The truce in the battle of the sexes during peaks of social harmony, 1940s and 1990s, halfway between peaks of social chaos circa 1920, 1970, and 2020

A topic I've been exploring lately relates to the 50-year cycle that Peter Turchin uncovered in social chaos and civil breakdown in American history, with eruptions circa 1970, 1920, 1870, missing one in 1820, and 1770. On that basis he predicted another eruption circa 2020 -- boy, was he right on the money.

He does mention the opposite values of these chaotic eruptions -- low-points for civil breakdown, or in other words, peaks of social harmony. The Era of Good Feelings in the 1820s was halfway between the breakdowns of the 1770s and 1870s. The Gay Nineties were halfway between the breakdowns of the 1870s and circa 1920.

It's misleadingly called the WWII era, since it began well before the war did (certainly before America's involvement in it), but the '30s and first half of the '40s, even the late '20s, were another such period. Woody Allen dubbed the period Radio Days. Also the period in which A Christmas Story is set. Or the contempo setting of It's a Wonderful Life. Whatever we call it, it was halfway between the breakdowns of circa 1920 and 1970.

Well, we just went through another breakdown circa 2020, which leaves the halfway point between it and the previous one before that, 1970, circa 1995. And really, harmony had been on the upswing by the late '70s, lasting throughout the '80s, and peaking in the first half of the '90s.

Chaos, breakdown, disorder, riots, etc. -- far more attention-grabbing for historians. The phases of greater harmony, stability, order, and calm, tend to go unnoticed.

Because this cycle pertains to such a foundational aspect of society -- order vs. disorder -- it affects so many domains of societal life. Riots vs. calmness is an obvious one. I'm interested in surveying how broadly this cycle touches our lives.

A perennial topic of discourse is the battle of the sexes, which has reached a fever pitch in the last 5, 10, 15 years. I think we're past the worst part of it, but it's still raging.

And before focusing on the harmonious phase, it does help to start with the chaotic phase, since its symptoms are so much more intense and easy to discern.

During the most recent chaotic phase, circa the late '90s through the early 2020s, and exploding during the woketard 2010s, there are too many symptoms to list briefly. #MeToo, Slutwalk, toxic masculinity, incels, gay BFFs / fag hags, fujoshi fanfic (girl imagining herself as a male in a homoerotic male-male fantasy), redpill, Game / pickup artists, porn based on degradation or humiliation (for either sex), and on and on down the line. Guys and girls could not have inhabited more separate, and more mutually hostile social environments.

In terms of waves of feminism, this is associated with the Fourth Wave.

During the previous eruption of chaos in the late '60s and early '70s, there was the Second Wave of feminism. Mostly focused on abortion, but also women's liberation in general, free love, bra-burning, equal pay for equal work, divorce, and the birth of what's called radical feminism i.e. the bitter man-hating abolish all gender roles type. That included the SCUM Manifesto, i.e. the Society for Cutting Up Men, by the whackjob who shot Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas -- this was before feminazis sanctified gay men as their protective cockblocking eunuchs against the forces of toxic heterosexual masculinity.

During the previous eruption of chaos before that, was the breakdown of the late 1910s and early '20s. That coincided with the First Wave of feminism, specifically the Suffragette movement. Along with the chaotic social mood generally, this movement of feminism had been growing since the turn of the 20th century, it just hit its peak circa 1920 (when the US granted women the right to vote).

You may have noticed a skipped-over wave of feminism -- the Third Wave. That term applies to the '90s and the early 2000s, during a period of relative social calm rather than upheaval, as opposed to the other three waves coinciding with civil breakdowns.

Well, Third Wave feminism doesn't really exist, and feminists admit it -- its hallmark was its lack of cohesion politically, and lack of coherence conceptually. It's more of a placeholder term for "whatever feminists were up to in the '90s". And it's premised upon women of the '80s and '90s having won so many things during the previous two waves, so what was left for the '90s?

One of the major books of the Third Wave, Susan Faludi's Backlash ('91), is more about the past than the present -- the backlash against the Second Wave after the peak of social chaos had been reached, by the late '70s and throughout the '80s and into the early '90s.

The other major book, which *was* more about the present than a backlash against the previous wave, was The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (also '91). Like the Third Wave in general, its premise is how many material, legal, and other gains have already been won due to the First and Second Waves. Now with women seemingly having it all, they find themselves searching for that last little bit of perfection that cannot be allocated to them by laws or corporate policies -- beauty, namely cosmetic surgery, fashion victimhood, eating disorders, and the like. The idea was, let's try to liberate ourselves from that self-imposed / mass-mediated oppression, and focus more on our worth as people who are not paragons of beauty.

OK, if that's feminism, then there was a Third Wave of it in the '90s. But it's not a movement, not political, and not seeking to up-end society like the other three waves did. Crucially, it was not man-hating or man-blaming or seeking a redress of grievances from the offending male sex. All feminists are at least somewhat man-hating and man-blaming, but the Third Wavers were pretty tame and calm, relative to the radicals of the Second and Fourth waves on either side of them.

The most you could point to in the '90s was in its second half, after the peak of social harmony had been reached, and the pendulum began to swing once again toward chaos and breakdown -- but had only just begun to shift. These developments were the embryonic forms of Fourth Wave feminism that would rear their ugly heads for real during the woketard 2010s.

Things like The Vagina Monologues ('96) and the associated V-Day ('98) which warped Valentine's Day into a day of raising awareness about violence against women, and even the whole Girl Power phenomenon ("chicks before dicks", to counter "bros before hoes"), associated with the Spice Girls and their Millennial audience.

Also the rise of gay BFFs, gay eunuchs, fag hags, and fujoshi fanfic -- Will & Grace, Sex and the City, and by the early 2000s, the first gay kiss in primetime in an episode of Dawson's Creek (2000), and in the music video for "Beautiful" by Christina Aguilera (2002), and the bitter emo girl + messy gay BFF duo in Mean Girls (2004).

Suddenly, boys and girls were beginning to split apart, although this rift would not reach its yawning maximum until circa 2020. But it was quite a gear-shift or phase-change compared to the first half of the '90s, the '80s, and the late '70s.

So, one of the hallmarks of that harmonious phase was the relative absence of a feminist movement, especially of the man-hating and man-blaming and man-lobbying type that we usually require for something to be a true feminist movement.

The last time there was such a relative absence of feminism was the second half of the '20s (after women's suffrage was fait accompli, as well as discredited by their lobbying for the 18th Amendment to ban alcohol, which got repealed by the 21st Amendment in '33), all of the '30s, and at least the first half of the '40s.

You know the WWII era was barren of feminism when all they can point to, desperately, is the Rosie the Riveter ad campaign, or the fact that women joined the military as WACs and WAVES in their cute wool nurse's capes, to support the men in the war effort, in their typical female capacity. This was not man-hating, man-blaming, or man-lobbying for societal upheaval. So women could join the emergency war effort -- big deal, that's not radical at all, and tellingly it was not won by protests, violence, or other forms of coordinated confrontation against the power structure.

Much like the second half of the '90s, the second half of the '40s saw the very embryonic forms that would eventually become Second Wave feminism, like the 1949 publication of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, followed some time later in '63 by Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.

I will go into greater detail on other cultural correlates of these harmonious phases, when the battle of the sexes ground to a halt. But for now, just to get the ball rolling, this brief overview of the timeline of various waves of feminism should give you the overall picture.

I promise those details will be more exciting and relatable than the history of feminism! But we have to start somewhere uncontroversial, like organized man-hating, man-blaming, and man-lobbying. And of course, the pair movement of womanizing, woman-hating, woman-blaming, and woman-hectoring. But the male version is not an organized or academic affair, so it doesn't leave as rich of a paper trail as the female version.

And in any case, females are the choosy sex in human beings, so generally speaking, what they say goes, regarding how close or distant the sexes will be with each other. The fine-detailed surveys will also focus more on how women change or cycle over time, although I will note how men change or cycle over time in the same ways.

Catcall report, woketards killing off boy bands, pent-up female desire channeled into pseudo bi-curiosity

Wow, first Saturday night of the spring where I went cruising down the main drag in the city with music blasting out of the windows.

Haven't been since maybe New Year's -- everything has gone virtual, I haven't even bothered to check in on the would-be Saturday night revelers. But there was actually a decent crowd! Not as big and bustling as it should be, but compared to other public spaces, this was not as devoid of bodies. Some experiences are way less replaceable with a virtual simulation.

In pre-virtual times, this crowd would have been totally representative of the population at large. But now, when everything has gone virtual, these seemingly ordinary people are actually a self-selected elite -- the top 10% of the population for fun-loving-ness, outgoingness, and corporeality, who just cannot feel fulfilled from the simulations of The Real Thing.

So I decided to turn up the dial on the life-of-the-party behaviors that I normally roll out on such occasions. I don't need to be gentle with them, they can handle it -- they *want* it that high, that's why they came out IRL instead of staying plugged into their simulations.

First was of course some catcalling, or rather wolf baying, since I had "She Wolf" on repeat and howled out during that part of the chorus (a proper AWOOOOOOOO, not the dainty little "awoo" that she does).

Got some good looks, although since it's dark at night, it takes girls longer to figure out that it's a hot guy making the sounds, so no calls back. Will try this again in the afternoon sunshine, tomorrow or some other day. I miss getting catcalls back, performers feed off the energy of the crowd. Summer of last year and 2020 were perfect for that, so we'll see about this year.

Are they so used to online interactions that it doesn't even occur to them to call back, even if they wanted to? Is their instinctual muscle memory by now to grab their phone and tap out a text message? They'd better not be *that* online. We'll see...

Anyway, on the way back from the main drag, I fumbled around for a new CD to put in the player, and there it was -- One Direction's debut album. I'd picked it up for a couple bucks at a thrift store, and decided to put it on for the ride home. But I didn't make it more than 30 seconds into it before singing along, and thought -- I have to turn around and go back, to serenade the babes!

Just think of how deprived their senses are of that crucial experience -- it's not right to just let them wither on the vine like that. Not that I'm a professional singer, but I can belt it out if I need to, for a little while anyway. And the hits on that album do get pretty intense, they're not mellow '70s ballads or anything. The early 2010s were one of the most intense zeitgeists in human history, and One Direction was a central part of that.

The absolutely pulsating teenage yearning that was provoked by the boy band to end all boy bands... and the phenomenon only just got going with the endless trail of humped pillows left in its wake. It was more about the feeling that they were actually desired as The Only One by some hot guy, who not only wouldn't keep them their dirty little secret, but was proud to shout it to the rooftops.

So I cycled through the three songs that struck me as the most apropos -- their mega-hits "What Makes You Beautiful" and "One Thing", along with one that I was surprised was not released as a single or a music video, the wholesome party anthem "Up All Night" (I heard it for the first time tonight, but the lyrics are simple enough to pick up fast).

