My shero

Thursday 11/14/24

People are sure going to tell you about that thing they say they don't care about.

I repeatedly see these claims offered up as gospel that parents instruct their male children not to cry because boys should not cry. My parents never said this to me. I never witnessed the parents of any of my friends saying it to them. We lived in this neighborhood in Mansfield, Massachusetts that was like these two circles, one bigger than the other. There were houses around the circles and house in the middle of them. Many of the families were family units around the same age. Parents were similar ages, kids were similar ages. You played with a lot of other kids. It was awesome and I was happy.

We were always playing games, doing sports, inventing games, riding bikes, swimming in pools, going out in the woods. Things happened. There were fights and making up. You had a friend and then your friend was an enemy and then you were friends again. There were sleepovers and you knew people's parents and their siblings and you had the same babysitters.

I can't ever recall anyone telling a boy they shouldn't cry because they were a boy and this was not the way to manliness or whatever. This isn't the same as suggesting that a kid shouldn't be crying, like they were too old to be behaving that way. You could say that to Amelia when she's being a pill. She doesn't really do that, though--the forced crying thing, but my point is, that's not a boy or a girl thing.

Additionally: I played tons of organized sports. A lot of hockey. And I never heard it in those situations either. This was a time, too, when supposedly parents were tougher and we weren't as enlightened in the ways of kindness as we are now, which is an irony, because people have never been more cruel.

They are cruel because they only care about themselves. Their talk about morality and attempts to police behavior is about their own lack of morality and selfish behavior. When you are a bad person, that's what you do to signal that you're a good person, which is necessary in your mind so that you will have authority which is power.

It's revealing that the people who talk about misogyny the most now tend to be the people who practice misandry the most.

This morning I saw a woman who bills herself as a Confidence Coach. It never ends.

"What's your job?"

"Confidence Coach. Give me money, I'll make sure you're confident."

"In what?"

"In your stupidity."

"I could use confidence. The patriarchy has taken it away."

"I'm so sorry that happened to you."

"Here's my money."

I saw where someone posed a hypothetical: If you could only save your pet or a human, who would you save?

Just about everyone said their pet. After all, they don't know the human, they said. Most answering were women, a number of whom said that if the human was a male, he probably deserved to die.

Some people provided reasons. I don't know the person. I know my cat. This person is probably a bad person. I love my dog.

These are the same people--or many of them are--who talk about how scared they now are for the world, their trauma over the results of an election, how they are now ruled by evil overlords, and here they are telling each other--and I suppose the world, in a way--that they'd let a human die to save a cat.

Look, these people in publishing that we talk about on here are evil. That's abundantly, unequivocally clear. Not fabricated, narratively enhanced/distorted evil in someone else's pursuance of remarks of "I'm sorry that happened to you." They are bona fide evil.

I would save one of those people with the same commitment that I would save my mother or my oldest friend. In this hypothetical. Knowing that they are evil.

Again and again I say on here: It comes back to you. You ultimately answer to yourself. There is right and wrong, and the choice you make to do the right thing or the wrong thing is about you.

Many women take to social media and post about "the sidewalk rule." In their mind, a man should walk on the side of the road closest to the cars in order to sacrifice himself so that she may live if a car runs up on the road. He should die for her. As a man. And because she's a woman.

These women don't understand why this tradition, if you want to call it that, existed in the first place, which goes back before there were cars. I suppose I've always done this, but not for those reasons. That is, no practical reasons, because they don't exist. Gestural reasons. With men, I hold doors for them, if I'm entering first. If I'm entering first and a woman is behind me, I open the door and stand aside so that she enters first. If this happens, say, at the Starbucks, she will then go first in line, when the polite--some would say the appropriate--thing to do would be to offer to have me do so (which I would decline). Guess how often that polite or appropriate or reciprocal thing happens? It's happened one time at the Starbucks I go to. But this is gestural. It's what I do as a gesture that may be old-fashioned, but some old-fashioned things, or the retaining of, say something about our character.

And a side point: The whole "I should die for you" thing isn't one I'd ascribe to. What are you contributing? What do you offer this world? I am here creating what I'm creating and trying to do what I'm doing for a greater good. I think that's important and that nothing is potentially more important. I do look at value in lives. I look at value in everything. I look at value in writing. Time and energy and experiences. Art. Relationships. What I undertake. I'm not getting run over by a car for anybody.

The greater issue, though, is the simple-mindedness. That people are that dumb. And that quick to castigate because, again, talk of misogyny is now often projected misandry. It's allowed in our American culture. To a point--the election was something of an attempted countering. Hit people where they live, and in the privacy of a ballot box, they may try to stop more of that from occurring. Or becoming the way of things. A status quo.

That you have people this simple running around is the issue. Thinking they are intelligent because they have clucked about "the sidewalk rule." There's this overriding smugness, and as we see with, say, a David Remnick in publishing, smugness and stupidity make for a bad combination.

