Masks off

About a month ago I started wearing the mask loose so it didn't cover my nose. This was both to breathe more freely but also to start sending the signal to everyone else that the whole mask thing is over.

Then over the past two weeks, I've started to just not wear it at all while indoors -- to breathe even more freely, to de-dehumanize the social environment, and to signal even more unambiguously that we're not going to wear masks anymore.

Those of you who live in the Sun Belt, or in a rural area, may be familiar with this transition already. But if you're in the North, and in a city, this is still in the early adopter stage.

Since the face liberation movement is still inchoate, what follows are some impressions of who's simpatico and who's hostile, after the failure of the mask policy to end or even decelerate the growth of the coronavirus pandemic.

(I might write a separate post about the inability of grassroots individualism to solve collective problems at the top. This post is just about the changing climate right now.)

First, who else is doing it? It's men, ages 25 to 45, high testosterone, not necessarily counter-cultural, and not detectably Republican or Democrat. Yesterday I saw open faces on a 30-something MAGA dad with his daughter, a single Hispanic or Middle Eastern guy with a pony tail, and a punk / alt guy with his gf / wife (who was also not wearing a mask).

Basically, who's the most risk-taking, but also comfortable challenging authority legitimately -- e.g., if the policy does not work, we don't have to follow it anymore. If it were teenagers, that would stem more from a defiant impulse. If it's fully matured men, that's the go-ahead to treat it seriously and not as a bratty backlash.

Who is the most excited to see the mask come off? From my own experience, overwhelmingly girls from teenagers to 30-somethings. They suffer the most from facial coverings, because they have the cutest faces, unlike middle-aged and elderly women. Females are also more social / empathetic than males and need to see, and make, facial expressions in public. And at that age, they're more drawn to signs of risk-taking and bad-boy behavior in guys.

(NB: not "risk-taking" in terms of contracting the disease -- the masks have already proven ineffective at that. I mean in terms of risking someone hectoring them, threatening to kick them out of the store, and so on.)

This goes double when the bad-boy behavior is channeled in a pro-social direction, like getting rid of a failed and burdensome policy that the authorities are refusing to end themselves. Then it's not like stealing a car and going for a joyride, which would only attract a tiny minority of girls.

Fitness babes are pretty anti-mask. Two of the small number of women I've seen with no mask, or pulled down under their chin, were wearing their gym clothes, including the only woman I remember seeing without a mask several months ago when no one was going mask-free. I just so happened to see her again tonight at the thrift store, and in the same section (books), still without a mask.

But by far the most enthusiastic free-the-face girls are the MENA baddies -- no surprise if you read Aimee Terese or Leila Mechoui on Twitter. They will lock eyes for the longest, and get the most visibly horned up, at the sight of a bold decision-maker who's saving or protecting the group. We're providing cover for the rest of them to do likewise, at a cost to ourselves when we get hectored. It's not merely to preen as badasses while the chicks are looking.

One of the only girls I've seen without a mask -- and the only one who was under 30, and who was not potentially following the lead of her bf / husband -- was a MENA baddie with wild wavy hair who came strutting through the TJ Maxx doors with it pulled all the way down under her chin. Not even a pro forma full coverage while initially entering, and then stealthily removing it when there were no prying eyes. Just coming out guns-a-blazin'. She was a teenager, too, albeit accompanied by her mother and so perhaps feeling like someone else had her back if she got hectored.

Tonight at the supermarket "I Love It" came on over the sound system, and I started whistling along and hitting the side of my leg to the beat, when all of a sudden a mocha-licious southern Meddie turned the corner and stopped dead, gawking at me while I was browsing. She was wearing gym shorts and a hoodie in the local college colors, so in her early 20s living off-campus. I should have reciprocated the attention, strutted on over, and taken off her mask for her, unhooking it like a bra, and planted a kiss right on her lips.

However, that would have been a bit too far for social acceptability in a Midwestern supermarket, with lots of people around us. Maybe if no one else were watching...

It's possible that the guys in my vicinity are also excited to see masks coming off, but since 99% of them are not gay, they're not sending a signal back as eagerly as the girl spectators are. They'll keep it to themselves, talk to their friends about it afterward, and then go into a store with no mask themselves in a few days or weeks.