By the end, my voice was getting pretty shouty, and I needed some nice rosehip & hibiscus tea after getting home, but it was totally worth it. Again, it's not a technical recital for American Idol or anything -- they're just excited to be part of that level of a party atmosphere.

And those girls were just the right age to be One Direction's fanbase 10 years ago, so there was no risk of "Hmmm, I wonder if the audience will know this one or not..." They knew. It's like singing "I Want It That Way" to 24 year-olds in 2008 -- of course they remember that one! Few songs have the ability to instantly, and fully, transport you back to an earlier time and place. One of the most powerful types are those that made you feel noticed and desired as someone special, for the first time.

No amount of likes on your social media posts -- or, God forbid, donos to your OnlyFans account -- can recapture that feeling of Mr. hot guy serenading you, and as far as you were concerned, only you. (He doesn't *really* mean it toward those billion other girls in the audience...)

Aaaaaain't nothin' but a heaaaaartaaaaache

Aaaaaain't nothin' but a miiistaaaaake

The response was amazing. Not like applauding or anything fake like that, it's not the occasion to applaud a performance. It's to jump on the trend, let go of your inhibitions, and do what the singer is provoking you into doing. Smiling, running like the wind, and all that other crazy wholesome hormonal behavior.

At one point, when "Up All Night" was blasting, two cute girls in sundresses dropped whatever they were doing, to bounce and dance around on the sidewalk, each with one arm raised up to link their hand with the other's. For that pagan dancing-around-the-Maypole vibe (it is the time of the season, after all).

It's so heartwarming and rewarding to see them respond like that, and to know that a bunch of others nearby saw that duo dancing, and felt what they were feeling vicariously. Good enough, since it wasn't a club, where everyone is expected to be dancing. I can get catcalled or followed around a store some other night -- picking up everyone else's spirits is something that is usually limited to festive occasions like this.

Toward the end of the cruise, it had suddenly begun to pour buckets -- but I refused to roll up the windows. The car seats can withstand a little water, my shirt sleeve and arm that are hanging out the window will dry out. The show must go on -- even more so, when everyone's mood is tempted to go all negative, getting poured on during their Saturday night out.

So I kept the music up, the singing going, and still pounded the outside of the driver's door like a drum during the right moments. While not able to distract them from the pouring rain, this activity at least makes it feel like it's all part of one great big crazy party atmosphere, taking them out of their ordinary experiences. Not just a bummer or a downer.

BTW, I think the average guy -- at least the type willing to go out and have fun on Saturday night -- enjoys hearing One Direction's girl-crazy anthems, too. When they were teens, these songs gave voice to their own intense crush on that one special girl, who they were internally debating whether or not to reveal their feelings for.

Listening to these songs, they got to imagine themselves in the aspirational position of being a confident (and hot) guy who opens up, in hopes of winning the girl. Not just girls, sluts, or thots in general. Not interchangeable accounts on the hook-up apps. But her, the only one he can't stop thinking and feeling about.

It's risky and takes courage to sing songs like these to a girl, so the guys are imagining themselves in a courageous role, something that would motivate them to take on a confident, masculine behavior. Sorry, but sliding non-committally into a girl's DMs, or God forbid, Venmo-ing her some cash on her OnlyFans, is not courageous. Not public, for one thing. But also non-committal, almost passive-aggressive. Girls want a guy who's got guts. Nothing risked, nothing gained.

* * *

Sadly, these kinds of songs will never be made again, as our empire disintegrates, and along with it, our cultural production industries. In this case, it's not only the general breakdown of trust and cooperation at the institutional level -- and remember, there are no Trump voters in these industries, it's 100% Democrat-on-Democrat suspicion, paranoia, hate, and violence.

On top of that, there was the jihad that these puritanical libtards waged against "toxic masculinity" over the course of the woke 2010s. These boy band songs came out right at the beginning of the decade, before the avalanche of wokeness had really gotten rolling during the 2nd Obama term and after.

How can the culture industry go back on that, and make One Direction / Backstreet Boys / New Edition songs again? For the woketards, such songs are instilling in vulnerable young girls the notion that they're only worth anything via the male gaze. Wanting to be desired by a special guy, is just internalized patriarchy. Their sense of self-worth isn't supposed to react to whether, how much, or by whom, they're being desired.

Even worse, if girls react positively to such songs, they are not merely neutral bystanders on the sidelines -- they are enabling the toxic forces, and are thus guilty themselves of perpetuating the social pollution. So even if you felt like reacting positively, you have to keep a lid on it, lest the witch-hunters come after you, as a 2nd-degree troublemaker, i.e. as an enabler of the 1st-degree troublemakers (99% of the male population, who aren't gay and want to win over the girl they're crushing on).

This is like daughters who are raised by insane feminist parents, who have to play down their desire to play with dolls and bake pastries, since for the parents that's just the first baby step toward reproducing the toxic pollution of the patriarchy. Only now, it's not just a fringe group of insane parents -- it's the entirety of the culture industry, academia, and media.

The current situation is a radical break from all previous eras of our history, and contra lazy right-wing "minds", it is not only the latest in a series of such changes since The Sixties. Girls blew off the insane feminists and kept crushing on boys, and wanting to be the crush of those boys. The pressure from the culture industry was not simply lighter in degree, it qualitatively was not telling them to be ashamed for liking their crush and wanting their crush to like them back. That's why decades of boy bands were produced by that industry.

And the same dynamics are at play for the young guys listening to these songs. They're not supposed to be encouraged by such songs, because wholeheartedly and without warning letting a girl know how you feel, is non-consensual and on the slippery slope toward literal rape. If you do feel the urge to follow the model of these songs, clamp down on it, don't let it break loose where it could infect or pollute innocent victims.

Woketards pathologize what is healthy and natural, and normalize what is sick and twisted. They don't care if a guy Venmo's an OnlyFans girl some money after jerking himself off to her videos. That's transactional, financialized, virtual, mediated, and animalistic -- not romantic, fully-human, IRL, and part of the wide array of normal behavior that is not consensual.

The OF girl did ask to get paid by coomers, whereas the average high school girl does not ask for any ol' guy, perhaps someone she doesn't even know, to reveal his feelings toward her. But it happens, it's natural, it's permissible, and dealing with awkward social experiences like that is part of growing up.

* * *

So where does that leave girls' desires? They can't unabashedly express them in their natural way, because that would be enabling toxic masculinity. Well then, how about if they got horny for other girls? That would seem to be compatible with the anti-hetero agenda of the 2010s, epitomized by the gay marriage Supreme Court ruling of the 2nd Obama admin.

Per se that case was not anti-hetero, but huge decisions like that are never standalone things, they're part of a broader cluster of things happening. And in this case, it was the jihad against toxic masculinity, all those rape hoax stories in Rolling Stone and the like, Slutwalk, mattress girl, #MeToo, and by now the trans agenda.

Not only are young people feeling pressure from the culture industry, schools, etc. -- but from the very highest levels of the government, who are weighing in on one side of the culture war. And about something as non-political, and biologically basic, as feeling crushes and wanting to be crushed on by their crush.

This is what's behind the cohort of girls born after roughly 1994, frequently mentioning how hot they find other girls, etc., while keeping a lid on any feelings they have for guys. They are not actually going to eat another girl's pussy, fall in love with another girl, introduce another girl to their parents as "my new girlfriend," or get married to / raise kids with another girl.

Lesbians cannot stand this trend, since they feel like they're being led on and faked out -- oh great, yet another performatively bi-curious, yet 100% straight girl, only fooling me into thinking we could have shared something together.

But we have to understand why this is happening, and it's very understandable. These girls are straight, but they can't express those desires without painting a target over their heads for the woketard witch-hunters. You want to get into a monogamous relationship with a guy whose reciprocation of feelings would mean all the world to you? Wow, someone's suffering from internalized patriarchy, internalized misogyny, not to mention enabling toxic masculinity instead of breaking the cycle of pollution.

I reject the idea that it's these girls acting like badass girlbosses and not wanting to make themselves vulnerable or weak in any way. We've had girlboss careerists in this society for many decades, and they didn't trigger a widespread trend of silencing your hetero female desires in favor of performative bi-curiosity. If anything, they wanted to be wooed as well. They wanted to have it all, the '80s yuppie woman's dream.

And if it were about not wanting to appear weak, then that would apply to expressing desires for their fellow girls as well. After all, the other girl might reject you, might laugh in your face, might gossip about the whole deal with the other girls.

However, if the desire is not genuine, and the intention to reveal her feelings to another girl is not truly there inside of her, then there's nothing to worry about. She can call other girls hot, since they know nothing is actually going to happen. It's just the only outlet they have for expressing their desires, during a jihad against toxic masculinity.

Female sexuality may be more plastic than male sexuality, but not that much. If these changes in overt expression were reflecting a deeper change in desires, then what's stopping these girls from getting it on with another girl, dating another girl, or marrying / raising kids with another girl? If anything they're being encouraged to do so.

And yet, as lesbians will testify, these girls are not genuinely bi-curious. Lesbians can't even get the initial stages started, where they're hanging out, going on dates, and getting mildly physical, despite the bi-curious girl calling it off after a bit. That was from the old days. These days, 99% of girls who talk about other girls being hot are not even bi-curious in behavior. They just need a societally sanctioned outlet for their sexual and romantic desires, in a climate of oppressive wokeness.

So blame the woketards, not the performative bi-curious girls, who have forced others to channel their expressions in this way, however misleading it is to everyone.

I think the late '90s births are the last generation to have gotten to enjoy unfettered, natural sexuality during their formative adolescent years. As evidenced in part by the One Direction craze. That may have changed as they got into their late teens and 20s, but they at least enjoyed it during their high school years.

Girls born in the 2000s imprinted during their formative years on a different environment, where the jihad against toxic masculinity had been launched. They're never going to enjoy that crucial early round of validation from a chart-topping boy band. There won't be any more, and boys IRL and online are not going to step in to fill that gap in pop culture. I mean, I will, but I'm not from their generation.

It looks like core cohorts of Millennials, the late '80s and early '90s, will be the last generation to go through both adolescence and early adulthood under natural circumstances, before the jihad against toxic masculinity, which only struck by the time they were around 25 and fairly done with forming impressions. They imprinted instead on the 2000s, defined by America's Next Top Model and American Apparel ads. If those girls talk about other girls being hot, they truly are horny for them, and they may very well act on it.

That would seem to be the last cohorts of guys who are comfortable revealing how they feel to girls, not just mutually swiping right on an app. That includes One Direction themselves (even though some of them are gay, they were still comfortable in the role of serenading a girl).

What remains to be seen is whether these trends ever reverse, like the backlash against feminism by the late '70s and '80s -- but that was when we still had a cohesive, resilient society. During imperial disintegration, we can't rely on society's immune system kicking in when needed. In that case, the plummeting birth rates, indefinite celibacy, and performative bi-curiosity will be hallmarks of our population contraction during societal disintegration.

