Death Is Bad

This graphic is both interesting and saddening. Take a look at the webpage on the left side first, then look over to the right for breakdown.

It’s interesting that Baby Boomers (or at least those in the study) have not yet adapted their internet-looking behavior to disregard common places for ads. This brings up the question of whether this is because it becomes harder to adapt as one ages (which would be sad and scary), or because older people simply don’t spend as much time reading online, and therefore haven’t had enough stimuli to form the avoidance behavior yet.

It’s sad because it points out another cost of advertising that I hadn’t consciously thought of before – reduced screen real-estate. Despite my screens continuing to get larger over time, the screen-space keep feeling smaller! This is likely one reason why – I never look to the side-bars anymore.

Which can be really annoying sometimes. On more than one occasion on reddit I was told the answer to my question was “in the sidebar”. And I was like “WTF? What sidebar? I looked all over the… ooooooohhh… right, THAT thing!” The sidebar had disappeared from my attention so thoroughly that I forgot it was a place I could look to if I was looking for information on-screen.

This is a damned tragedy. If I could pay $10-$15/month to a micro-transaction service that split that among all the websites I visited, and get that screen real-estate back, I’d gladly do so. Unfortunately the only way to make that work is if everyone else online also does so, and that’s a coordination problem we can’t tackle (yet?). /sigh. You win this round, Moloch!

Lately I’ve been seeing more and more of a certain “insult”, which is so bizarre I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around it. That insult is “cuck”, and seems to be used exclusively by the MRA/PUA-types.

What makes an insult hurtful? Obviously it’s not the sound of the letters. It must come with emotional pre-loaded into the word due to social context. I noted previously that slurs like “nigger” or “cunt” have a history of violence and state-sanctioned terror associated with them, which is why they are particularly harmful. But even mild insults like “stupid” or “ugly” are attempts to hurt someone, by making others who hear the insult think less of the target. Someone who is stupid makes a poor ally. Someone who is ugly makes a poor mate. Such allegations, if taken seriously, could damage one’s future prospects.

So how does the term “cuck” hurt someone?

Cuck is short for cuckold. Which, in today’s common usage, means a man whose Significant Other has sexually cheated on him. I find it very counter-intuitive that this would be a slur against the man. (For simplicity, I will refer to the SO as the “wife” from now on, though I don’t think the couple necessarily has to be married. They do have to be a male/female couple though, as we’ll see later).

What does it say about a person if their partner has cheated on them? Well, generally, that their relationship is experiencing extreme difficulty, to the point of collapse. This could be caused by all sorts of factors. Maybe there’s been a recent death in the family. Or a financial stressor is making life difficult. Perhaps the couple has been together for so long that they’ve grown in different directions, and no longer have much in common, but they have unwisely chosen to stay together anyway due to social pressures and are unhappy about it. Maybe one of them has developed a substance addiction which the other one is unhappy with. Or has spent so much time pursuing a career that the partner has been neglected for a long time, and the two of them don’t have strong enough communications skills/protocols to deal with this. There is a near-endless list of possible factors, and often more than one is in play anyway. This makes the insult “cuck” reduce to “your life is difficult in some way, and you aren’t good at dealing with it as a couple!” which… is really too vague to be a good insult. Plus it doesn’t really make the target look bad to outside observers, just unfortunate.

OR it could imply that a couple has differing levels of sexual desire and/or incompatible sexual tastes. AND, in addition, they were bad at discovering this (or unwisely ignored it) before they made a very long-term commitment, AND they were too conformist to adopt an open marriage, AND they forced themselves to stay in the marriage rather than moving on for far too long. This does, indeed, show bad judgement! However, I don’t think this is what the insult is angling for. If you want to insult someone’s judgement-making-skills, the old-school term “idiot” does so very well. And “cuck” is very sexually-specific, which is just weird. Why focus so much on bad judgement in sexual terms, rather than just bad judgement in general? The former is less likely to be a liability in an ally.

It’s a very mystifying insult, until you look at the people who are using it. Then much is revealed.

