Groups who can ruin a public space with just one of them present

While you may not prefer to hang around people from various groups, certain groups are more toxic than others, in the sense that for any fixed number of them, the more toxic groups pollute the space more than the less toxic ones. Perhaps the easiest way to see this is to ask whether a public space feels contaminated with only one or two members of the group present, as opposed to there needing to be quite a few of them before their disruptive influence is felt.

Ethnic and racial groups are of the less harmful type. If half of the people in attendance are black, you might be in for a bumpy ride. But just one or two black guys aren't going to act up. Same for Mexicans, Chinese, Jews, etc. The lesson is that entire races can't be so dysfunctional down to more or less the last member, or else they wouldn't be here still.

As for those who can ruin a space acting alone, bums come to mind. It just takes one of them aggressively panhandling, shouting crazy shit, looking filthy, pushing or carrying or wearing weird stuff, or storming around half-possessed. That puts most people right away into a defensive mindset and posture, preventing the openness and trust that are necessary for a public space to feel communal. This is why bums, a subset of the homeless, are so seriously targeted by businesses -- it just takes one to drive away most or all of the normals. Even liberal businesses like Starbucks often put locks or keypads on their bathroom doors so that only paying customers can use them.

Faggots are the other obvious case. It doesn't matter if there's only one around -- that buzzing, breathy voice with its sing-song, kiddie inflection broadcasts the sound of a hypersexualized child throughout the space. People may try to ignore it, but there are few things that sound more creepy than a 7 year-old boy trying to seduce all the other males within earshot.

Their juvenile Peter Pan tendencies also mean they are totally unaware of what level of voice is appropriate, what topics are and aren't appropriate, and so on. It's not uncommon to hear them ejaculating loudly about their fucked up sex lives, sexual innuendo, and the rest of their many neuroses. Everybody has to hear their problems and rush over to hug them, and like, is it seriously to much to ask to blare "Beautiful" by Christina Aguilera over the PA system? They're living through a continual emotional trainwreck, so it's not like the normals will catch much of a break from hearing about their airheaded anxieties.

And then there's the visual aspect, just as with bums. Black people don't dress in such a deviant way, as though triggering your disgust response. Queers not only dress in a campy and childishly provocative way, but they just look plain freakish to begin with, from their boyishly straight hips to their sissy mincing gait and alien-looking gay face. And yet we're just supposed to sit there and not notice how bizarre it is to see a 40 year-old wearing cut-off jean shorts and an Abercrombie t-shirt, while shaving his bald head in a lame attempt to hide his age, and staring out of dead eyes sunken into his mummified face.

Outright criminals are another clear-cut case -- even if there's just one of them who bust in to rob the store, to shoot up their workplace, or whatever, that's enough.

The common denominator here seems to be level of socialization. Bums and criminals choose to live outside of normal society, so they certainly aren't socialized in its ways. Homos are an interesting case because they don't choose to be unsocialized. Rather, it stems from their fundamental state of being stunted in childhood. You have to physically and psychologically mature before you can become sensitive to the social dynamics of normal adolescents and adults, and to gradually fit your way into their world. Being always held back before that transitional stage, queers are mostly incapable of becoming fully socialized.

The best that they can hope for is to stay in the closet and just keep quiet, kind of like well-behaved children when they're out in public -- incapable of taking part in the interactions around them, but still not disrupting things for everyone else. If we expect that of our children, then why not of our man-children?

Members of this or that racial / ethnic group are on average fully socialized, albeit to different norms and customs than for other racial / ethnic groups. But they don't come off as characteristically deviant. Certainly those different norms can lead to tension between groups, and even outright conflict. But that's not the same as everyday pollution of the in-group's public spaces.

Conservatives for the past 20 years have focused too much on between-group conflict stemming from differences in customs, like moving away from blacks and their culture. Meanwhile they've abandoned public spaces within their own community to the liberals, preferring instead to hunker down like a pussy in their home with the nuclear family unit only.

