January 2013 Review

Eight per cent of the year over already. I finished January with a nasty bout of food poisoning that started the evening of Saturday 26th and had me on a telephone consultation with my GP late Monday morning after a visit to the Teddington Walk-In Centre. If you have never had food poisoning, you have no idea what I went through: if you have, you do. It leaves you weak, distrusting food, dehydrated and wondering if all of your life has been a vain effort at nothing. I cancelled a massage I had booked that Monday evening, got hit with a cancellation charge, told them to keep the appointment open and made it. I found out which muscles in my right arm were tense so that my right elbow was hurting, and that there was some knotted stuff in my left shoulder that made it a little unstable when bench-pressing. Not sure that the guy did much to fix it though. A couple of mornings later I woke up and my arm was tense and sore, which it hadn't been the previous night: aha! I'm clenching my fist in my sleep. I am going to be taping up my right hand lightly each night for a while to discourage it from clenching. 

I bought three new pairs of flat-front wool trousers and four blue shirts for work, all from T M Lewin, and it's a much cleaner look. The trousers are 37" waist, two inches thinner than the previous pairs I bought about three years ago. I got a decent haircut at Huckle The Barber to go with all that as well.

I shifted my eating habits: I have a sandwich at 11:00, take a lunch break at 13:00 when I buy another sandwich, but I don't eat it until 15:00. I don't feel as dopey in the early afternoon. Instead of sitting in a cafe, and despite the fact that it's been freaking cold, I've been taking some walks: it's really not that far down to the Thames and back and it makes me feel like I'm in the real world for a while.

I've talked about the preview visit to The Shard, with lunch at Mildred's in Soho afterwards, and let's add in Django Unchained, McCullin, Looper and Gangster Squad as well. Sis and I had our monthly supper at Skylon, and I had a month-end lunch at St John Bread and Wine, and I'm sure it wasn't the deep-fried rabbit that did the harm. Maybe the test results will show. 

I'm stuck on the Ezra Pound's final Cantos: the Pisan and later are nowhere near as comprehensible as the earlier ones. All that polyglot stuff is just showing off - like people who quote "from the original". As soon as those are done, I'm moving on to Musil to get one of my objectives started.

Training has been iffy because of the arms, and delayed by the food poisoning: you do not lift weights when de-hydrated. 

In summary, I have been experimenting with my daily routine until I can get more zip back, and I have done some stuff "just because".  The CV and agent mailing is pretty much drafted. I'm clearer on the terms I want to go back into dating and whatever else. I'm still not sure about the logistics, but I did give myself the first three months to sort this stuff out. 

And everything you have read about the benefits of magnesium oil rubbed on your skin (aka "topical magnesium") is true. Works for me. Not sure what 200mg is, but I put three spritzes on each leg and rub in. Leg because there's less between the skin and the bloodstream: don't want to be running it in on fat. Sleeping better and feeling... calmer, more whole.

Views From The Shard: Part Two

The owners were having trade-related folk through to debug the whole process and get the staff used to the procedures. The Shard is the only super-tall office building, along with the Heron Tower with an observation floor in London - you can't go up One Canada Square, and the Heron Tower and Tower 42 aren't quite in the same league. The lifts whizz up in two stages and the final ascent is made by stairs. You can go out into the open air, as you could on the World Trades, but I found it all a bit too exciting when I tried - I've had my feet on the ground for too long and I'm not good with heights any more. People were playing "Spot the landmark" and "I can see my flat from here", and on a clear day I'm fairly sure I could see Hilltop House. Not that Saturday, as it was all a little misty as well as being very cold and windy. We stayed up there over an hour and barely noticed the time passing.

Views From The Shard: Part One

My sister works in the designing-your-expensive-Head-Office business, and can gaze across London from her office windows, point at various landmark buildings and say "we did floors in that one, that one, that one..." - which is a pretty neat connection to have with one of the greatest cities in the world. The firm isn't in The Shard yet, no-one is, as the landlords are playing it very close for fear of having salesmen camping outside their doors. Everyone wants to be The First In The Shard.

Being in the trade, Sis got hold of the chance to buy two preview tickets (yea! In before Boris!) the other weekend and so off we went. I even took the 1100D along and at times it shows. If you get the chance or the notion... go, but book in advance.