The people who use this term are almost always from the Men’s Rights Activist / Pick-up Artist / Gamer Gate section of society. While not all these people are sexist, much of the ideology they hail from is. If you read through their screeds, you pick up a crazed view of human sexuality. Men are divided into two sets – Alphas, who are intrinsically attractive to women, and Betas, who are intrinsically unattractive, but can buy sex with promises of support (financial, emotional, or other). (there is a third class, the Gammas, who aren’t worth talking about because they serve the same role as the Untouchables in any caste system). Women are all of a single type – they want Alpha dick for pleasure, and they want Beta support for child-raising. Women’s winning strategy is to marry a Beta as a provider, give him as little sex as possible (since it’s so unpleasurable), and whenever possible to get pleasurable sex by cheating with an Alpha.

(For reference, the sexual strategy proposed by these groups is to either A) pose as an Alpha, to trick women into sleeping with you, or B) impose extreme personal controls on women so they are unable to cheat)

Thus the power of the word “cuck” as an insult is made clear. It says, foremost, that the man is not an Alpha. (That in itself is not a big deal, because these groups all admit that not being an Alpha isn’t that big a deal, very very few people are, and certainly no one that needs to come to their website to read this advice.) Far more importantly – it says that the target of the insult has failed in his duty as a Beta to police his wife’s life. He has allowed her to get out of hand, running around and sleeping with an Alpha, while he continues to provide her with support. Like a chump. Like a pussy-whipped loser. Like a cuck.

The world view that makes this word an insult is appallingly toxic. It makes women something between property and whore. It makes men helpless economic slaves. They are controlled by their dicks, and can only wrest back this control by controlling the dick-pleasuring-object. No wonder these men hate women! They must live in fear their whole lives. And being called a “cuck” is an attempt channel that fear into a hurtful word. It is a reminder that one is powerless, and intrinsically undesirable.

I think that’s why these people have latched onto this word. It actually means something to them. But to anyone who isn’t drowning in a sea of sexism, it’s just bizarre. I used to think seeing that insult was just a weird, harmless quirk. It was like being called a honkey. Um… OK? But now I know better. Now, when I see someone use the insult “cuck”, I feel sorry for them. It’s one of those weird insults that makes the user look pitiful to onlookers, rather than the target. I guess that’s a kind of poetic justice all its own.

[edit: I suppose I’m also a bit disgusted, by the implication that the man was too lax (and possibly not violent enough) in policing the woman]

Artsy-fartsy awards are often derided by their critics as out-of-touch with the mass of humanity, and therefore inconsequential. “If you don’t nominate super-best-selling writer X, then there is obviously something wrong with you, and you’re relegating yourself to irrelevance,” they say. In response, the snooty art people will point to the current super-popular but low-quality phenomenon, most recently 50 Shades of Grey, and warn that following the mob leads into a slide to that Gomorrah.

I’m mostly side with the fancy-pants guys, but I have to say – popularity is a type of quality in its own right. Because humans are social creatures, and if something is popular than it can be used as a social hub. There is a lot to be said in favor of something that entertains and is accessible to a large enough swath of the population that people can talk about it freely. It gives us something in common, and any common bonds we can forge with others in a society as divided and socially-isolated as ours is a major asset. You may think that Muslim lady in her hijab looks weird and off-putting, but as soon as you realize that you both love Game of Thrones and get to fanboy/girling over the latest episode, you suddenly feel a lot closer to her. And now her culture isn’t so alien after all – she’s another human, like you, and she also thinks Jorah is tedious and can we just kill him off already?

Reading is very isolating activity. You can’t really do it with other people. The best you can do is find other people who’ve also read what you have, and talk with them about it. This is why I’m in a book club. I like to talk about what I love with others. But due to how much time it takes to read a book, and how many books are published every year, it is extremely unlikely you’ll find anyone who’s read the same books as you, unless they are extremely popular. (or you pre-coordinated, via a club) Connecting with people-in-general via written fiction is very hard.

So I get annoyed when people say “the book was better.” You know how many people I could talk about the Song of Ice and Fire books with, IRL? Maybe a dozen hardcore fantasy readers. You know how many I can talk with, now that it’s a hugely popular HBO series? ALMOST EVERYONE. Any time something greatly broadens the audience that a work gets, it is improving that work along the “popularity” axis, even if it reduces it in other ways. Very often the overall value is improved even if the artistic value is diminished.