Facing no opposition from conservatives, who tend to react more strongly to notions about sanctity and taboo, the libs have encouraged all sorts of repulsive and deviant types to infest public spaces -- libraries, parks, book stores, coffee shops, fast food dining rooms, and so on. And the typical conservative could care less, hiding away from all that mess and browsing / purchasing only from Amazon, going to the fast food drive-thru, etc. Let somebody else worry about it, not me since I don't use that space anymore.

One good thing about a rising crime rate is that it brings the conservative weenies out of their bunkers and back into regular face-to-face relationships with their fellow neighbors and citizens, to provide and receive mutual aid and support.

Final, broader observations on Halloween

I'm still a little pleasantly buzzed from the party tonight, so this'll be off the cuff but hopefully of broader relevance.

- The nightclub party I went to was weak, nowhere near full. It wasn't the club's fault. It's regularly packed on other occasions, like presumably last Saturday when it was filled with the dorks who can't stand celebrating a holiday on a weeknight. Nevertheless, it's not like there were many cool, open people there tonight either. More like a mini-version of the attention-whoring festival held on The Saturday Before Halloween.

- Related to that, I saw almost no one dressed up in the late afternoon / early evening like I did on Saturday. So, basically the entire set of holiday rituals has been removed from October 31 and placed on the Saturday before. If they haven't been eliminated altogether, such as --

- Trick-or-treating. I saw two groups on the way home, and five groups within sight of my house. I stood outside because our porch light's broken, and I'm always interested to take note of any changes. Only one group stopped by our house, and it was three high-schoolers. I should've told them they were too old to be out, but one was a 17 year-old blonde in a tight leather Catwoman outfit who was pushing her titties out of her top / bustier thingie. And what kind of neighbor would I be to turn them away on Halloween?

All of the little kid groups of course had parents accompanying them, and in almost all cases right up to the door. Still, I saw something that I never would've even thought possible -- two elementary school boys hit a couple houses across the street, then got into a car driven by their mommie. Was this the end of a faraway trip, and she was going to drive them back home? Naw man, she drove them a few houses down, let them hit another few houses on their own, then back into the car, and so on. She was chaffeuring them down a single side of a single neighborhood block!

Why not carry your 10 year-old child in one of those papoosa dealies, knock on the door yourself, collect the candy yourself, etc.? And yet the helicopter parents act surprised when their kid wants to live with and sponge off them until age 40...

- Then there's all this autistic conservative stuff about not celebrating Halloween because, ACTUALLY, it's a Pagan, Celtic, or whatever holiday. Yeah, well, shooting off fireworks and roasting dead animals in the open air to celebrate the birth of your nation ain't exactly religious or supernaturally focused either. Somehow, Halloween's origins in a non-Christian tradition must mean that, here and now, people who celebrate it are practicing something Pagan, Celtic, etc.

It's as lazy and idiotic of an idea as saying that we're reviving Latin, Greek, or Celtic languages -- and bringing about our own pollution -- by using words in contemporary English that ultimately derive from one of those sources. Imagine how sterile a language would be with no borrowings -- well, it would be the official French of France. If Pagan religions had something worth preserving, then why not preserve it and adapt it into our own culture?

I don't take the argument seriously, as it's just a half-baked rationalization for why we must cocoon even further. Liberals tell themselves that Halloween is bad because of potential harm to the kids, and maybe lack of fair treatment for those whose groups are worn as costumes by others.

Conservatives also mention the potential harm to kids, but they're also sensitive to moral "taste receptors" like purity, taboo, pollution, etc. (Jonathan Haidt.) So in addition to acting like weenies about their children's safety (despite how safe Halloween has always been), they'll also trot out some argument about cultural pollution from some out-group like non-Christian religions.

Notice, however, that neither libs or cons are interested in replacing Halloween with some holiday and set of communal rituals that are more to their liking. Their arguments are just post-hoc rationalizations for their gut decision to cocoon and eliminate communal rituals altogether.