As ever, click on the photographs to see the originals which have way more detail. I'll say a bit more about the visit in the next post.

Evo-Psycho vs Economics As Explanation: Part Two

Misandrist feminism was a free-rider in all this. It was Capital and State that needed women in the workforce in the 1970's and modified the laws accordingly. Militant feminism never was effective: women over thirty got the vote in 1918 because their actions in the 1914-18 War made the rhetoric that denied them the vote embarrassing. They didn't get it because Emily Davison stepped in front of a horse at the Epsom Derby. But militant feminism makes great press. There has always been a shrewish strain in the female population, and now it was being paid: the shrews grabbed the stand-up mic, the documentary and the pop-sociology book. What no-one knew was that under the cover of pop-culture, misandrist feminists would execute entrist tactics into the "women's issues" industry and embed sexist misandry into family law, social work, child protection and in some companies, HR policy.

At the same time, the value and number of full-salary jobs was declining. The price of family-sized houses was going up, pushing the cost of a traditional life up, and the opportunities for starting one at a sensible age were getting smaller. Even if the boys wanted to be traditional men, many of them could not afford it, and even if they could, there wasn't always a girl who wanted to be a traditional woman available at the right time. In the meantime, why not party a while longer? Or go for the promotion? With fewer people saving for capital outlays in the near future, there was more disposable income for partying, holidays and toys. The dark secret that office work was a damn sight easier than running a home and raising a child was out in the light by the mid-1980's. Wife or career-girl? Gee, that's a tough call. By the late 1990's any attempt to tell girls that a sensible aim on leaving education was not a career but a husband would have been answered by a swift economic explanation involving salaries, house prices, inflation and the difficulty a young man has of ever earning enough to support a wife and family in the traditional way.

I'm not suggesting that the fact you can't get laid except by flakey, slightly overweight entitlement princesses is one giant conspiracy between Barclays Bank, Tesco and Camden Social Services. Those guys are quick-response reactionaries, not revolutionaries. I am suggesting that most of the changes in the behaviour of women can be explained by reactions to economic change, to fit in with what was presented in the pop-culture as the prevailing, or perhaps cutting-edge, mores, and to react rationally to what they saw in their own families. I'll go with this kind of explanation any time. It's messy, and that's one of its advantages. It doesn't immediately suggest a way to Make Everything Right Again, which is always suspicious in a supposedly descriptive theory. 

This is the future for the Anglosphere. Nothing has changed, it's just got honest. This is how women always wanted to behave. Turns out they are every bit the same bunch of thoughtless, selfish, mixed-strength assholes than men always were. And that's what disappoints the guys in the Manosphere, who for some reason thought they could expect something rather better. Because they believed the hype. Which is where the Red Pill / Blue Pill thing comes from.

So what's an honest, decent man to do? He stays single, unless he meets That Special Woman^TM. Since that is by definition unlikely (I couldn't even tell you what I would look for), and since he's not dead yet, he will want to get laid, so he needs some kind of Game. Whatever works for him. And contraceptives. He will work out, read, travel and have creative pastimes. He will understand that everything the girls say and do is intended to advance their class and personal interests, and therefore anything they say can be dismissed as a kind of propaganda. He won't bother with pop-culture opinion columnists, whom he knows make careers on fake controversy. He will aim to learn about and appreciate the Real Thing, and leave the latest entertainment industry sensation to the girls and children.

He will also understand that, no matter how the girl he is trying to Game appears to him, she is, in her eyes, an honest decent girl trying to answer the same question. She too will stay single, unless she meets That Special Man^TM. Since that is by definition unlikely, and since she's not dead yet, she wants to get laid, have someone to take her out and pay her attention, so she needs some kind of Game. Too many girls think that their Game consists of showing up. It doesn't. But that's another story.

Sometimes neither have any success. The guy will shrug his shoulders and split, muttering something about how awful girls are. The girl will  split and mutter something about how awful men are. He will blog about it, she will Facebook it. Somewhere in the back of their minds will be the thought "at least I'm not stuck with a child and someone I don't actually care much about, like my parents were". 

And because they can't afford their own place, they will have flat- or house-mates waiting to chat to them and share a late-night vodka. Their parents had their own places, and were lonely.