Who, then, are the most hostile? Not other men. Imagine how terminally cucked you would have to be to stop and wag your finger in another man's face about following a proven pointless policy. I'm sure a good amount of them do not approve, but they will never degrade themselves low enough to whine about it to my mask-free face. It's not only the fear that they are risking the start of a physical confrontation, for no tangible benefit to themselves or others. They would just feel like a pathetic little bitch, and that's bad enough.

Even the low-T "I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE" soyboys will just silently stew in resentment IRL, and then bitch about it impotently on the internet afterward.

Instead, the finger-waggers are all women, roughly ages 30 to 50 or 60, nearly exclusively white founding stock, and in particular Germanic. (No surprise for a race addicted to following pointless rules for its own sake, even when there is no tradition or test of time to back it up). Fatter than average, including some who are downright obese. Mostly unattractive -- only one so far looked average, although hard to tell with the mask, and she was one of the most polite anyway.

It's split evenly whether they act confrontationally or politely, although if Midwestern niceness is not a phenomenon where you live, they could be more in-your-face about it.

I'm sure most of them are liberals, but some appeared conservative.

It seems like the same demographic who gets the most heavily propagandized by the media, because they see themselves as the stewards over the health of the nation. Foreigners, Ellis Islanders, kids of recent immigrants -- it's just not their society to dictate the terms over, and they know it. But women of founding stock feel it's their birthright to nag the citizenry into behaving according to the laws.

Don't interpret this as WASPy dominance, though. They're not upper class, but those with degrees from low-ranking colleges. They're strivers eager to prove to those with real wealth and power that they're good little teacher's pets and hall monitors, deserving of a promotion. For every maskless person I hector, can you pwetty pwease cancel $100 of my student loan debt?

So far it's split between workers and fellow customers. Three workers have told me to wear a mask on their own. Another one (and the only African-American) seemed like she might have been indulging a customer who had asked to speak to her manager or something.

As of now, I've been momentarily going along with the workers' requests, to get them off my case, and because I know it's coming from their boss or some irate customer, not them being a loser themselves. After a bit, I'll take the mask off again. But if a fellow customer barks anything at me, I shut them down and blow them off unambiguously, and as nonchalantly as possible, so they don't get the reward of getting a rise out of me.

The best is when they don't even bother arguing against "the masks are just a placebo," and instead go complain to the workers -- who then don't do shit to indulge the hysterical freak, and just let me be. I'm a regular at the places I frequent, and have been for years, so they know I'm good. They also don't want to have to add to their tasks on the job -- now they're supposed to follow me around the store and make sure I never once take off my mask? Bullshit, that's above my pay grade.

The best of all is when those workers are young women, the kind who are the most supportive of the face liberation movement, especially if it's regarding a random hot guy. Why would they possibly care, Karen? -- they're not a fat ugly menopausal psycho like you. I really have a heightened respect for those workers now, having stood up for me. I imagine them singing to themselves, "I'll keep you, my dirty little secret, dirty little secret, who has to know?" xD

Overall, the hostile types are rare, but that is irrelevant. All it takes is one to threaten your ability to free your face indoors. It is nice that there's not an entire army of them swarming at the same time, but they are frequent enough to present an obstacle during every visit to a store.

However, now that the trend is accelerating -- I didn't see anyone else without a mask last week, and this week I'm likely to see several others -- they have nowhere to go with their hectoring. They can already sense that this is the beginning of the end of the policy, and not because the government has lifted the mask mandate -- because people are sick of failed policies, and no one higher up is enforcing them.

Indeed, the whole point of masks was to devolve responsibility down to the individual. If the elites don't want to get involved, that includes enforcement of their own mandates. They would actually have to stick their neck out, put their foot down, threaten a confrontation with their underlings, and so on and so forth.

They would rather abdicate the chain of command altogether and live a degenerate life away from whatever troubles are going on in society. This is not the New Deal era of strong government, when the mayor, governor, or president might send in the police or the military to deal with even non-violent civil disobedience like sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter.

Today's leaders shirk the duties and costs of being a strong leader, and we're going to take advantage of that when they deliver pointless or harmful orders to the common people, unless we come at them specifically (like storming the Capitol building -- but not going mask-free into our local indoor public spaces).