Are we becoming a race of party-poopers or what? Celebrations in public space, from lively to low-key, bind the community together. What kind of sick world do we live in where the local faggot and homophile brigades can muster an extravagant Pride Parade every year, while neighbors refuse to send their kids out trick-or-treating, or to host these guests if they show up at their door, by turning off the front light?

Changes in the carnivalesque nature of Halloween

The shift has been going on for some time now, but it finally hit me last weekend that the 20 and 30-somethings who get dressed up for a Halloween party are no longer bothering to do so on Halloween night. Instead they're playing it safe by going out overwhelmingly on the Saturday (or perhaps Friday) before Halloween.

Masked balls and the like are supposed to rejuvenate the health of a community by giving it the occasional hit of stress, over-turning the ordinary order of things to a smallish degree and for a limited time only. It's like playing sports to stay healthy, welcoming those shocks and hits, provided that they're not out of proportion or ever-lasting. Without shaking things up periodically, the community muscles atrophy, and its nerves weaken. The revelry of New Year's Eve and the Fourth of July (at least back in the good old days) also serve this function.

However, the push to move Halloween parties away from a specific date and toward the previous Saturday night robs them of their carnivalesque potential -- if people go out partying in their ordinary lives, it's always on a Friday or Saturday night, so there's nothing unusual and special about partying on the Saturday-before-Halloween. And girls picking out a hooker dress, plus some throwaway ironic embellishment to make it a costume, is not very different from their outfit-picking rituals on an ordinary Saturday night.

When a holiday is celebrated on a particular date, though, it could possibly land on a day when you normally wouldn't be carrying on the way you are. That out-of-the-ordinary feeling heightens your appreciation for the holiday. Children travelling around the neighborhood in packs after dark is unusual enough, but what's more, most of the time it will fall on a school night! It's odd, but 2nd graders in the 1980s were more adventurous than today's 20-something party-poopers who wouldn't dare go out late on a week night.

And their complaints about having to work or go to class the next morning just show how little feeling they have for Halloween, that they wouldn't sacrifice even a small disruption to their personal routine. It's as though they began to do away with Christmas dinners because, ugh, y'know I really don't wanna show up to work the next day with a belly ready to burst. Like, let's just do a cute little Christmas falafel wrap instead, it'll totes be fun, and like, Jesus was Middle Eastern anyway, right?

Then there's the costume types that represent a temporary exchange of roles between the high and the low, the blessed and the cursed. Mannerheim's comment about ugly sweater parties reminds me of our age's great love of blackface, and more importantly who it's aimed at. Assuming they were choosing a caricatured, rather than more sincere costume, people today no longer dress up as plantation slaves, hobos, or poindexters.

Today's joyless pranksters must instead send up anyone who was fun, exciting, sociable, and capable of feeling positive emotions -- the '70s cop, the disco dancer, the '80s jock (sweatbands), and the Maiden and Bon Jovi-era metalhead. Dude, can you believe those guys used to physically stand up for their friends and kiss girls? How fucking gay, it'll make the perfect wacky costume.

Meanwhile, the attention whores must corrupt the coy feminine charm of the nurse, the schoolgirl, and even the librarian. I know that girls used to wear similar costumes in the good old days, but it wasn't in blackface -- the shift is signaled by the names of these costumes today always beginning with "sexy." Sexy nurse, sexy schoolgirl, sexy librarian. And of course "sexy" here means attention-whoring, look-but-don't-approach, Fergalicious -- cold and repulsive, totally unlike the warm engaging attitude of the people they're dressed up as.

As with most cases of blackface, here we do not see the marginalized mocking their masters, but the reigning majority of autistic killjoys taking pot-shots at extinct groups who actually had an enjoyable social life.