Evo-Psycho vs Economics As Explanation: Part One

The Manosphere loves Evo-Psycho. I don't. It's unfalsifiable to the N-th degree, pseudo-science right up there with psychoanalysis and String Theory. It's an ideology, an interpretive framework within which one can make sense of seemingly random events and outcomes. It makes no predictions, but it's damn good, in skilled hands, at making anything seem as if it was the most obvious and natural thing to happen. That's why it seems so hard to actually refute it. Evo-psychos never make predictions, they only explain.

When it comes to stuff like this, I'm with the old school guys. Follow the money, follow the power, follow the twisting curves that is the development of Capitalism. Look for the expression of class interest and at the logic of the relevant social structures and institutions, and at the influences of pop culture (itself a product of Capital) as well as those Four Horsemen of Social Apocalypse: Church, State, School and Parents. Regard people as problem-solvers making use of these institutions to advance their self-interest within whatever random rules they have picked up, and with whatever random talents, gifts and advantages they may have been born with or into. Also I hold that inter-sexual differences are smaller than intra-sexual differences, mod reproduction-related issues. In other words, given any asshole-like behaviour by men, you can find a woman who's a bigger asshole, and given any saintly behaviour by women, you can find a man who's a better saint.

So here's my version. Economic development in Western Capitalism reached a stage around the late 1960-s where there was not enough labour to do all the work that could be done, and that many of the jobs being created were not congenial to most men and didn't quite add enough value to justify a full male salary. In addition, the State - even in America - was creating a large number of welfare-related social services jobs that definitely did not add a male salary's value, and so both the State and Capital needed more women in the workforce. Hence the changes in employment legislation in the 1970's. In a very short time, basically between 1970 and 1979 in the large towns, girls went from seeking marriage to seeking A Flat Of Their Own.

They did so for three reasons. Girls aren't stupid. They can see when their parents aren't happy, and they could figure out that it was being forced to live together well after the initial attraction had faded that was the cause. It's men who bang on about the Old Days when Gramma and Gramps Toughed It Out and Stayed Together, not women. Women don't want to live like that for a moment longer than they need to, as they proved when no-fault divorce was introduced. So a lot of girls simply don't have the stars in their eyes in the first place.

Pop-culture hyped the benefits and joys of independence. It did so because it saw girls going into jobs rather than marriages when they left university, realised that there was a market there - all the single ladies spend, spend, spend, a value second only to the Pink Pound - and mirrored those girls back to themselves. Other girls read the same magazines, thought it looked like fun, and followed on. In case you guys think that's an unrealistic assumption of naivety and influence, where did your friends get their Blue-pill ideas from?

Third, who the heck said that women ever wanted to be married and raise children? It just looks that way because it worked out that way before The Pill. Gramma just wanted to fool around, did so for a while, and then the inevitable happened and Gramps did the right thing and married her. What we know from the introduction of no-fault divorce and reasonably well-paid jobs for women after the 1970's is that it isn't men who want to live alone with their cats, it's women. It isn't men who set up impossible ideals for a potential partner as a way of hiding the fact they don't really want one, it's women. And it's both sexes who are happy to screw around, especially if there's no chance of pregnancy.

I Could Have Screwed Up Royally...But I Didn't

So where are we, now that we're back where we started?

I'm one of the people who lives for sensations and pleasures, and I was somehow smart enough in my teenage years, reading Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas as it came out in Rolling Stone, to realise that if I let myself go to those sensations, if I ever found a drug that got me out of it, then I was not coming back again. I channeled it into the abstract thought of philosophy and mathematics, and taught myself to appreciate jazz and composed music. That's where I get my kicks. I understood somehow, from somewhere, about "the pram in the hallway", long before reading the book. I knew from when I was five or six that I never was going to get married, and I have never changed my mind. I have wanted to get laid, I have wanted a girlfriend, I have wanted a "relationship", but never in the depths of any misery did I ever want to be married. I could cite my Chinese horoscope, which has a strong Rat influence: we Rats never get into anything we can't get out of. Or I could just accept that I'm an addict with the sense and luck to stay away from the really destructive addictions.

Like many young men, but not the majority of them, I had a long and painful dry spell when I should have been getting laid regularly. This gave me a bitter view of the world: women were the enemy, because they had what I wanted and wouldn't let me at it. At some point this passed, and I think it was in my late twenties, when I started working and did get laid now and again. It didn't take a lot to make me feel way better. Then all the other stuff happened. I knew the girls wanted some kind of relationship that I wasn't able to provide, and because I didn't understand much about myself, I thought that was my failing. I was "wrong". And that was where we came in.