Anna Nicole Smith, Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Going through the Perfume Nationalist podcast, and found this episode about the Anna Nicole Show. I was only vaguely aware of her and her claim to fame (blonde bombshell who married a rich geriatric), never having watched the early 2000s reality show after her initial burst of notoriety in the '90s.

But the way they describe her is like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl — a beautiful soul, free-spirited, winding her way from one of life's many adventures to the next, and cheering up those who happen to cross her path.

Still, those are only personality traits, not a role that she plays with respect to other characters in the dramatis personae. The MPDG is an earthly guardian angel, who nurses an unlucky-in-love sad sack back to social-emotional health, enabling him to find true love by the end (though usually not with the MPDG herself).

Then it hit me — that's the role she was playing with the rich geriatric she married. He was in a romantically low-enough place that he was going to strip clubs as an elderly man. And she happened to be one of the dancers there when he showed up.

She wasn't seeking out rich old guys habitually, like a gold-digger or a maneater, hellbent on a master plan. It was one of those spontaneous, fun projects that occurred to her as it was already happening. Why not pick up the spirits of this gentle old sad sack, who is clearly not long for this world? Just another zany, off-the-wall adventure along the neverending tour of her life.

The fact that he was loaded appealed to her more at the level of establishing themselves as an odd couple — young and elderly, rich and poor, captivating and invisible, sensual and buttoned-up. A carnivalesque, Studio 54 kind of match, not cold deliberate and predatory.

The MPDG doesn't want a clone as her project — the whole point is to add zest and variety to her life — and to the lives of the people she meets — not to close herself off in familiar homogeneity. They have to be endearingly mismatched in some crucial way.

Their ending was partly true-to-type, and partly not. He did wind up with her until the end, rather than her only being a temporary guardian angel. But she did get deprived of his company before very long when he died, and was kept out of the rest of his social circle afterward. So her role was more of a temporary rehabilitating nurse after all.

So then, how well does Anna Nicole Smith and her odd-couple relationship fit the other aspects of the MPDG pattern I've detailed over the past year or so? That is, not the intrinsic qualities of their relationship, but her personal profile, the timing and zeitgeist, and so on? More or less to a T.

First, their relationship — from initial encounter through getting married — took place during a restless warm-up phase of the 15-year excitement cycle, namely the first half of the 1990s. Same time as Pretty Woman and L.A. Story. This is the phase of the cycle when people are itching to leave their refractory state cocoons from the previous vulnerable phase (the late '80s, in this case). But some need more coaxing than others, enter the MPDG to help out the sad sack.

Second, she was born during a manic phase of the cycle — the late '60s, just like Julia Roberts and Sarah Jessica Parker. She imprinted on a climate of soaring energy levels, invincibility, and therefore a downplaying of risks and setbacks. Dust yourself off and try again. She imprinted on this same climate again during her second birth in adolescence, turning 15 in the early '80s manic phase. If your role is to coach and coax someone who's shy about taking risks, you'd better be resilient and invincible-feeling yourself, or else they won't buy into you being a role model to follow.

Third, she was a corporeal rather than cerebral type. Dancing, whether in a strip club or elsewhere, is one of the most corporeal and least cerebral activities. She was also a model for Playboy and Guess, back when models were still used rather than actresses, singers, podcasters, and other non-fashion celebs. Another activity whose expressions are of a visual, concrete, and kinesthetic nature, rather than a verbal, abstract, and conceptual nature.

The MPDG is an earthly, not ethereal, guardian angel. She has to get the sad sack to turn off the "paralysis of analysis" program running in the computer of his mind. Romance is fundamentally physical, and how else is he going to find a true love mate, without getting more comfortable in his own body and taking part in kinesthetic activities? In her nursing role, physical rehab and emotional rehab are just two sides of the same coin.

And, true to the profile of corporeal types, she was a butt woman rather than a boob woman. She did opt for breast implants, back when there was still (waning) pressure to do so, but by nature she had more around back than up in front. In their review, the Perfume Nationalist group mentions only one iconic physical pose of hers from the entire show — when she got stuck under a table while drunk, on all fours, with her PAWG-tastic ass preventing her from escaping forward out the other side.

Aside from being corporeal butt women, MPDGs also tend to be somewhat taller than average, although this is a weak correlation and there are plenty of shorties. But Anna Nicole is another point in the taller-than-average direction — standing at a statuesque 5'11. I think this has to do with taller girls feeling less intimidated about approaching men first, as is required for a spontaneous nurse who seeks out her own patients, rather than them checking themselves in to her.

Despite this slight tomboy tendency, though, MPDGs have very feminine hourglass waist-hip ratios, which she did as well. Nursing is a fundamentally feminine, not masculine role.

She also had a bisexual tendency, which supports my claim that lesbians cannot be MPDGs but bisexual or bicurious girls can be. In her show, there's an ongoing theme of her flirting with her unattractive sad-sack lesbian personal assistant. A woman in need of the MPDG treatment must rely on bisexual women, not their fellow lesbians, who are defined by a perimenopausal / middle-aged state and are therefore unlikely to initiate such an out-of-the-blue adventure. Bisexual women are the young-at-heart type, and can be relied on for that kind of youthful frenzy.

Her story is only off-brand for the MPDG in that it was not set in a bi-coastal WASP-kenazi milieu, but in the downscale flyover South. Even then, in the sprawling Houston area, not the hip Austin or the glamorous Dallas of that time. And yet, all of the other aspects of their relationship, her role, and her individual traits, match up with those of the MPDGs from the movies. It was just inflected by her being a reality celeb in the early '90s, before that trend had become mainstream in Hollywood and New York media.

Unlike 9/11 response, COVID response collapsing due to anarchic polarized climate of imperial disintegration

I was skeptical of the claims that the draconian COVID protocols would be here to stay, and if anything would only get worse. "If you don't believe it, just tell me how many people leave their shoes on while going through security at any airport these days, 20 years after 9/11".

But as we saw with the entire GOP failing to defend against a stolen election, unlike their aggressive stance in the nail-biting election of 2000, nobody is in charge in this shithole country anymore. The elites could not be more polarized, more checked-out, and more abdicating of their basic responsibilities, even to their fellow elites.

We don't live in the relatively cohesive early 2000s anymore, and that was already starting the trend toward red state / blue state rivalry. There is less and less within a bipartisan consensus anymore, so it's just might makes right, and whoever happens to be stronger for awhile will impose their will on the weaker side.

That will allow Democrats to steal elections that matter in the short term -- including against their own people, as seen in the New York mayoral primary -- but it also means that none of this shit is going to last in the medium-to-long term. There's simply no broad buy-in from most of the elite class, and worse, the parts who aren't buying in are having that rubbed in their faces.

Unlike other countries, America has been an expanding empire since about 1700, and is subject to a different trajectory going forward, namely imperial disintegration. Finland, Denmark, etc., don't have to worry about the especially nasty forces tearing apart America from within. They have not been expanding empires, and they are not about to suffer from a "black hole of asabiya," as Peter Turchin describes the collapse of the potential for collective action, when empires begin disintegrating.

To compare to the Roman Empire, only because it's the most well known, our neoliberal / Reagan era was similar to their Antonine dynasty, in the mid-late 2nd century -- after their maximum territory had been reached, following centuries of expansion. It was a consolidation, resting on their laurels kind of phase -- stagnation, or saturation, rather than continued expanse and growth.

We reached our territorial maximum after WWII, occupying Japan and Germany, and gradually folding in the NATO countries. We failed to expand into the Middle East or Central Asia. None of those regions are under our sphere of influence, and those with whom we are allies were either expanding states themselves -- such as Saudi Arabia, which had been expanding since the late 1700s against the Ottoman encroachment -- or peaceful treaty partners, like Egypt. The ones we tried to conquer, like Iraq and Iran and Syria, have only slipped further out of our orbit. Ditto for Afghanistan, an even greater abject failure.

Even before that, we failed to take North Korea and Vietnam on mainland Asia, and we lost our former conquests in Cuba and the Philippines.

What comes after the stagnation phase of an empire is its disintegration, beginning really with the Year of the Five Emperors in 193 for Rome, but totally unraveling during the Crisis of the Third Century. As a sidenote, any right-winger who is telling you about Caesar (or, for Trump-era populist points, the Gracchus brothers), and lamenting the end of the Republic vs. start of the Empire, as though that's where we are now, is willfully retarded. They can't tell what stage of the Roman Empire we are in -- very obviously, past its peak of expansion, and headed toward polarized disintegration. Namely, the Third Century. There will never be any further Caesar figures in America, and any potential Constantines will be, like the original, in a far-off land that is only under American influence now, not within America proper, and will only spawn a new empire (then, the Byzantine, and now, who knows?).

It's amazing to see how little of Roman culture and society from the 3rd century onward survived. All the Roman literature and architecture -- including the colosseums, arches, columns, walls, aqueducts, everything -- basically stagnated when the rest of the empire stagnated, during the Antonines. And nothing has been retained in The Canon from the 3rd century onward. Christian culture doesn't count, just cuz it was written in Latin, as it is decidedly post-Roman.

I think American culture will go down the same way -- they'll include the early stuff, 19th C, and most of the 20th C. up through the '70s (movies more than novels for the 20th C.), and then only begrudgingly include stuff from the '80s through the 2000s, as cool as we may find it now. Probably nothing from the crisis period of the 2010s (after the Great Recession broke the economy for good). And definitely nothing from this moment onwards, again however neat we may find it at the moment.

Those earlier periods had elite buy-in from many sides, even during a period of Civil War. Just as with the civil wars in Rome, ours took place during imperial expansion -- that seems to be a general fact, as with the English Civil War taking place during the expansion of the British Empire. When the stakes are huge, as with an expanding empire, civil conflict takes the form of Team A vs. Team B vying for who gets to control and administer the high-stakes empire.

When the empire's fate is only going to decline, who gives a shit about controlling it? There are no great big teams vying for control, and there is no Team A vs. Team B kind of civil war. More like chaos and anarchy. See the Crisis of the Third Century, or the internal politics of the WWI era in most of the moribund European / Ottoman empires, or unfolding right now in America.

The elites of imperial societies preserved the culture of their fractious civil war periods because they were still part of an even longer-term rising phase of imperial expansion. They were still part of a strong Us vs. Them ethnogenesis (against the Celts, Carthagenians, etc. for Rome, and against the Indians, Nazis, and Soviets for America).

However, when national identity begins disintegrating, why bother preserving that culture? It's not built to last, indeed it seems contaminated with corrosive elements. So, ignore Roman "culture" after 200, and forget German "culture" after WWI sent their empire into a death-spiral -- but keep all the good stuff going back to the Prussian Enlightenment monarchs, when their expansion began.