Young people drinking less, except before sex

Recently I pointed out one strange aspect of the prudification of the culture over the past 20 years -- that drunkenness seems to have become a goal in itself, not as a pleasantly buzzed gateway toward further fun activities. Another part of this shift may be that young people have become incredibly more self-conscious over that time, even around their friends at the increasingly dominant small parties. They therefore require a stronger dose of booze to loosen themselves up and at least attempt to mingle.

I think this is where the false perception of greater binge drinking comes from. The CDC's nationally representative Youth Risk Behavior Survey asks high schoolers if they've had 5 or more drinks within a couple hours, during the past 30 days. In the mid-1990s, 33% had, yet by 2011 only 22% had. This pattern over time is not unique to hardcore drinking: it shows up for casual drinking as well (having had at least one drink in the past 30 days).

But you have to actually have some kind of life to be out in a situation where binge drinking is going on in the first place. Perhaps lower rates of binge drinking simply tell us that, as we know from so many other sources, young people today have no life and lock themselves indoors all day, either playing video games or farting around on the internet, where no kegs can tempt them. We would have to compare rates of binge drinking to rates of going out to parties in order to determine how likely they are to binge drink, assuming they're already out at a party. For all we know, binge drinking could be more likely to occur at parties.

Fortunately the YRBS does ask a question about drinking alcohol in a specific social context, namely before having sex. Technically it asks if you used alcohol or drugs before your last intercourse, but alcohol is overwhelmingly what it would have been. Marijuana usage is far lower, and hard drugs like cocaine minimal. And for high schoolers, the scene leading up to getting it on is more likely to have been a party where they were drinking, not vegging out and watching horror movies while getting baked, then satisfying the munchies before falling asleep.

The graph below shows the rates of binge drinking and of having used alcohol (or drugs) before having sex the last time.

The blue line shows the decline mentioned above. However, the red line shows no substantial change in drinking before having sex, although at least it's down from the early 2000s. But given how much drinking has declined in the broader context, you'd think it would've fallen also in the specific case of before sex.

To see how much more likely it has become to drink before sex, relative to drinking overall, look at the ratio of drinking-before-sex compared to some baseline like binge drinking (it works the same if casual drinking is used as the baseline). You could also take the difference in rates, or the difference relative to the baseline; they all show the same thing. But a ratio is simpler to understand.

In the early 1990s, the before-sex rate was about 70% of the binge-drinking rate; by 2011 it has risen to over 100%, meaning that high schoolers today are more likely to drink before sex than to binge drink. I can't help but notice the brief halt-and-reversal of this trend during the mid-2000s euphoria. For those few years, the entire culture took tiny steps back toward the rising-crime culture of the 1980s, probably in response to 9/11. But by now we're well back on the path set out in the early-mid '90s.

To reiterate, the major change is not so much in their overt behavior (drinking before sex), but in their underlying psychology -- their mindset, tastes, and inclinations -- and how the behavior functions in their broader lives. Before, maybe they just happened to be drinking at a party before pairing off -- the two were more independent. Now, they're more closely linked, as shown by young people's higher preference for drinking before sex, relative to their overall inclination to getting drunk.

So we shouldn't be fooled by the lower rates of drinking among young people -- it probably means that they just don't go out as much as they used to. Relative to their overall alcohol consumption, they're much more likely than before to consume it before having sex. That's one more sign of how paralyzingly self-conscious they've become, where getting blasted is required in order to open up in bed. Not healthy. Blaming others for their problems has also become more widespread -- anything to protect their precious self-esteem -- so they need a reputational insurance policy like dismissing responsibility with, "Dude, I got so drunk last night, I don't remember anything..."

And then there are the emotional functions. Now that they're more avoidant, they'd like for an act that threatens them with potential intimacy to be as forgettable as possible, for it to leave no emotional trace -- well then, why not make sure you black out while it's happening? They also fear getting emotionally excited, so they choose to get drunk in order to be in more of a daze than in a vivid state of arousal. They just fumble through some bad sex (Whiskey dick for the guy, perhaps something similar for the girl), without feeling like they're being lifted out of their ordinary selves.