Along these same lines: There are many women who spend significant chunks of their life online cataloguing examples of the treachery of the patriarchy. Here's one example I see often: A woman is walking down the street. A man refuses to move. Big, bad, mean man! How dare he!

I'll tell you what I experience a lot, and it can be with men or women, but it's much more often with women these days, and has to do with entitlement. I always walk on the right side. The right side and the right side. The right side is the right side. It's like driving. Stay on the right. I go up and down the Monument on the righthand side. I walk down streets on the righthand side. I will often stay as far to the right as possible. At Trader Joe's, I keep to the right when possible.

This is the way of all forms of traffic in America.

Many women will walk wherever they please. They will take up however much space as they wish. Guys do this, too. And groups of whatever composition--four guys, two women and two guys--will walk four-aside down Hanover Street. On Hanover Street, you often need to walk in the street if you don't have all day, but keep your head up, lest you get clipped by a car.

I'll be on the right such that I can run my hand along the fronts of the buildings I'm passing. I'm where I'm supposed to be. A woman who is coming the other way on the left, and who is in the opposite place where she is supposed to be, will give off so much attitude over this big, bad, mean patriarchy that here is a man in front of her. It's not that this man hasn't moved yet--it's that he has the effrontery to be where he is. They'll sigh, roll their eyes, swear, mutter something, and they will sometimes even use the word patriarchy.

And really what has occurred here is a result of them being a dumbass. And an entitled dumbass. Who doesn't even understand the practicalities of walking down a street.

So what then happens? That woman then takes to social media, writes her latest dispatch about Trumpers and the patriarchy and how this ogre of a man refused to get out of her way when all she was doing was walking to the store, so innocently. Cue the responses of "They think they own us," "They think they can do whatever they want," "I'm so sorry that happened to you."

People are people. They suck equally. Men and women. Sometimes for different reasons, with different themes, but they suck. People are horrible now. This is not a man thing. it's not a woman thing. It is a people thing.

I saw a post from a woman who said that her preschooler had these two good friends. And this mother was herself friends with the parents of the preschooler's friends. She learned this week that the parents--whom she said she liked a lot--"were MAGA," and now she had taken to social media the query the punditry--all of these reasonable, intelligent, not insane at all people from the peanut gallery--whether or not she stop being friends with the parents--as a moral obligation--and stop her daughter from being friends with her little friends because of how those little friends were invariably being raised.

That's your world. It's not your world since election night. That's been the world for a while now. That level of stupidity where performance has overtaken sanity. The performative person ultimately becomes locked in the role--they become that role. They no longer have an identity because they no longer have a self. They don't have intellect or a working brain; without a working brain, you obviously can't think.

Rarely do I make any comment on social media, but this morning I did. I saw where a women said she joined a dating site and quit after two days because men can't talk. Bad, bad, bad men. Super, super, super women. Anything bad must be a man's fault. Couldn't possibly have anything to do with the woman. Or it couldn't have to do with how the world is, for the reasons that are so exactingly detailed in the pages of this journal. (If this world was no more and humans were gone, aliens arriving on the scene, or in the space where our world once was, could look at this record and understand how we were, how we got there, and why we came to an end. There isn't anything else about which that can be said. And it's here right now for us, so that we might do something about what is happening before it's too late. Because it is getting there. I'm not doing this for my health. I'm doing this because I care.)

She moaned about how she did all of the heavy lifting, and the way it's supposed to work is you ask a question, they ask a question, you ask a question, they ask a question, and on and on.

Right.

Maybe...People should say something intelligent? I say something intelligent, you say something intelligent, I say something intelligent, you say something intelligent.

Crazy concept.

Obviously, virtually no one can say anything intelligent, so that's out.

But how about saying things? Sharing thoughts? You say something, I respond to it. We talk about it. I say something, you say something back, we have a conversation. We move from topic to topic. We spend more time here, maybe less there, we circle back to this. We share. We come to know each other better. And we can do this in minutes.

You will find very few women on dating sites who don't think that conversation is wholly a matter of asking questions. Like there can be nothing else. And that they are heroic for doing this. Which most of them don't do, because most just want compliments, and have no intention of connecting with anyone. They have their wine and their cats. They're broken. They are not moving towards becoming unbroken. But they will be miserable, and you know who will be blamed for that: Patriarchy!

Convenient. Made more convenient by how this plays within the social media echo chamber that passes, so very often, for the lives of such people.

Then consider the narcissism, the shortsightedness: These people will think that the people belonging to the group of which they are a part of don't do this same thing--the "light" lifting. Non-existent lifting. It's not something women do. Uh-huh. Which you know to be false if you've spent five minutes in your life on a dating site with your interest being in women. You'll find a woman, for example, who will whine and whine and whine about how alone she is, how much she wants to meet her "person"--creepy phrase that everyone uses because of Friends, whether they know that's where that started or not--but if Sir Galahad were to write her, with everything in the world going for him, and he tailored a response to touch upon her profile and what she'd conveyed, and he was great looking, and learned, all of the stuff, and he made some nice remark somewhere in there about something she'd said, chances are very high that this woman would respond, "ty."