In fact, the modern welfare state was pioneered by Bismarck in the 1880s, at the height of Prussian ("German") expansion and power. And it's no coincidence that it was retained through all sorts of subsequent developments -- it was created in a climate of elite consensus and harmony, which makes dismantling it sacrilegious. But the stuff from the Wilhelmine era after Bismarck and through WWI (roughly 1890 to 1920), fell by the wayside, especially the distinctive new policies like trying to make Germany a colonial power, or trying to dominate France within Europe.

That's akin to our New Deal period giving us our welfare state, from a bipartisan consensus and harmony among elites, and at the peak of our expansion, with FDR being our Bismarck -- strong, "authoritarian," and long-serving, all signs of a strong state. We have an incredibly weak state right now, with weak rulers cycling through like the barracks emperors of the Crisis of the Third Century.

And none of them are enforcing jackshit, especially if it's a new policy rather than a longstanding one -- just look at all the COVID protocols, which were largely terminated by governors of gigantic states almost immediately (e.g. DeSantis in Florida). In the wake of 9/11, did multiple governors flout the federal rules about how airports on their turf were to be run -- all the requirements about shoes, liquids, and the like? Not a chance in hell. We were still a halfway strong state and cohesive people in the early 2000s. The elites could still be brought onto the same page.

But not anymore. They've already had to call an end to the masks at the national level, and if anyone tries to bring them back, that will last for even less time than the first round. They've already been tarnished, and too many people were already breaking the rules during the first round. They will only be joined by more open rule-breakers if a second round of mask mandates is enacted.

These flailing attempts to establish order during the elite-driven anarchy will certainly cause misery and headaches along our terminal decline, but none of them are going to last like Social Security or even taking off your shoes to get on a plane. Imperial disintegration means collateral damage from elites waging war with each other in an increasingly ineffectual way -- first this method, then that method, from this ruler then from that ruler -- rather than a single method administered forever by an enduring dictator.

It also makes me wonder what from the crisis period of the 2010s will be jettisoned like the COVID protocols. I could easily see gay marriage getting stricken down at some point, like an over-indulgence of prog morality akin to Prohibition getting repealed. At least at the level of individual states refusing to enforce federal laws, and the feds being too ineffectual to enforce them.

Certainly no prog policies relating to trannies will last over the medium-to-long term, as they're only getting going during the outright disintegration period. Indeed, those ones seem destined to blow up due to polarization and lack of broad buy-in from elites, and are intended just to lord it over political enemies in the very short term. Our parasitic elites are more concerned with dunking on each during a 24-hour discourse cycle, rather than implementing anything to last 50 years or longer.

To conclude, not that I ever read them, but the thinkers of the New Deal era who were primarily concerned with analyzing / critiquing strong states and authoritarianism are now clearly of no use. Their main contribution was to break out of the strong government era, and into the neoliberal liberation era of roughly 1980 to 2020. With our societies so weakened by now, where it's outright falling apart, we won't have to look to an analysis or critique of strong states, the ratchet of authoritarian policies, and so on.

We need to look closer at analyses of disintegrating empires, such as the Roman Third Century, or Spain after its Reconquista-driven Golden Age (so, during the 19th and 20th centuries). We could look at more familiar ones like Britain, France, and Germany during their 20th-C disintegration, although that fall was padded by being absorbed into the American sphere of influence -- whereas we have no successor empire left to bail us out as we disintegrate.

Lorde, lesbian PAWG attempting Manic Pixie Dream Girl role in "Solar Power"

The new song and video for "Solar Power" by Lorde ties together so many recurring themes here.



This is a clear attempt at a Manic Pixie Dream Girl role, or an earthly guardian angel (a beachier, "prettier Jesus") who nurses a sad sack back to social-emotional health, in order to help him to fulfill his potential.

These roles appear during the restless warm-up phase of the 15-year cultural excitement cycle, as people are coming out of their refractory states from the previous vulnerable phase of the cycle, and feel like mixing it up again with the opposite sex. The last heyday was 2005-'09, which drew people out of their refractory states from 2000-'04. The most recent vulnerable phase was 2015-'19, and as of last year people are ready to come out and play again.

In this song, though, she's not aiming at a specific sad sack, who's been unlucky in love. It's more about nursing everyone back to health, not just men, and not just in the romantic domain of life. She could easily be encouraging a group of women to find confidence and fulfill their potential. She's a free spirit leading by example.

The earthiness and the dating-and-mating aspect is still there in the double-entendre about "my cheeks in high color / overripe peaches". But it's aimed at a general audience.

And Lorde does check almost all of the boxes of the MPDG type.

Crucially, she's born during a manic phase of the excitement cycle, and was re-born in adolescence during such a phase at age 15. She was born in 1996, during the late '90s manic phase, and turned 15 during the manic phase of the early 2010s.

Manic phase births imprint on a zeitgeist where energy levels have taken off in a spike, which is carefree, invincible, and resilient regarding risk and loss. This gives them a natural attitude of dusting yourself off and trying again, not wallowing in abjection. The last such crop were those born in the early '80s manic phase, who led the MPDG way during the late 2000s restless warm-up phase. (And before them, those born during the late '60s manic phase, who led the way during the early '90s restless phase, such as Julia Roberts and Sarah Jessica Parker.)

You might not have known it — certainly I did not — until this new video and the cover art for the accompanying album, but Lorde has a pronounced hourglass shape. The MPDG is fundamentally a nurturing role, and this is reflected in their hyper-feminine waist-to-hip ratio. Also, they tend to be butt girls rather than boob girls, and Lorde is no exception. This relates to their being corporeal rather than cerebral, as corporeal people are butt people, while cerebral people are boob people. And the MPDG is an earthly nurse, not a cerebral therapist or Socratic tutor.

The one thing that she misses in the MPDG checklist is being heterosexual (as is the norm) or bisexual (a la fellow late '90s birth Rebecca Black in the Manic Pixie-ish "Girlfriend" from earlier this year).

Here is an item from Blind Gossip, whose clues clearly point to Lorde as the lesbian being described ("drama" referring to the title of her then-new album Melodrama, and the related link being about a "Royal" being gay, referring to her breakout hit "Royals"). She got defensive about "What's wrong with lesbians" when questioned by an Australian radio interviewer about her close friendship with (closeted lesbian) Taylor Swift — another dead giveaway, if I had been paying attention back then. Google image search both of their names, and you can see they were very physical and excited to be around each other, even though they seemingly had little in common. Taylor was just hyped up to find another lesbian in the music industry, and a quasi-forbidden 7-years-younger minor at that (no hate, 16/17 and 23/24 is totally natural).

I didn't suspect she was lesbian because lesdar is incredibly hard for outsiders to refine, unlike gaydar, but I should've been tipped off by how mature / old she sounds and presents herself. Lesbians are fundamentally a peri-menopausal group of women, in contrast to gays who are fundamentally a pre-pubescent group of boys ("ewww, girls are yucky"). Lesbians are more likely to be butt girls than boob girls, so that's another match.

When "Royals" came out, she was only 16, but her voice, affect, and the rest all came off as 10 years older. In the new video, she could easily be in her late 30s or 40s, just having a really tight body for her age. It sounds more aimed at an adult contempo audience, who want to rejuvenate their lost or slipping-away youth. When the women are doing the tai-chi inspired poses, I immediately thought of those "yoga your way through menopause, and discover the best you possible" kind of products.

However, this does allow her to target a broad audience, and to talk about more than just dating and mating, as though she were a wise middle-aged hippie, rather than a naive or ditzy youth. So her being a peri-menopausal lesbian works for the song, but does keep it from being a true MPDG role.

* * *

So far I've discussed her persona instead of the music itself, because this is mostly a change-of-character performance from her indie / dark persona. The music is OK, not something I would buy, but not something I would change the station for if it came on the radio. I was never into her earlier stuff either (didn't hate it, though), so this isn't necessarily a backslide for her maturation.

But how does the music embody the larger themes? It's fairly subdued for the most part, with plainspoken vocals, occasional layers of sighs, and sparse instrumentation. In that way, it's like the dream-pop sound typical of the previous vulnerable phase of the cycle, characterized by trance-like droning layers rather than dynamic melodies and riffs. It taps into the late 2010s drowsiness and moodiness that is still a familiar feeling for us, especially her target audience who need encouragement to leave behind their cocoons.

There's hardly any percussion, although the guitar strumming is a bit syncopated, and the pick striking the strings is amplified so heavily that it takes on a percussive timbre, all creating a stirring-awake rhythm. People are just coming out of their cocoons in the early 2020s, not off onto an energy spike just yet. And it builds steadily toward an uplifting choral finale, for when we are finally awake and raring to go.

It sounds nothing like George Michael — I don't know how that became a common take. Everyone in the media today is a failson or faildaughter being propped up by central bank handouts (quantitative easing), so it's no surprise to see them have such an impoverished store of references in memory, that they heard a sparse verse with an acoustic guitar strumming, and instantly went to "Faith".

What does it actually sound like? It does have an early '90s vibe to it, since the 1990-2004 cycle was a low-energy cycle, whereas the cycles before and after it were high-energy (1975-'89, and 2005-'19). Or an early '60s vibe (another low-energy cycle, 1960-'74, before the high-energy one that followed). I can't think of a particular example from the early '90s, though.

However, it otherwise sounds like "Unwritten" by Natasha Bedingfield.



Technically this was released first in 2004 in the UK, where it went nowhere, but really released in '05-'06 in the US, where it was one of the biggest songs of 2006 and cemented her fame here. "Unwritten" is a bit faster and groovier, but is still very sparse in instrumentation, features a simple acoustic rhythm guitar in the verse, and has minimal percussion (mainly a muted bass drum, akin to the bass guitar in "Solar Power").

The vocals in the verse are fairly plainspoken, occasional sighs for layering, but it gradually builds toward an uplifting choral finale, which is in a Christian gospel style — not unlike the New Age-y religious chant of "solar power" in the Lorde song.

Thematically, it's another anthem about finding confidence, not letting the past weigh you down, and turning over a new leaf, ready to fulfill your potential. The running metaphor is writing, and the initial state she's in is having writer's block, like a sad sack from an MPDG movie who starts off stuck in a rut, at an impasse in life. Totally in touch with the zeitgeist of shifting out of the early 2000s refractory state and into the restless warm-up phase of the late 2000s.

And just like Lorde, Bedingfield was born during a manic phase (the early '80s, along with the MPDG actresses from that same late 2000s era). Judging from her other music videos (like "These Words"), she looks like more of a butt girl than a boob girl, and styled as a free-spirited gypsy. Unlike Lorde, she seems pretty heterosexual, full of youthful energy and libido, and not like a middle-aged mentor (however funky they may be).