It's too bad we don't have data going back before the '90s. You certainly don't see this kind of thing in the teen movies of the '80s, whether Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Weird Science, Heathers, Teen Wolf, or whatever else. To judge from Fitzgerald's stories of the Jazz Age, that period too seemed like young people wanted to have a few drinks just to loosen up, but that they wanted to be lucid enough to remember what great fun they were about to have. Getting tanked before petting or getting it on doesn't show up, as far as I remember.

I wonder about the mid-century, another period incredibly similar to our own in attitude. Re-reading this excerpt from Time's original article on the Silent Generation, it does sound like these young people had gotten pretty blotto during their otherwise innocuous small party. Maybe their panic about juvenile delinquency, and similar anxieties of the time, were like ours today -- that young people may not have been behaving as wildly as before, but that they were acting out too much in what should have been easy-going and fun-loving situations, like having a small get-together or going for a roll in the hay.

In any event, this case study shows the value of looking at more specific contexts that some behavior occurs in, if there are good hints and data at the finer-grained level. Even an apparent exception to the prudification of society -- no real change in one type of drinking -- turns out to adhere to the larger pattern, where young people are so self-conscious and emotionally avoidant that they'll give booze a second chance, provided it'll help them get through their awkward sex lives.

Grown-up hijackers of Halloween are changing its roles from guest-host to selfish contestants

There's some interesting data in this USA Today article about a topic I've covered for awhile now (just search the blog for Halloween). The clearest sign of the holiday's "adultification" is that at Halloweenexpress.com, over 60% of costumes sold now are for adults, vs. under 30% a decade ago. If they had sales data two decades ago, they would've found more like 3% of costumes going to full-grown adults.

It would be a mistake, though, to view the major change in the nature of Halloween as adults simply taking over the holiday. I don't think I've emphasized it before, but it's not as though the roles that the participants play have stayed the same, only now the participants are grown-ups instead of children. It's that the roles themselves have fundamentally changed.

When Halloween was a real holiday, social interaction centered around trick-or-treating, where the children played the role of guest and the candy-passer-outters the role of hosts. Guest-host relationships are fragile and so are always the first to go during a breakdown of trust. The guests begin to believe that their hosts would take advantage of them, abusing their higher status. And for their part, the hosts begin to believe that their guests would take advantage of the hosts' vulnerable state after letting strangers get so close to their personal space.

Aside from trick-or-treating, hitch-hiking is another guest-host relationship that has completely evaporated over the past 20 years. It used to be common during the early 20th C, but disappeared during the cocooning mid-century, only to be re-discovered in the 1960s.

At any rate, today's grown-up Halloween participants do not enter into any sort of special guest-host relationship, other than at most your garden variety house party. Even there, the role of host is minimized -- they're just supposed to allow their home to be used for the small get-together, not to hand out gifts, etc. And the guests are supposed to minimize their role as well, just show up and mingle, rather than make a display of "please" and "thank you".

More importantly, the guests are not strangers, but close friends of the host. Some or most of the trick-or-treaters would have been known to the hosts, but they generally did not have frequent social contact with each other. They therefore had to overcome more potential distrust than close friends would have to, making the old Halloween ritual a stronger and purer example of guest-host interactions.

In such relationships, the two parties allow themselves to be somewhat vulnerable, trusting that the other party will not exploit them once their guard is down, and feeling something of a renewed faith in others when it's over and neither has in fact taken advantage of the other.

Unlike those relationships, today's Halloween ritual is more of an antagonistic status contest. Like, who can think up and pull off the most uniquely ironic costume? Or who can make the most obscure allusion? This is the opposite of the children's pattern, where they wear costumes that aren't so different from each other's. It pushes everyone in the direction of the catty red carpet diva who, despite trying to quiet her self-consciousness, remains anxious about what all those other bitches are wearing, and whether the audience will judge her look to be among the best.

