun blast), Kobe (an apologetic clip of Bryant speaking about his wife overlaid with the sounds of rough sex) or “with a bong hit” (self-explanatory). ”Flash Friday” was a feature where listeners were encouraged to turn on their headlights, and female listeners to flash said drivers.

Leykis was also known to the public at large for revealing the identities of Kobe Bryant sexual-assault accuser Kate Faber, Duke lacrosse rape hoax false accuser Crystal Mangum, teacher Mary Kay Letourneau’s underage partner, and a Pacific Northwest man who died after an incident involving bestiality. In more shocking legal matters, Leykis was the recipient of an on-air murder confession by a Phoenix-area nurse who killed a former one-night stand who refused to pay child support. I’ve heard the tape, it’s really messed up stuff, and the Arizona police located the woman but were unable to proceed with the case because the records of the “suicide” as it had been classified had been destroyed.

His interview with Kay Hymowitz (discussed here) was my first exposure to her silliness. He also provided my blog with lulz via his self-satiric conversation with Betty, an obviously drunk woman from West Virginia.

I feel like I have to say this or I’ll get typed as buying Leykis’ act and his points hook line and sinker, and the softer elements of my readership will be put off – he has a lot of wise things to say, but I don’t take him totally seriously, because I know there’s some intentional hyperbole to generate notoriety and get listeners. Gruff and uncompromising on the air, Leykis was shown to be considerably warmer and more genial in other environs, which suggests a lot of his persona is a self-styled caricature. He was always open about the fact that he was optimizing for revenue. Sometimes it’s good to just laugh at some outrageous stuff for a fun time. Leykis also took a lot of calls from women who liked either his personality or the arguments he was making.

I’m curious to see how he reopens these male-interest topics. A lot has happened in the area of male writing and media since The Professor’s been gone. (Actually, come to think of it, some of the more media-savvy members of the Manosphere might want to try to get in touch with his people and maybe get on the air. Dalrock, Dr Tara J Palmatier and Roosh would all make fascinating guests.)

*I neither endorse nor oppose a Marriage Strike – Dalrock has shown via statistics that a widespread marriage strike is not happening and not likely to happen.