Both songs are less about the music per se, and more about channeling the zeitgeist, and spurring forward the social-emotional changes under way between the vulnerable and restless phases of the excitement cycle. They're more cultural than aesthetic, but no less important for that.

The difficulty of fine-tuning lesdar (vs. gaydar) from IRL observations

First time a lesbian has followed me around a thrift store yesterday. Although with all the talk about disappearing lesbians and rise of "non-binary" types who are clearly female, maybe she was one of those.

Somewhat taller than average for a girl, early-mid 20s, cute face, flawless pale olive skin, boyishly short side-parted hairstyle from circa 1990 (NOT a gay whoosh) but with the back and sides shaved close, brunette, small boobs, thin but athletic (visible abs), midriff-baring tank top, khaki shorts just above the knee, forgot the shoes, some kind of glasses too.

She was there with another girl, who had a fashion mullet, and who I assumed were a lesbian couple out thrifting. Toward the end, I saw them both debating which woodcraft items they were going to buy to decorate their groyperesque, uh, I mean cottagecore home.

But for awhile there, the mullet one was off browsing t-shirts, and the tomboy one was clearly trailing me and trying to get me to notice her. I don't think a lesbian has ever had a clear case of the hots for me, unlike the other girls there, so maybe she was just "lesbian presenting" but actually a straight or bi girl with an edgy aesthetic.

Or she was one of the rare surviving lesbians, but was not trying to get my attention sexually. Maybe she saw someone with a cool edgy look, and wanted a fellow cool person to acknowledge her own coolness. Seeking validation as girls do, but not for their body.

However, the confusion of her signals left me wondering what she really was and what her motivation was, so I didn't actually smile at her, talk shop about thrifting, or anything like that. Perhaps for the better, as I would've inevitably asked, "So... are you a lesbian or what?"

It can be hard to tell who's lesbian and who's a low-body-count straight girl. Both have amazing skin (lack of pollution from all those different partners' germs, or whatever). Both are adorably bashful. Both dress more comfortably and sometimes alt, but in that '90s slacker way rather than the flamboyant late 2000s scene queen way.

No more exciting of a conclusion than that. More of a case study of how lesbians don't always jump out of the background, unlike gays who are always flamingly obvious (whether they're "out" or not). Fine-tuning your lesdar is way more difficult than gaydar.

And a reminder that if you're basing your intuitions about lesbians from the ones you can easily detect, you're forming a biased view since most lesbians try not to stand out in a crowd, let alone flaunt their non-hetero sexuality. Those are either the butch dyke types, or the off-the-wall bisexual types.

To get a better understanding of lesbians, you really do have to go straight to the source and listen to a variety of them, none of whom would be identifiably lesbian out in the wild. Contrast that with gays, who you can easily identify in public and just observe their mannerisms etc. to see what they're like.

Lesbian normality vs. fag-hag abnormality, further details and cases

Continuing the theme of the last post, here's PAWG-alicious lesbian Dua Lipa straddling the border between gay and lesbo culture, as usual, in the newest video for "Love Again":



On the one hand, it's a disco sound (required of the restless warm-up phase of the excitement cycle, beginning in 2020), she's wearing a cowboy hat, and there are Village People inspired back-up dancers.

On the other hand, she's got modest boobs and a thicc ass, is comfortable in her body to the point of exuding sex appeal and charisma (one of the few lesbians who gets straight guys horned up), not some type of neurotic body dysmorphia (super-skinny or mega-fattie). She's not a notorious fag-hag, despite making danceclub music.

Related: she's the only member of the Albo mafia to not bleach her dark eastern Mediterranean tresses. That's comfort in her body-as-it-is, knowing it's hotter than bleaching -- which is more of a gay or fag-hag thing.

Gay guys bleach their hair or frost their tips (part of their broader syndrome of body dysmorphia, which they share with their fag-hag BFFs), whereas lesbians do not.

Fag hags like Madonna, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, et al. are much more likely to lighten their hair, even if they're already dark-blonde (like Christina Aguilera going platinum blonde).

Isn't Dasha from the Red Scare podcast a natural brunette? But no blonde dye job for fellow anti-woke left brunette Slav, Heather Habsburg -- who is a lesbian! Hehe.

Aging-but-trying-to-stay-young women also lighten their hair, another typical fag-hag demo who are, typically, looking to avoid the straight male gaze that would remind them of their sub-ideal attractiveness level (due to aging). Lesbians are peri-menopausal, hence "aging" in some sense, but fine with it and not desperately trying to reverse it.

Lightening your hair is one of those girls-vs.-other-girls contests, like getting an eating disorder or spending big bucks on high-heeled shoes -- not an attracting-mates behavior.

Lesbians may have a somewhat catty personality, like all women, but they don't go off the deep end with those competing-against-other-women contests. All part of lesbians being peri-menopausal (the opposite of neotenous gays), when you're done competing and are settling into a grandmotherly serene stage of life.

Less careerist, more slacker or blue-collar (at least in affectation). Healthy weight, natural hair, natural hair elsewhere too for that matter, sensible / practical footwear (could be pretty or stylish, but not high-fashion)...

NO FAKE TITS, how could I forget that one? Boob jobs are not meant to attract mates, since it only targets boob men, and even they don't like the rock-hard fake bolt-ons IRL. It's used in women's pecking-order games of who has the biggest cup size. Notice women don't compete over who has the most thicc and juicy ass -- that's for attracting mates, just like the primate gods intended!

Lesbians continue to be the pleasant surprise among the non-hetero population, and naturally the least promoted by the LGBTQCIA mafia during Pride Month, the parades, and the rest of the normalizing-abnormality spectacle.

Why are fag hags never PAWGs, but only super-skinnies or mega-fatties?

An old post looked at the main reason why women become fag hags — to adopt a surrogate child, when they are unable to find a man to give them a baby for real. Gays are neotenous or pedomorphic, meaning they resemble pre-pubescent boys, both physically and especially psychologically ("ewww, girls are yucky"). Lesbians are the other way around, resembling peri-menopausal women, and are therefore more mature physically and psychologically. So if a woman wants to adopt a child-like creature (other than a pet), she cannot befriend lesbians, but only gays.

Having said that, there are other secondary reasons that some women prefer the company of gays over straight guys. One pattern that just struck me is that you only ever see and hear about fag hags who are on either extreme of the BMI spectrum — super-skinnies or mega-fatties. Normal weight, thicc, curvaceous PAWGs are just never going to restrict their male acquaintances to gays only. They're perfectly fine interacting with straight guys.

What explains this bimodal distribution of fag hags by body type? Well, they're the farthest away from the ideal female body type in the eyes of the only group who gets to determine that standard — straight guys, especially the hot ones — whereas PAWGs are smack dab in the ideal shape range.

That suggests that another key reason why women avoid straight guys and prefer gay friends is that they do not want to be reminded of their less-than-ideal shape. Gays do not want their body, or any other woman's body, so they will never send a positive or negative signal about her physical desirability. Straight guys, on the other hand, will frequently give off signals, however involuntary and subtle (or not, as the case may be), reacting to the woman's shape.

Over time, the super-skinnies will develop an implicit understanding that their straight guy friends and acquaintances don't find them to be the ideal shape. Indeed, if the guys comment openly at all, it will be to the effect of, "You could be so hot if you'd just put on 20 pounds and really fill out your jeans" (suicide material for the thinspo crowd).

Ditto for the mega-fatties, who probably already know they're not ideal, but still do not want to be reminded all the time that straight guys don't react to them in a horned-up way. They too do not want to hear the occasional comment about changing their shape: "You could be so hot if you'd just lose 40 pounds" (an indignation for women who want to shove carbs in their face all day every day).

And so, the only way to avoid these negative reminders of their not-very-ideal shape is to eschew the company of straight guys to the greatest extent possible, and rely on gays if they must associate with the opposite sex.

Thicc girls with hourglass figures would never receive such negative feedback about their shape, so they're perfectly fine with hanging around straight guys. Not necessarily the "I can only be friends with guys, not other girls" type, just that they have no problem associating with us.

Some of them may enjoy the positive feedback, and prefer being in our company as often as possible. Others may be more shy about all the drooling tongues they're going to provoke, and try to cover up their shape — but even these ones will not feel bitter or resentful toward straight guys, so they will not seek the comforting social rescue of a fully gay circle of friends, like the fag hag coping mechanism.

And of course, not all of the super-skinnies and mega-fatties become fag hags. Some of them are humble and accepting of reality, and don't mind the constant reminders from straight guy friends that they could be so much hotter if only they'd radically alter their shape. What I'm saying is that these not-ideal types are clearly more driven to become fag hags, so they will make up the vast majority of them.

This explains why some types of girls, who you would expect to be very gay-friendly, wind up not having many gays in their circle. Pornstars and strippers are part of a broader group of people who are sexually permissive and/or deviant, including gays. And yet they don't really associate with each other because those girls are more of the ideally sexy body shape.

Then there are the lesbians, who are more likely to be normal weight, even PAWGs, than anorexic or morbidly obese. And they famously cannot stand being around gays for very long (and vice versa). They don't mind hanging around straight guys, though, which again is not to say they prefer us as friends. Just that they don't feel the repulsion and urge to withdraw from us, out of existential dread about their shape. You'd think if any group of women would be repulsed by straight guys, it would be lesbians, but it's actually the super-skinny and mega-fattie straight girls who are.

Is this internalized homophobia ripping apart the "LGBTQ community"? No, it's just lesbians feeling more secure about their body shape, compared to anorexic or obese straight women, and not needing to flee into the non-judgmental arms of gay guys. And lesbians are not more secure about their bodies for delusional reasons — they actually are closer to the ideal female body shape than are the super-skinnies or mega-fatties.

Nor is this due to lesbians not needing some kind of male approval. If they felt like avoiding those who might remind them of their lack of physical desirability, they would avoid their fellow lesbians! Lesbians, not just straight guys, are judges of the ideal female shape, and they're the only such judges that a lesbian would actually feel stung by if treated as not-so-ideal physically.

If a lesbian truly felt the same need to protect her ego regarding body shape as super-skinny and mega-fattie straight girls, she would befriend straight women. None of them would be attracted to the lesbian, and therefore would not give off good or bad feedback about her sexual desirability.

Lesbians seeking ego protection about sexual desirability would never hang out with female-attracted people — other lesbians, or straight guys — and yet they do. Some even prefer those two groups for their social circle.

Conclusion: lesbians are not hung up about their body shape, probably because it's not the polar opposite of ideal in either direction. And sure enough, they're more of the corporeal butt girl type, less so the cerebral boob girl type (just the way hot straight guys like 'em).

Reflections on getting COVID in April 2020

I'm going to do a bit more COVID posting, but have decided to break it up into a more digestible series. And what better place to start than looking back on and learning from when I myself got coronavirus during the spring wave of last year?