Honestly, my dream is to some day be involved in producing something that spins off uncounted transformative works. Cosplay, music videos, fanfiction, fanart, whatever. That is engagement with other people. That is what really matters. So sure, maybe 50 Shades of Grey is meh-quality moderately-popular fanfiction that was marketed heavily, and doesn’t “deserve” to be as popular as it is. But it IS popular, and that is valuable by itself. Don’t denigrate it.

(of course, don’t give it literary awards either. Those aren’t meant to judge that particular type of quality, we have best-seller lists for that)

I was a HUGE Xenite back in the day. One might say I was a hard-core nutball. And I was super-excited to hear that the new Xena series is going to let Xena and Gabby out of the closet! But here’s a strange conundrum… is the new Xena less progressive than the old?

The original show put on a charade of “two single, straight women.” But anyone who watched the show could see Xena and Gabby were lovers. So in practice they were shown to be two bisexual poly women in a committed, long-term, and open relationship. They had occasional flings, and even serious secondary relationships. That’s actually still pretty uncommon on TV today.

If the new show goes with an overt lesbian relationship, that’s certainly more progressive than the original Xena’s mask of “two straight women.” But I suspect that they would no longer be in an open relationship, because I don’t think NBC would be OK with that. Which is actually a step back, right? The monogamy myth gets reinforced again. To say nothing of bi-erasure.

Of course the key aspect of Xena & Gabby’s relationship was that it was between Xena and Gabrielle. That is the most important part to keep. It’s the part I’m super-excited for! :)

But there are far fewer poly relationships shown in the media than lesbian ones. A lesbian couple isn’t that big a deal nowadays. So for NBC to neuter the poly aspects of their relationship, to make the couple more palatable to mass audiences, is actually counter-progressive. I find it ironic that this erasure is being done in the name of progressivism.

But then again, the only reason the original series got away with it in the first place was because the whole thing was (nominally) closeted. It’s a strange world we live in.

In the late 80s and early 90s, there was a mini-baby boom, as the original Baby Boomer generation reached their peak reproducing years. This has been called the “Echo Boom”. The Oct 1995 issue of American Demographics identified 1989-1993 as the peak birth years of the Echo Boom. We know them today as Millennials.

Aproximately 18 years later, in 2008, the Baby Boomers tanked the world economy in an orgy of greed and stupidity that we now call the ’08 Financial Crisis, leading to the Great Recession, which we are still climbing out of. Right about the time that the peak-years Millennials were graduating high school.

I was born in 1980, which puts me on the cusp of Gen X and Millennial. I’ve been grouped into both, and I don’t fully feel a part of either one. But I do have close ties with many Millennials, and I’ll say this – they are the hardest working group of people I’ve ever met. They are passionate, they pursue their dreams, and they don’t expect any financial reward. They’ve come to accept that you generally don’t get paid to be creative or innovative. You struggle to get by, and spend your spare energy on bettering yourself, and hope that maybe someday in the future it’ll pay off. I admire the hell out of them.

But what do they get from the Boomer generation? Even from the older Gen X generation? Nothing but derision. They’ve been called entitled, self-absorbed, and sissies. Their fashion-choices, many driven by an actual lack of money, are sneered at as “hipster” and “poor-envy.” Their lack of opportunity is portrayed as a lack of ambition.

This demographic swell has inherited the worst economy in decades. They are coming out of higher education with crippling debt-loads that earlier generations don’t seem to comprehend. They are expected to work for years with no pay for the “experience” or “exposure”, since they can’t get jobs without those, despite their degrees. And then they’re called lazy and entitled by the very people who put them in this shitty situation. They are playing extremely well, considering the hand they were dealt.

And now the older generation is surprised that a crazy-eyed firebrand speaking to the young people is surging in popularity? That a man promising to end their student debt, and disrupt the wealth disparity that forces them to work for nothing while the old guard who sneer at them rake in millions, is evoking such passionate support? Face it old folks – you done fucked up. Bernie Sanders is the voice of the surging tide you created. And while I personally have doubts he’ll crest this year, the tide is only going to keep getting stronger. Expect the game to change, and learn to swim.