I could have screwed up my life a dozen ways and royally each one. I could be twice-divorced with three estranged kids: two from the first marriage, one from the second. I could be a suffering alcoholic - though I would be long dead by now. I could have been a drug addict - and even longer dead. I could have picked up the gambling bug, but the last races I went to, one horse didn't make it out of the stall, and one lost a shoe on the way down to the stall. I stopped after that. I would have needed a big win to get hooked, and I never had one. I've survived some nasty bouts of unemployment that sent my career back to zero when I was forty and then fifty. I climbed back out and have had my nose above water for a while now. I've even survived a car crash that other people thought would have killed the occupants.

I used to think I messed-up my career, and while I made some dumb moves in my first job, but after that, I didn't. I know now that strong corporate careers need a lot of energy and people skills, as well as a capacity to do stuff now that you believe may not pass the Regulator in the future. I don't have that energy, and I don't have that temperament. For many years my intellectual thinking was confused, first by hormones and then by booze. It was only when I got sober and calmed down that I began to be able to think clearly. In a great many ways, I am in better shape now than I was when I was thirty. Just not as pretty.

It is, all in all, a freaking miracle I am still standing at all, let alone standing as tall as I am. When my energy levels are up, I can carry on with life and feel okay. I look confident, I don't feel down, but look at what I do, at how I live, and you will see that really I scuttle from home to work to gym to home and that's basically it. I haven't approached a woman in years, nor tried to find another job, nor, well, anything outside the scuttle-path. Either I've decided to retire early, or something is still wrong, or it's just plain time I got off the bench.

This has been one looonnnnggg investigation of the idea that "something is still wrong". I mean, of course, on one level, there is something wrong. I'm an addict, alcoholic and ACoA, and I'm pretty sure others would add other non-flattering adjectives. I am not going to do trust, fun, intimacy^TM, authority figures or relaxing, and I am going to take myself too seriously (whatever that means). I was never going to be a great father, nor anyone's loving husband. I get bored way, way too quickly for that. I can't be anyone's rescuer or amateur therapist, and I'm no-one's mentor or guide. I'm not that promotable, and I have no desire to slave-drive younger people (aka a "motivational manager") or sell clients something they don't really need (aka "consultancy").

Well, this is "wrong" to a gold-digger / husband-seeker / status-groupie / princess / career-girl / entitled-wall-slammer-in-denial. It's also not what the older woman wanting a substitute father for the kids / replacement husband / fund to pay off the debts (all aka "someone to share my life with") is after either. And in London, those groups make a lot of the female population. Fine, at my age and hormone level I can live without them. The task is to find a woman who isn't one of them, ask her to join me for coffee so we can engage in mutual inspection and see if we can keep a reasonable conversation going for twenty minutes. If so, I'll follow up with an actual date. And I'm talking 30-45 here (probably 35-45, the 30-35 is aspirational). How do I have the temerity to aim there? 

So there's this twenty-seven year old at work I have a crush on. (I always have a crush on one of the girls at work. It occupies those feelings with someone unavailable. It reminds me I'm alive.) Except she doesn't yet realise she's attracted back (Girls! Sooooo in touch with their feeeelings). Her friend can see the attraction, and has made indirect jokes about it a couple of times. I am not going to make a move, because work, and because I don't want to deal with someone who can't recognise her own feelings, and who is just a little bit of a princess. The point is, those girls don't see me as their kindly Uncle. They see me as a viable man. Otherwise I would have heard "Eeeeugh" noises.

So it's about getting my Game going. 

Finally, I Understand "Normal" - And It Isn't Pretty

I had a cold around that time, and did I ever write some even more depressed stuff on it. I will spare you. Then I read this...

"Girls back home never could stand the fact that I was different. Before I had tits I was a misfit...who liked to read and watch horror movies...They teased me and made fun of me, but didn't give me much thought. Once the hormones kicked in, that's when I became a genuine threat. It wasn't just that I loved sex, it was the fact that I didn't use it as a bargaining chip. I didn't want to trade it for a house and a mess of kids. I actually enjoyed it for its own sake. For that, all the girls hated me. Boys on the other hand, they loved me. That is, until reality kicked in, and they traded me in for a more sensible, wife-worthy model." (Christa Faust, Money Shot, pp119-20 Hard Case Crime edition.)