She wouldn't even write out thank you, because she'd be trying to convey that he wasn't worth those extra six letters. "You'll take this crumb of a crumb from me and we're done here." That's for her. For that black hole that is her ego and emotional innards. That is why she's where she is. It wasn't because Sir Galahad wasn't trying. That's what she wanted to do--ring him up. Notch on the belt. She wanted to feel like she could do that to him because she's her. And she's very important. Which she doesn't believe. But this is how she performs that.

You want to talk about guys. We can talk about guys. Most are noxious and witless and they just want sex. Part of me says, well, if no one offers anything on these levels, what remains? Bodies. Holes. Appendages. Again, value. There's no intellectual value. No mental value. No romantic value. What remains? The physical. There's some value there.

I'm not defending that. I have been on my own for ten years. What I'm saying is that is why things play out as they often do. All relationships, whatever form they take, have a component of "What do you offer me?" They do. That's not my fault that that's true. What do you offer me, what do I offer you.

Such is life.

This is what I said:

"No one can talk at all. It's not a men-aren't-verbally-adroit thing. There is next to no substance out there anywhere, people have been lobotomized by click-centered 'culture,' and those who think they're trying equate conversation with playing twenty questions. It's funny/telling, though, when someone concludes it's this one group, which, of course, is about other things."

Now what are you going to say to that? Someone said the truth definitively, cut through the bullshit, the agenda, the projection, and said it in a way that no one else is going to be able to say anything. There goes the allegations. There goes the broad-brushing. Do you think there will be lots of people responding to those words or not? Do you think people will be upset/angry because someone was definitive? Of course they will be. But they won't be able to do anything about it, because they will know that it's true. Lights were turned on ending the passive aggressive man-bashing party. Do you think people like that or hate it and hate someone who does it?

I don't even need to add those answers, do I?

Yesterday I saw where a woman was talking about how she went to the store and was waiting to grind her coffee when the big, old, bad, mean patriarchy and a Trumper, no less, struck yet again and it was time for her to make sure justice was served and to save society, one encounter at a time if that's what it takes, because as was pointed by someone just like her, and just as miserable as she is, she's a "shero."

This man was taking far too long, she said, grinding that coffee of his, which was a result of his presumed privilege as a member of the patriarchy. Because what white man doesn't wish to spend as much time as possible grinding his coffee at the store? What fun that is. Why do it for a minute or two if you could do it for ten? How about an hour? Oodles of fun.

People are insane. Almost everything that they say happened when they are social media never happened at all. They invent it because that's how mentally ill they are and they need attention at the cost of their happiness, fulfillment, their health, their psychological wellness, their souls.

So here is what the woman says she said to that man from her place in the line:

"why don't you go fuck yourself and move your male entitled ass. go on fuck off, and then keep. fucking off, until you no longer exist."

She then claimed that a few men smiled nervously.

Which would never happen. If you saw someone behave that way at the store, you wouldn't be smiling at all. Her attempted implication there is that those men "had to give it" to her that she was both 1. Witty 2. That they were scared intimidated by her, shero that she is.

All anyone would have thought if this happened is that here was a psychopath.

So that gave her away. Doesn't track. But what she has accurately conveyed is her level of anger, delusion, and the blackness in her heart. Her prejudice. Her sexism.

Most people in publishing are like this. They fit the bill of this woman to a large degree.

How do you think such a woman would feel about me? What I do? How about a story written by me about women or girls? A book about them? How I look? Which side of the street do you think she walks on? How do you think it'd go if I was coming down the Monument and she was coming up the stairs on the wrong side? What social media post of lies and spuming rage do you think that would result in?

In the first person narratives of just about everyone's life, you will be dealing with a highly unreliable narrator. People aren't telling you what happened. They are filtering prospective narrative elements through their own prejudices, emotions, anger, performative tendencies, their desire for what they want from you, what they want to hear back from you. If you were at this store, you might have witness a woman sigh or roll her eyes, on account of some guy who just got to the grinder. Maybe she said that one first thing--which I very much doubt--after waiting for mere seconds, because she was trying to start something, which would have resulted in his totally normal response that would have been spot on.

The comments all expressed support of the woman and admiration. Here's one, which was typical:

"Good for you! More of these entitled fucking pieces of stupidity need to be dealt with like this! I applaud you"

That's the dominant liberal persona on social media. Social media is big in many people's lives. For a great deal of them, it's tantamount to the most important thing in their lives. And people can't understand--or people one side of the aisle can't understand--why other people didn't vote for the party that they associate with this kind of thing?

Says the person affiliated with neither side. The human enterprise is my sole interest. And look at this mess. On all sides of humanity.