To begin with, I find it strange how few people on the internet appear to have gotten it. It's rare to hear people share their stories, whether they're a large account on social media, or a lowbie in their replies. I understand why, say, Aimee Terese did not get it — she's in Australia, and their country smartly closed its international borders early and consistently, as did their Kiwi neighbors. See, even a libtard-run government like New Zealand can protect its people from pandemics, and all without the insane protocols that we have had to endure for over a year in America.

Really the only case I remember was @HeatherHabsburg from Twitter, fellow founding member of the lads-and-lesbians affinity group. She also got it during the spring wave.

Perhaps the cerebral types who are terminally online simply avoided contact with the outside world better than the corporeal types? Sorry, but one lesson I learned was that this thing was not nasty enough to turn yourself into a hermetically sealed nerd in order to avoid, or to keep others from catching — unless they were old and vulnerable.

It also makes me wonder whether lesbians like Heather were more likely to get it than gays. Gays are more cerebral, nerdy, and snobby, whereas lesbians are more corporeal, jockish / craftsy, and down-to-earth. I've read through the Red Scare podcast subreddit occasionally, and the girls-and-gays crowd there has mostly avoided it. I don't know about the lads-and-lesbians crowd — if someone has a better feeling for Tumblr, witch tok, or other lesbian online spaces, feel free to chime in.

If so, it would be yet another example of the horseshoe theory linking cottagecore lesbians who were on Tumblr in 2012 and groyper super-straight lads who were on 4chan back then. Every time I see @that_groyper (now just @groyper on Gab) posting a picture of home-baked bread, reporting on his moka pot brew du jour, and posting about nature hikes and interest in bugs and other ugly creatures, I have to check to make sure I haven't wandered into a cottagecore YouTuber's videos.

At any rate, by far the most widespread reaction to Heather Habsburg getting COVID was the deranged moralizing about how she had no one to blame but herself, since she sat in a restaurant where no one was wearing masks. She also commented on how pleasing it was to see such a sight. So in the minds of the deranged, the epidemic gods were meting out punishment on her not only for flouting the protocols, but praising the rule-breaking for its humanizing effects.

Even those who were sympathetic to her still concern-trolled her over masking, saying you're too good to succumb to COVID just because you don't want to wear a mask.

However, for the moralists keeping puritanical score, I happened to get COVID when everyone including me was the MOST restrictive in our behaviors. Everything was shut down except supermarkets and drug stores, which I only made a trip to once every 2-3 weeks. I held my breath and covered my nose & mouth when I went outside to take the trash / recycle bins to the curb. I had no one over, and visited no one. I didn't even go for a leisure ride in the car!

I wore a surgical, not cloth, mask on the rare trip outside, and I disposed of it after a single use, not just after every 8 hours. I wore latex gloves inside the supermarket, and disinfected my eyeglasses with rubbing alcohol after getting back home. In the supermarket, not only did I keep 6 feet away — we kept out of the entire aisle when someone else was already there.

The only extreme measure I didn't take was the disinfecting of grocery packaging, quarantining them, etc., since it was already known to not spread that way.

And despite all of that, it still got me. I didn't blog about it at the time because I wasn't fully sure that it was COVID — I did not suffer the supposedly telltale fever, but I had all the other symptoms, including the strange ones like the freezing feeling in my fingertips and toes for a bit before the debilitating ones struck. And it was during the spring wave that was hitting the rest of the country, so it wouldn't have been unusual for me to have gotten it too.

It wasn't a cold because there was no typical stuffy / runny nose, or other sinus problems. No productive cough either. It wasn't the flu. It had severe dehydration, though.

After 2-3 days of not even being able to drink a cup of water, let alone eat food, at last I could eat and drink again. I made a nice hearty steak and vegetable stew, loaded with animal protein, fat, and electrolytes. The first dish of that instantly brought me back to 70% of normal functioning. When you're low on electrolytes, which the nervous system uses to communicate, your brain can't send signals to itself or to the rest of the body, so it adds to the bodily fatigue and the mental cloudiness.

Recovery went well from there. I felt pretty normal after a week, and fully normal after about two weeks. I have no remaining problems taking a full breath. The only thing I'm not sure about is impairment of the sense of smell. I've always had a really strong sense of taste and smell, and it seems to still be that way, although there could be some minor loss that would show up on a lab test.

Naturally I didn't go anywhere or interact with anyone once the bad symptoms hit, or during my recovery. And again, I was maximally protective — at least, according to the official protocols — when I may have been infective early on before the major symptoms.

But it's possible, perhaps even likely, that I did spread it to someone else because those protocols were clearly wrong. They had a totally incorrect model of how it was being transmitted — as though it were a person-to-person contagion. And objectively in hindsight, they did nothing to slow / stop the spread.

I'll be posting more on the correct model for COVID's spread — where infecteds pollute a common public resource — but even if you didn't have any mathematical modeling under your belt, or knowledge of history, or awareness of diseases in other parts of the world, you could still figure out that the experts had gotten it totally wrong.

Somehow someone spread it to me, despite the fact that everyone in my neck of the woods (not just me) was taking the most extreme measures in April 2020. So I could have just as easily spread it to someone else, in the same way that I picked it up. Both links in that chain of transmission took place because the technocracy had no clue what was going on, and instantly fixated on an incorrect model of transmission, as well as a set of protocols that were therefore destined to fail.

Luckily for me, I was "only" 39 years old at the time, and it felt like a bad cold or bad flu, albeit with its own distinctive mix of symptoms.

On the silver lining side, I had immunity during the much more widespread wave during the fall / winter. And it convinced me that for most people (under 60 or 70 or whatever), it was not severe enough of a threat to justify the extreme protocols — even if they did work, which they observably did not. And it got me thinking about what the epidemic's dynamics actually were, if the flu-like standard SIR model was wrong. And after that, what types of measures might actually be able to slow or stop the spread — purifying, or at least neutralizing, the public resource from its pollution.

Flirting with strangers resumes in public places

Over the course of late 2019 and 2020, I cataloged the signs of people coming out of their refractory states from the vulnerable phase of the 15-year excitement cycle. Girls catcalling guys, brushing up against guys in public, and so on and so forth -- things which had not happened to me since the summer of 2015, all of a sudden were coming roaring back.

Sometime after the theft of the election -- seems like the Capitol storming or Biden's inauguration -- everyone fled back into their cocoons. Staring down at phones became widespread overnight, when it had all but disappeared during the late 2010s. People swerving 10 feet away from you on the path around a park. Utterly hysterical anxiety, as people tried to figure out what was going to happen in the power vacuum after the coup against Trump and the Reagan-era GOP.

But now that there's a lull in outward signs of political instability (until the next major blow-up), people are starting to lighten up again, and are tentatively coming back out of their shells. The springtime weather certainly helps, especially with the birds-and-the-bees side of the return to social interaction.

The alt girls in particular have been wearing down my defenses, whether by locking eyes with me, following me around, or actually coming up to me and saying, I really like your outfit ^_^. Today I finally felt inspired enough to make the first move in complimenting them.

At one of my regular stops on the thrift store circuit, an adorable alt girl with tawny skin and a quirky purple bob of hair had followed me back into the men's clothing section, where I had been the only person browsing. She started making little moves to stand in the same aisle as me, though at the opposite end, to have plausible deniability in case I ignored her. But like an eager fishie, I took the bait and walked down her way, passing her as I turned around the end of the aisle, then remaining within 5 feet or so of her.

Unlike most alt girls -- and their scene girl ancestors -- this one was a butt girl, standing in a contrapposto while staring up at the t-shirt rack as though pondering a design exhibition (but inwardly focused on luring me closer). I don't even remember what she was wearing on top, all I could see was her buns pushed out to one side, in high-waisted jeans, a grommet belt, and Doc Martens. How could she tell I was a butt guy, and not a boob guy? Maybe she saw that I too was dressed to show off my butt, and figured birds of a feather flock together.

Another pass down the opposite aisle from her, so that she was standing across from me and making eye contact. I noticed she had one or two slits in her eyebrow -- typically a signal of being a lesbian, but given how eagerly she was following me around, maybe the bi girls have adopted it as well.

Then she came back to my aisle, heading right for me. OK, time to give little miss flirty-birdy some spoken validation.

"I like your hair color..."

oh yeahhh?

"Yeah, it's really cool. I used to have that same color, in 8th grade."

(true story -- was not BS-ing just to get on her good side)

yeah, it's... really... funnn.... ^_^

(She must've been so starved for conversation during the pandemic, she was struggling to force the words out of her throat. Awww, it's so cute when girls get speechless.)

I, uh... really, like your shirt! (edgy b&w graphic tee)

"Thanks!"

And that was it -- we went back along our merry ways after our little dance, one step further out of our shells.

When the social mood progresses to further levels of restlessness during this warm-up phase of the cycle, I'll go further and invite her to be thrift store buddies for a little while. Mostly for her to model things, but she could also pick something out for me to try on. I really miss how excited young girls get when they're out clothes shopping and want a random hot guy friend to give them both some unconditional validation as well as some honest feedback. Something they cannot get from a gay BFF -- they want to know if they look hot, and only the attention of a straight guy (preferably one with options) can make that signal palpable.

Speaking of which... there was another alt girl in the next thrift store, who was wearing a dress so sheer you could perfectly see her black bra and bikini-cut underwear. She tried to get my attention a bit, too, passing by me narrowly in the men's jeans aisle, then turning a corner and slowly strutting her ass from side to side, wholly visible under the non-existent dress. This is a clear exit from the vulnerable phase of the cycle, when girls don't want anyone looking at them even partly exposed, and instead resembles the "no pants subway ride," "free the nipple," and other exhibitionistic displays from the last restless and manic phases.

However, I noticed when I first saw her -- like, she's got to be here with her boyfriend or something, otherwise honey-bunny is looking to get catcalled, groped, or slung over someone's shoulder. Well, in a manner of speaking -- she was there with her gay BFF, who was playing the typical eunuch role to his fag-hag friend. Total boner-killer. Minus 10,000 points.

I don't know why girls still don't get it, about not bringing any gay friends out with them when they're trying to get attention from guys. If they wanted to not be approached, then bringing along the gay eunuch makes perfect sense. But when you're dressed half-naked and flexing your buns before a random hot guy? Get him the fuck outta here, Jesus. No eye-contact from me, certainly no verbal compliments or anything further.

Woketards may have made it unsayable in public, but no normal straight guy, especially a hot one looking to flirt with some girls, would ever hang out with gays. It's just not a thing -- no "fag-hag, but a guy". It's already enough to have to befriend or disarm a straight guy friend who you might be out with -- let alone one who will be creepily eying us over even more than you will (they have no filter or shame). It creates such an awkward mood, just... don't.

Final friendly reminder to take off your placebo mask indoors every once in awhile, for awhile, so they can see your face. It gives them a better idea of what you look like, but also makes you more human and approachable -- less faceless. But that's the topic for another post.