That, right there, is almost the entire Manosphere - Feminist / Mars - Venus / Slut - Wife / Fundamentalist Religion - Socialist Atheist thing in a  nutshell. Ms Faust's website is here and she looks pretty darn funky to me, but I doubt I could hold her attention for very long, plain commuter guy that I am. The point is, she's an actual woman, not a guy with a pen-name.

Because if she was a guy with a pen-name, that quote could be dismissed as loser male cynicism. Since she isn't, there are three possibilities: first, Ms Faust doesn't mean it, it really is fictional; second, this is an idea that all sexually over-sensitive / over-powered / obsessed people, female as well as male, have about the Straights; third, it's true. I'm going with the second and third.

"It wasn't just that I loved sex, it was the fact that I didn't use it as a bargaining chip. I didn't want to trade it for a house and a mess of kids. I actually enjoyed it for its own sake. For that, all the girls hated me." For someone who regards sex as a complex and many-faceted pleasure that is enough in and of itself, the idea that it would be used to manage one's partner is almost morally repulsive. Who would do that, and why? 

I have puzzled, as have many, over the answer to that question for a long time. In the depths of a dry spell as a younger man, the answer was "manipulative bitches who don't have the capacity to love". Dry spells do brutal things to a boy's world view. It won't do as a considered answer, especially as there are women who like sex for its own sake, and I did meet a few. What's puzzling is why almost all men should think there is nothing wrong with women using sex to manage them, as they must, or there would be rude words to name the women who did it. But there aren't. It is regarded as natural and maybe even desirable. Most men go along with it. Shall I say that again? The vast majority of men consider that it is entirely natural, right and proper for women to use sex to manage them. 

At this point, someone could say "Blue Pill / Red Pill. Duh!" That's all too much tied into Evo-Psycho for me. I prefer to look to the way we experience and interpret the world on a very fundamental level. Of course I would, I'm a philosopher. I suggest that folk like me, Ms Faust and some of the Manosphere guys, are very differently wired from the Straights.

We are people for whom living is aesthetic, about sensation, feeling and thought, intensity, variety, being lost in a moment, enchanted by a detail, when someone's smile can be the high point of a day. The way we live can often look slightly addict-y, exactly because those sensations are a kind of High. We seek out sensations from whatever our preferred sources are, and those are the reasons for our actions. Why do we do what we do? Because it feels good. (Note: not because it is "satisfying", "fulfilling", "meaningful" or any of that morality disguised as psychobabble. I said "feels good" and that's what I meant.)

The Straights aren't like that. They are all about relationships with other people. Their reasons have to do with co-operation, competition, sabotage, status and display, about recognition and help from, or victory or control over, other people. They do stuff because it creates, develops or changes a relationship with someone. So for a Normal Person^TM everything is about managing, competing with, manipulating or using other people. That's why Normal Men don't find it odd that Normal Women should want to manage them with sex. It's all just part of the drama and content of their lives.

Sick, isn't it?

What's worse is that under the guise of "psychotherapy" and other related witchcrafts, they try to shame us into being Normal People^TM, by telling us we are sad and miserable, empty and unable to have intimate relationships, and lacking in meanignful and fulfilling occupations. Don't we want to be married and have children? Don't we want the relatives round for Christmas? Don't we want to celebrate our birthdays with everyone in our mobile phone? Don't we want to toss frisbees on the beach and play mixed touch rugby? Don't we want to live like them? No. We Bloody Well Do Not. And within short order, they are reduced to shaming.

Oh. And if you find yourself asking "But why are you after sensation, instead of entering into human relations? What went wrong?" then you are still caught in their, or still exercising your own native, shaming mode. Nothing went wrong. We were made Ferrari's, and Normals^TM were made, well, Volkswagens. What's wrong is if we try to carry the baggage for their family holiday to the house at the end of the dirt track. Not where we're at our best. Just like the Normals^TM are not suitable for abstract thought, scientific, technological and medical discovery, sustained creativity, problem-solving and single-task focus. That's our stuff.

So we're nearly there. In true form, I have come round in a large circle, but seen parts of the world I haven't seen before on the journey.