There's a small degree of that competitiveness in any party atmosphere, but at your ordinary party, the range of what you're expected to wear is a lot narrower. It's generally considered in bad taste to show up to a normal party dressed incredibly different from anyone else, trying to stand out that much.

On Halloween, though, anything goes, and that invites people to go as far-out as they please in order to distinguish themselves from their competitors. This also means you have to plan a lot more, instead of thoughtlessly opting for one of a limited range of choices, which would have allowed you to forget yourself and get lost in the moment. Now you've got the spotlight of self-consciousness trained on your face the entire night.

One final note -- a holiday of reversals also tells us about what ordinary life is like, through contrast. In the good old days, people in everyday life were a lot freer to wear whatever they wanted, keep their hair long or cut it short, and listen to this, that, or the other music group. And in the current age, people are a lot more conformist in how they dress and groom themselves, how they entertain themselves, and so on.

Songs about, or for, the free-spirited

Style Council, "Speak Like A Child":



You usually can't even tell what Paul Weller is saying, but a simple evocative phrase in the chorus is all it needs. The music and the non-linguistic part of the singing convey the feeling perfectly on their own. (It sounds more sublime on a CD.)

In our socially avoidant age, I think most people would equate "free spirit" with someone who believes they're above belonging to a group or to another person, whether because they're mousy and fearful or dismissive and haughty. But Fergie has a dead soul, not a free spirit.

In a rising-crime period, people imagine them in a Romantic way -- as someone who is willing and actively looking to bond with someone else, and who can even stay attached to that single other person, provided that they keep supplying the magic. Although not fated to be so, free spirits are thus more likely to be heartbreakers, albeit of the type who never mean for it to happen, unlike more calculating types like gold-diggers. Hey, you gotta take the good with the bad.

It's too bad they didn't have Style Council back in the Jazz Age. All those readers taken in by Fitzgerald's female characters would've loved them.

Drunkenness as its own goal among young party people

Another puzzling trend I've noticed since the later half of the 1990s is that often when young people get together for what should be wild fun, it only goes so far as getting drunk. In the good old days, drinking was more for greasing the gears of social interaction, or raising hell. Now it's an end in itself, and once that state is reached, the party or get-together has hit its peak -- people will just stay drunk for awhile, then wind down and go home to recover, but without having used their inebriation for some larger purpose.

The ubiquity of beer pong, flip cup, and other boring drinking games are the most obvious sign of this shift. By turning the act of consuming alcohol into a competitive game, party-goers protect themselves against indulging in "alcohol-fueled behavior," since doing so would distract them from the goal of simply drinking more booze in order to score higher in the game. Keeping their eyes on the prize, they will not pipe up with, "Hey, we're already pleasantly buzzed enough, so why don't we go do X?" where X is anything other than continue with a pointless drinking game.

Are the parties I've been to unrepresentative? I occasionally overhear Millennials talking about what happened over the weekend, and by now I've given up hope of being scandalized. It's invariably something like, "Oh my god, we got SO drunk last night!" or "Oh my gosh, my best friend and I always act so silly when we get drunk -- I mean like, acting STUPID!" Never anything about what the drinking led to afterward, as there was no afterward. All the during-and-after pictures that fill my Facebook feed from my Millennial friends tell the same story.

The same goes for overhearing them in anticipation on Friday or Saturday afternoon -- "Dude, we're gonna get SO drunk at this kid's rager tonight!" Never any mention of what they expect their drunkenness to lead to -- hitting on girls, getting laid, going for a joyride, T.P.-ing somebody's house, etc. Some must believe that getting drunk will magically make fun things happen, while others kind of realize what a bunch of killjoys their generation is, and are trying to hype themselves up for a boring party to give some dignity to the only kind of interactions that are possible with their peers.

You rarely see young kids just hanging around outside anymore, and guzzling a lot of booze doesn't seem to change that. I can't remember the last time I saw young people drinking and having fun outside on an ordinary Saturday night, emphasis on having fun. At most you might see a small house party spilling out onto the front porch, and usually not even that.