Fashion models are butt girls, not boob girls, same as other kinesthetic performers

After looking back on the death of fashion during the 2010s, I couldn't resist going back to watch Project Runway from its late 2000s heyday (on DailyMotion). I began with season 3, whose winner, Jeffrey Sebelia, epitomized the era's edgy rocker chic. So many things about the fashion / style ecosystem stood out, now that there's such a stark contrast to the past 10 years when the industry has disappeared.

Sticking to just one of those topics for now, I was surprised to see how much the fashion models leaned toward the butt girl side of the boobs-vs.-butts spectrum. Back when I watched the show regularly, I would've dismissed the idea because none of them have big round rumps, thick thighs, or anything like that. They're so thin!

However, when it's framed in relative terms, as I've done during my ongoing study of the two types of girls (and the two types of guys who like them), it's obvious. When you are basically flat-chested, even a modest tushy qualifies you as a butt girl. And it's not just their proportions in a static pose, but which region they emphasize more. There again, it's so clear that they're drawing more attention to their buns rather than their bust. The pendulous swing of their hips, the flexing of their (mini) glutes that's visible through the fabric, and the overall emphasis on their lower half while strutting.

I noticed this especially from Clarissa, who was also briefly an NFL cheerleader before moving to New York for modeling. (More on the connection between models and gymnasts, dancers, etc., below.)

If they wanted attention to go to their chest, they would be raising and lowering their torso to make them bounce, or pushing either shoulder forward in alternation to make their boobs swing, or leaning forward toward the viewer to dangle the hypnotic object before their eyes. Instead, their gait is defined by an almost rigid torso, restrained arm movements, and the shoulders moving only during the brief transition between poses. Most of the dynamic motion is going on in the fertility region of the waist, belly, hips, ass, and thighs.

Models are also required to have hourglass waist-to-hip ratios (around 25-35), which reinforces their feminine fertility appeal. This eliminates a tiresome explanation about gay men dominating fashion and imposing a masculine ideal upon women, and thereby also alienating straight guy tastes. If the ideal were masculine, they would have tubular waist-hip ratios, and they wouldn't have such doll-like faces and long hair.

Even the Victoria's Secret angels, whose job does draw more attention to the chest, and who are meant to appeal more overtly to straight guys, only have a B cup size. There's just something about bustiness that does not work well with the role of modeling.

If you've been following my work on the two types of girls, you may have already guessed the answer -- butt girls are more corporeal, boob girls more cerebral. So naturally the former are favored in any role that is concrete, kinesthetic, and visual, while the latter are favored for roles that are abstract, symbolic, and verbal.

I've already demonstrated this pattern with examples from other physical domains, like athletes and dancers being butt girls, though models are not so surprising as a further example because it is a highly kinesthetic activity -- just not one that requires lots of strength, and therefore one that doesn't give them a typical shapely athletic figure, where the relatively greater size of their backside would be evident.

But don't let their tall, lithe profiles fool you -- these girls are not the awkward lanky beanpole type, they're very agile, and have fine-tuned proprioception (an awareness of where all the various parts of their body are, how they're moving with respect to each other over time, what the environment is like, and how to navigate through it). This suits them to physical activities that involve coordination more than sheer strength, but that still makes them kinesthetic people.

Just imagine how quickly they would be cast out if they could not walk to a regular rhythm, could not strut with full strides, could not time transitions between poses, could not hold a pose whose balancing demands were more complex than standing symmetrically, and so on and so forth. Of course they have to be kinesthetically gifted.

Cerebral boob girls have a different sort of feminine physicality, or rather lack thereof -- they're more clumsy and klutzy, and in need of physical protection and guidance, which the masculine role is only too eager to fulfill for them. It's cute and adorable in a childlike way, as though they were still learning how to navigate their environments and occasionally smack right into the kitchen counter. Corporeal butt girls have a more impressive, graceful physicality that shows they are done maturing and are ready to hit their stride, as it were.

These differences do not reduce to the narrow mechanics of some activity involving the lower body more than the upper body. True, you cannot strut in full strides without working your glutes, so butt girls have an advantage in achieving that kind of gait. But they're advantaged in physical activities that draw on the upper body as well -- volleyball, softball, tennis, field hockey, basketball, swimming, etc., all make intense demands on the upper body, yet those girls are all butt girls too.

Without even investigating to confirm it, I already know that archery girls are going to be butt girls, despite the much greater involvement of the upper than the lower body in that sport. That has nothing to do with large breasts getting in the way of the bow (a narrow mechanics explanation) -- rather, it's yet another example of boob girls being less coordinated and athletic. General explanations win over narrow ones.

Incidentally, one of the finalists from season 3 of Project Runway, Laura Bennett, excelled at archery after her fashion career. She, like the other designers, is pretty flat-chested. So it's not only the models, but the designers too, who are more on the butt side of the spectrum, since visualizing and constructing 3-dimensional objects that are going to be moving in various ways on a human form, requires a good kinesthetic intuition.

I'll bet the straight-guy fashion photographers are butt men, not boob men, as well, for the same reasons. Who better to consult than Patrick Demarchelier? Here's an iconic portrait of Cindy Crawford, and the cover to the book of his photography across genres:

Cindy Crawford is a great example of all these things tying together. She has only a B cup chest but an hourglass figure, most of her shoots from the supermodel era focused on her hips-ass-and-thighs, she was part of the athletic / fitness trend, and in the '90s she had her own fashion show on MTV (House of Style), back when the industry was still flourishing.

This framework also explains the major racial / ethnic differences in modeling.

First, the most cerebral and biggest-busted group, Ashkenazi Jews, are all but absent among fashion models, in contrast to their dominance in domains that are informational, or that are physical but focus on boobs (some kinds of porn, pin-up photography, etc.).

Those of African descent are far more common in the modeling world than you would expect if it were solely about finding girls who look hot, considering that African facial features are less attractive, hence why they're not so common in porn, pin-up photography, and other domains that are strictly about hotness. It's not that you can't find Africans with symmetric faces, only that a symmetric Italian face looks better than a symmetric African face.

However, if modeling is more about the kinesthetic performance, then African girls are going to punch far above their weight. They're more athletic in general, and specifically in sports involving the lower body like sprinting. They're also more rhythmically skilled, and a stunning runway walk requires more than just maintaining a regular rhythm -- there are distinct stages along the path, each with their own transitional poses, and when to time them and how long to hold the pauses, is difficult to pull off (see an ordinary person attempting to "do a runway walk"). In season 3 of Project Runway, this rhythmic aspect of the walk is best shown by Camilla, a Ugandan model who mainly worked with Laura.

I haven't started watching America's Next Top Model yet, but did notice from the casting that their coach for runway walking is African-American (in addition to the host Tyra Banks).

I reject the explanation that this is just elite wokeness giving quota jobs to black people for representational purposes, since this trend has been going far earlier than the explosion of wokeness during the 2010s. Also, it only extends to people of African descent -- not other recipients of wokeness' representational crusades, such as heavily Amerindian Hispanics, or any region of East Asia.

But Amerindians and East Asians are not athletically dominant over other groups, and are not stereotypically the best dancers, so it's perfectly explained by the framework that modeling is another kind of kinesthetic performance. If you're not very good at one kind, you're not good at the other kinds either. (It's not about height either: while Amerindians and East Asians are not tall on average, there's no, er, shortage of them in absolute numbers who clear 5'9, especially in gigantic populations like the Han Chinese.)

Within Europeans, there's the fascinating ubiquity of Slavs among fashion models. If wokeness were the explanation for why some groups are over-represented, then there should be zero Slavs -- wokeness is an ideology for the integration of subjects under a single sphere of influence, and for the Anglo empire, that has never included Eastern or Southern Slavs, and only very recently and tenuously the Western Slavs.

In fact, the Eastern Slavs led by Russia have been the mortal enemy of the Anglo empire and NATO. They are generally only over-represented in our culture to denigrate them (even then, they're typically played by Ukrainians, the subset of Eastern Slavs most hostile to Russia and friendly toward the Anglo empire).

Still, does it fit within the framework of corporeal vs. cerebral? Of course -- they also punch above their weight among athletes in general, but including those that are more about coordination and agility than brute strength (although they excel in those as well). Dancing, ballet, figure skating, gymnastics, track & field, and -- sure enough -- fashion modeling.

Just because those girls are slender rather than meaty, doesn't mean they're awkward waifs whose wispy forms will blow away in the wind. That's just an act, like their affected tiny little princess voices, to use their strength in a stealthy manner.

It also contradicts the misconception that Slavs belong to the "skinny and busty" type. They are certainly skinny, but they're the rare type of butt girls who are also skinny instead of thick. They may not have big butts, but they don't have big boobs either -- they're immature in development, overall. Still, they lean more toward the butt side of the spectrum, both in how much they're carrying relatively, and where they draw attention to.

Returning to the supermodel era, where was the focus on Paulina Porizkova's body? Not on her average B-cup chest, but on her round, toned, and big-for-the-'80s buns.

Zooming out, boob orientation seems to have replaced butt orientation with the rise of agriculture, sedentary societies, and civilization. And among Europeans, the Slavs were the last to settle down and civilize. I think the false impression we have of them as cerebral comes from their doom-and-gloom mood, which we associate with depressed intellectuals. But Slavs are less likely to do purely abstract philosophy, and more likely to do philosophy-through-literature or something more concrete and relatable. And again, how could a race of nerds produce so many jocks?

But the origin of boob orientation is getting too far afield, so we'll end here and maybe return to that in a later post.

Fashion died circa 2010, as a cultural production (more signs of a Dark Age)

I started going through some old designer things of mine during the past week. Both because it's the restless warm-up phase of the 15-year excitement cycle, when people want to dress to get noticed as they emerge from their shells, and to do some spring cleaning / inventory. Not to mention wanting to take part of the 2000s revival -- and not by looking y2k, but the just as ubiquitous "edgy" "chic" of the time.

It just made me realize how, like so many other cultural domains, fashion died off during the 2010s and is basically non-existent during the 2020s. That does not mean people have stopped wearing clothes, taking part in trends, displaying themselves to others, etc. Just like it's not as though people have stopped telling and listening to narratives (high or low in status).

However, the cultural production of fashion has ceased to exist, and it's entirely an audience without a team of creatives making stuff for them. Who are the designers of the 2010s and '20s? No one who was not already a somebody from fashion's heyday of roughly the 1980s through the 2000s. Who are the models -- and supermodels? What are the must-have perfumes and colognes? Who are the photographers? Who are the editors and other curators and directors? What are their outlets? Who are the critics and commentators? Where does the audience actually congregate to browse and buy their stuff? Where else in the culture is fashion the focus -- movies about it, TV shows about it, songs about it?

None of those things exists right now, and looking back, have not existed since about the same 2010 cut-off point for the current and perhaps indefinite cultural Dark Age. And yet the culture was all but saturated in fashion during the 2000s.

More on the specifics below, but first let's complete the overview.

The 2008 financial crisis and recession dealt a decisive blow -- though not in terms of the drying up of funding for some domain like fashion. The central bank printed up $4.5 trillion under Obama, and trillions more under Trump, handing it out to the clueless rich to gamble on or fund their pet projects, and bail out those who lost on their investments earlier.

That removes a tiresome explanation from the list -- that after the Great Recession, luxury became taboo, became unaffordable, etc. No it didn't -- luxury purchasing soared under Obama, as the rich were bailed out by the central bank. Look at how many upscale supermarkets there are, upscale coffee shops, upscale movie theaters, upscale everything.

It's not for want of funding, nor tapped-out consumers, that the would-be culture creators have stagnated. It's something larger, like the disappearance of institutional trust and cohesion, as the 2008 crisis was not just any old recession, but left the elites with the sense that the whole societal project was over, and now it's only a matter of sucking dry whatever is left rather than creating entirely new things.

During societal disintegration, there's not enough camaraderie left to fuel collaborative efforts like cultural production. Society disintegrates from the top, as the elites war against each other for status, and cultural production is an entirely elite affair. Folk culture evolves slowly over time, but the deliberate crafting of narratives, images, and so on, for an audience, belongs to the elites. And the masses like it that way -- they scoff at bad art because "my kid could have made that". They look up to the cultural creatives as a group gifted with some degree of talent and resources, so let's see what you've made out of it -- wow us, knock us over, don't make us make it ourselves.

That suggests that the Dark Age may last for quite awhile, since the American (and broader Anglosphere) elites are only going to get weaker as the Anglo empire has reached its peak of territorial expansion, material exploitation, and downstream effects like cultural influence. Now the only question is how wide the Dark Age will cover -- will it cover pop music too, with every new hit song being some channeling of a style made before 2010? Or are songs less demanding than movies or fashion, so that they will be relatively spared by the Dark Age? Time will tell.

Food seems safest, as it doesn't require lots of collaboration or creativity (in the sense of making something distinctive and original). Food is about familiar faves, whether your own or from another culture, not about conceiving and implementing a truly new creation.

* * *

It shouldn't have to be said, but all of this is objective analysis of a state of affairs, not subjective appraisal of whether you like it or not.

Perhaps the easiest way to detect the death of fashion is from other cultural domains that treated it as their subject (a still-alive subject, not a history, documentary, etc.). During the 2000s, there were multiple hit reality TV shows, running several seasons each, that were about fashion and style -- What Not to Wear, How Do I Look?, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Project Runway, Blow Out, Shear Genius, and America's Next Top Model. Designer Isaac Mizrahi had his own talk show. There were iconic movies such as Zoolander and The Devil Wears Prada (adapted from a hit novel of the same decade).

Songs about the industry appeared earlier in the heyday, circa 1980 -- "The Model" by Kraftwerk, "Fashion" by David Bowie, "Girls on Film" by Duran Duran, and two songs from the '90s called "Supermodel" (one by RuPaul, and another by Jill Sobule for the Clueless soundtrack).

These other cultural domains stopped referring to the fashion industry during the 2010s, because it had died, and they're not about to start referring to it again anytime soon, since it's not coming back from the dead.

The life of the cable TV channel the Style Network encapsulates the broader trend: it was spun off from E! in 1998, was re-branded away from fashion in 2008, ended operations altogether in 2013, and its successor the Esquire Network itself bit the dust in 2017, with no further replacements. There cannot be a viable TV network about a sector of culture that no longer exists, unless it's a historical channel.

The death of models has been discussed for at least a decade now. Here is an old post of mine looking at the generational aspects of its decline, whereby Gen X-ers were the most suited to being models, whether they were teenagers or 30-somethings, and across various time periods from the early '90s to the late 2000s. Millennials never took over. The last two supermodels were Gisele Bundchen and Alessandra Ambrosio, born in 1980 and '81.

Emily Ratajkowski is not a model, but someone who could've been a model if she'd been born 10 years earlier. She is that hot chick from the "Blurred Lines" music video, who has appeared in the zombie runway shows for zombie fashion brands, and zombie publications like the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.

For awhile now, pop culture celebs have taken over for models -- actresses, singers, hot chicks from music videos, etc. They've so run out of ideas, they've reduced themselves to getting politicians like AOC on magazine covers, and resorted to generic libtard journos blabbing about her white capelet as though they were visually talented and specialized in fashion rather than politics.

The last widely popular, original designer movement was, for lack of a better term, "edgy minimalism" from the 2000s, with or without a "rocker" spin on it. I didn't pay much attention to women's fashion, but for men it was Hedi Slimane at Dior Homme, Ennio Capasa at his own Costume National, Neil Barrett, John Varvatos, Tom Ford, and a few others I may be forgetting. This was not only a movement within fashion, it cross-fertilized with the music domain to craft the personas of rock band members, and movies (not typical projects like dressing someone for an awards show, but re-inventing James Bond's look for the new Daniel Craig movies).

Related was the edgy, though less minimalist, look of the Affliction t-shirt craze, which also cross-fertilized to enhance the personas of MMA fighters and rock band members of the 2000s.

I mention this movement because it was the last to rely on straight men as the audience, not just a narrow niche of gays. Of course, gays did not kill fashion -- rather, once fashion was already dead, gays colonized the ruins and used it as a way to signal to each other that they're gay while out cruising. Wearing a skinny black tie in 2005 didn't mean you were gay -- it meant you were into rock bands like Franz Ferdinand and the Bravery.

Even more appealing to the dreaded toxic masculinity of straight white men was American Apparel during its late 2000s heyday. You could wear that stuff and not look gay -- you were taking part in the '80s revival. You looked like you were part of the hipster sub-culture, not a gay cruising sub-culture. Then there was the girls' clothing -- I don't know what guy wasn't thanking God for those shorts back in 2008. Not to mention the endless models and the porny-polaroid look of their ads. Name anything as iconic since then...

Relating to porno chic, as well as the still existing role of "model", there was the heyday of the website Suicide Girls in the second half of the 2000s. They were not influencers, it was not a social media site, not a porn site, and although not connected to a specific designer or design house, the site did rely on the alt style of the pin-up models for their branding (when you could just search a million porn sites for naked girls of no particular cultural identity). Girls could look at the site for style inspiration, if they were into the alt / goth / punk sub-cultures.

I touched on the importance of thriving scenes having both male and female, and primarily heterosexual members, in the post on the death of sub-cultures.

* * *

Finally, there is the matter of what is going on today, and how is it qualitatively different?

Quite simply, there is no team of cultural creatives producing fashion anymore. No more designers, models, hair and make-up stylists, photographers, layout editors, publishers, public events or spectacles, stores (IRL or online), and cross-fertilization with other cultural domains. Other than that, it's the same!

What this means is there's nobody within the elites who are making fashion, so it's up to the masses to carry out those various functions themselves. But they have no specialized training, and most of them lack the basic visual skills necessary. The outcome is what you would expect if you asked readers to write their own books, or drivers to design and make their own cars.

The abdication of their role as culture creators is just one more aspect of the elites screwing over the masses these days. Some creative types would love to make it happen still, but by and large the tone is callous and dismissive -- the glory days are never coming back, and letting everyone fend for themselves is rationalized as liberating, democratic, and DIY, when it's really disempowering, elitist, and no-one-does-it-at-all because it's not within their abilities.

These days, fashion participants are just about exclusively female, with some token gays and trannies thrown in for wokeness points. Straight guys have no rock band members, MMA fighters, or cool actors to take their cues from, to aspire to, and to want to otherwise culturally affiliate themselves with.

They buy their items from online mega-marts like Amazon, AliExpress, Etsy, Ebay, etc., rather than a store focused on their particular group. And certainly no boutiques dedicated to just one brand. These online stores remove any sense of fashion being part of a physical, social scene that connects culturally similar people.

There are still teams of designers somewhere thinking up the items, and manufacturers making them. But most of it is recycling previous eras rather than trying to do something original. And its approach is more one of fan-service to a fandom, rather than creating something just to create it that way, and relying on customers to appreciate it and buy it.

Hot Topic is a textbook example of that 180-degree shift in approach -- during the 2000s, the customers took their cues from the merchandise that was curated within the stores, then during the 2010s it turned into a fulfillment center for your geek merch of choice, depending on which fandoms you belong to.

There are no models who work as models -- i.e., separate from the target audience of consumers. There is no specialized photography, no set dressing for an ad campaign, and really no ad campaigns at all. There are still images of the item by itself, not on a person, and you imagine what you'd look like with it on.

If you see it on a real-life person, it's probably from another member of the fandom, who has uploaded videos to TikTok or some other site. But the audience cannot put on its own show, so these are not models. It does keep alive the part of fashion where the "end-users" wear the items and display them for others to see -- which, however, was never part of the cultural elites' job. The consumers are still around, just not the culture makers.

Naturally the cameras, microphones, lights, set dressing, editing, etc., are pretty lo-fi since it's the teenagers using their own smartphones, not professional equipment used by trained technicians. So that's not an ad campaign, not even a guerrilla campaign. That all belongs to the part of fashion that happens after it's produced.

There is no over-arching vision for the end result, since there are no designers, tailors, manufacturers, etc. This leads to what is rationalized as eclectic tastes, but is really the consumers jumping from one trend to another based on their daily mood swings. It's not following a cohesive fashion movement, and it's not wearing the uniform of some sub-culture (you can never dress as The Other on a regular basis -- only for blackface value).

In fact, one popular trend on TikTok is the girl trying on 7 outfits from mostly unrelated styles, as the song lyrics say, "Wear this on Monday, wear this on Tuesday..." throughout the week, randomly bouncing from one style to the next.

Again, how can we expect the outcome to be any different? It's not their fault -- they're not the ones who are supposed to design, produce, market, sell, and brand the items, with links to other cultural domains like music or movies. They're just supposed to carry out the functions that the audience or end consumers do -- buy stuff, wear it, display it, etc., which they are in fact carrying out.

By the time things have devolved into individual consumers being tasked with those roles, rather than the cultural creatives doing what they're supposed to, fashion as such is dead. People trying on different looks for others to see, is not fashion as a cultural domain, any more than people telling stories to each other constitutes narrative art.

With no creative, original impulse left at the elite level, perhaps these flailings at the mass level will lead them to fossilize into new folk dress styles. They are not to be altered, and nothing new needs to be created, because that has already been done long in the past, by people we may not remember. Minor details may cycle, like hemlines or degree of color saturation, but the fundamental look will be set in stone.

In the meantime, though, we are living in an era of profound uncertainty and anxiety, as the elites have abandoned the common people and left them to their own devices.