Long gone are the days of wandering out into a wooded area with a six-pack, shooting the shit, throwing rocks at stuff, and carving figures into trees (or whatever else, if you went out there with your girlfriend instead of your buddies).

Over the summer, I did see a group of three people on their front lawn in sleeping bags, staring up at the sky at night, maybe or maybe not drunk. It's such an unusual sight that I stopped dead in my tracks to look them over for a second, just to convince myself they were really there. Even if you don't have access to a large patch of grass to lay on, you could always recline on the hood or roof of your car after you and your friends had gotten drunk and wanted to look up at the sky while chewing the fat.

Why does staring up at the sky make for a stronger bonding experience anyway? Maybe with a less feature-rich frame of reference for your physical surroundings, you become less bodily aware, kind of like meditation except that your eyes are open and you're talking with other people. Usually the kind of de-individuation that involves open eyes and talking is shared rhythmic motion -- dance, drill, and the like. Looking-up-at-the-sky bull sessions could be unique in combining still bodies with wide-open eyes and moving mouths during a de-individuating, group bonding experience.

Whatever the reason, a little alcohol always helps too, but only if the participants have such a larger goal in mind. By fixating so much on GETTING SHITFACED BRO, today's well-behaved young people keep their feet nailed to the ground, believing any form of exploration, alcohol-guided or not, to be dangerous.

The return of small-only gatherings in youth party culture

"And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy."

Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby

Every place that I checked to get that quote had a bunch of people who totally misunderstood it, so at the risk of killing the joke, here's what she means. In a large gathering, each person's spotlight of attention is diffused over so many people, that no single person feels like they're being intently focused on by most attendants, let alone by all of them.

This feeling of not being watched by most or all others lets two people take their interaction wherever it wants to go, without having to freeze in place every time someone else's spotlight jerks over toward them, anxious about how they're being perceived. Large parties make for those "I Think We're Alone Now" kind of interactions.

Small parties work the other way, where each person may be fairly focused on all the others -- on some more than on others, of course, but still there's not that feeling of being able to slip away from the watchful eye of The Group, nowhere where two people could just talk about or do whatever without being noticed by others. This puts people more on their guard at small parties.

In a healthy world, people go to both large and small parties, enjoying the good parts of each, and putting up with the bad parts as a necessary cost. But sometime over the last 20 years, we've returned to the mid-century era of relying mostly on small gatherings, unlike the earlier large-party atmosphere of the Jazz Age, and also unlike the larger-scale shindigs from the days of Beach Blanket Bingo, Animal House, and Weird Science.

The nightclub craze of the Roaring Twenties and the Go-Go Eighties is also long gone. In low-trust periods, people just don't feel comfortable being surrounded by so many strangers in such an unprotected space. It's not only that people in such periods are less promiscuous and have lower sex drives, since you could always go out dancing with your steady partner or group of friends. They just feel awkward in public spaces, so nightclubbing becomes a fringe activity.

At small parties, though, there's no carnivalesque feeling that all barriers have been removed between groups and individuals, so to low-trust people it feels safer. There are probably no more than five separate little groups of friends, and since each group knows the hosts, they aren't that far apart in social distance. To the low-trust person, knowing that some unknown group comes pre-approved by mutual friends eases the interactions between strangers.

In an old post I excerpted a party scene from Time's original article on the Silent Generation, which unfortunately is no longer free online. It sounds pretty familiar, a rather small gathering where nothing too wild takes place. The attention-whoring described is not surprising given how self-conscious the average person will be in a small party, yet where there's an understanding that something unusual should happen.

It's like how everyone pretends to be fascinated by the boring game of beer pong that they're watching. If they respond to it like they should, by ignoring it and talking about or doing something fun with another person, the intense spotlight of small-party groups will train itself on them, to remind them that we're all here to watch beer pong, so don't kill the mood, bro. Kids are so conformist these days.

It's not as though young people in the good old days lacked group activities where everyone got together to pump themselves up as a group, rather than pair off and wander here, there, or anywhere. Sports games are only the most obvious example, and fans were much more rabid during the '20s and the '80s. But they also held their own events where, within an atmosphere of groupiness (those inside vs. outside the party), anyone could still find their own hidden little place, away from prying eyes. They enjoyed a healthier balance of event types.

I still stand by two older posts about how boring the typical Millennial house party is (and that episode was from Halloween, no less), and how beer pong reflects anti-social trends. And after a brief resurgence of nightclubbing during the mid-2000s, its appeal to young people keeps falling. Now, even when they do go out, it's mostly to whore for attention if they're female, and if male, to stare at "hot chicks" without making a move. No one's in any danger of making a connection.

The myth of wealthy gays and blue-collar lesbians

A major misconception that normal people have about gays is that they're more sophisticated, dashing or stylish, and relatively wealthy. Most of these images come from propaganda shown on TV and movies, and would be quickly corrected if you lived in a city where they congregate. What a rude awakening to discover that in reality queers have campy taste, dress like 13 year-olds, and want for disposable income (especially after paying for all the drugs, and for young bodies if they're middle-aged AIDS mummies).

The same goes for the blue-collar, manual-labor lesbo. I've only ever seen one who was like that -- shaved head, cargo shorts, wife-beater, and barbed wire tattoo around each bicep. You're far more likely to find lesbian professors, for example, and other middle-class and professional types as well, I'd assume.

(One of the few heart-warming facts about the make-up of university faculty is that there tend to be very few fags. Most gay agitation on campus comes from full-time activist groups and students, not so much from professors. But there's always a good number of lesbian faculty who show up to support the cause.)

But for the benefit of those who don't live around many homosexuals, let's turn to the General Social Survey. (Only whites are studied.) First consider education level. Among males, straights average 13.8 years of education and gays 14.5. Despite their mild advantage in education, though, gays' average annual income is much lower. Among high school graduates, gays earn about $49,000 vs. $61,000 for straights (adjusted for inflation to the year 2011).

This fits with the infantilization theory of male homosexuality, since they earn less not because they are dumber or less educated, but simply because they're underachievers and don't want adult responsibilities. The feminization theory does not account for this pattern because when women earn less than men, it's because they don't go to school for as long, work fewer hours, or don't work at all, mostly to take up the duties of being a wife and mother. Gays have no nurturing instinct, let alone nurturing behavior, and so do not have that excuse to fall back on for their lower earnings.

As for non-heterosexual females, straights average 13.7 years of education, bisexuals 13.6, and lesbians 14.5. (I break out bisexual vs. lesbian here because there does seem to be a distinct bisexual type in women, whereas most "bisexual" males are homos deep down.) Unlike the gay case, though, lesbian high school grads earn more on average than straight women -- about $52,000 compared to $36,000. Bisexuals earn the least, at $28,000.

I don't have a simple grand theory of lesbians and bisexuals, but those figures match with other patterns, where lesbians are more adult-like, generally blending in in everyday life (unlike freakish faggots), and bisexuals have a neurotic, pissed-off, wild-child profile. At any rate, clearly the causes and outcomes of deviant sexuality are very different between males and females.

The old stereotypes of the gay ghetto and the careerist lesbian are much closer to the truth than the newly invented propaganda about cultured, wealthy gays and Rosie the Riveter lesbians. Actually, most of the smokescreen is devoted to obscuring the reality of gay life, since it would be too depressing, and too damning of the pro-gay crusade, to show a drug addict free-loading at some friend's house, before going out to a Lady Gaga nightclub to suck 10 different dicks.

Instead we must be presented with the impeccably dressed sophisticate who lavishes his disposable income on taking out his fag hag friends to exotic dinners. Back on planet Earth, it's the chick friend who plays the mothering role to the down-and-out fuck-up of a son played by her gay BFF.

GSS variables used: sex, race, educ, sexsex5, conrinc