Japanese steppe culture: Ruling clans with the piebald horse as totem animal, and ritual horse sacrifice

Following the previous post, we'll look at another sort of "creation" myth from Japan -- the origin myth of ritual impurity, and therefore, of ritual purification measures to counter-act it (the basis of Shinto practices). This myth provides 2 links to horse culture from the Eastern Steppe. It's from the Nihon Shoki, though not the Kojiki, from the earliest writings in Japanese (early 8th C AD).

The god responsible for introducing ritual impurity into the world is Susanoo, the impetuous storm god. The target of his ire in this story is his sister, the sun goddess Amaterasu. He takes the Heavenly Piebald Colt (Ame no Fuchikoma), and flays it alive -- starting with its back end, and working toward the head. The text uses a specific term to emphasize that this is a "backwards flaying" ("sakahagi"), not a standard flaying that starts at the head and works its way toward the tail.

This is a form of ritual impurity, since he has not killed the colt first (e.g., by slitting its throat), and since he's removing the skin in backwards order.

He then hurls the colt in through a hole in the roof of Amaterasu's weaving hall, where one of her maidens is so startled by the desecration that she runs into the spinning shuttle at her loom, which hits her in the genitals, causing her to begin bleeding from there. This is the origin of menstrual bleeding, another form of ritual impurity. Amaterasu then goes into hiding in the Heavenly Rock-Cave Door (Ame no Iwayato), in a form of menstrual seclusion. Susanoo also defecates in her palace, another form of ritual impurity.

This story reveals that the myth-makers of Japan were intimately familiar with horse sacrifices -- how they were supposed to be performed, and therefore, which actions would constitute desecration, defilement, and impurity.

I don't know about every culture that practiced horse sacrifice, but the Cheremis people (AKA Mari) began flaying the horse from the head, then ending at the tail. Of course its throat was slit first, not flayed alive. And it was a colt, not an adult horse (the Japanese term "koma" means specifically "colt," combining the words for "child" and "horse").

The whole ordeal is described in grisly detail in the Finno-Ugric portion of The Mythology of All Races, which I referred to in the previous post. Incidentally, from my reading of their myth and ritual, the Cheremis seem to be mostly Indo-European culturally, despite speaking a Uralic language -- much like the Hungarians, Estonians, and Finns. They live along the Volga River in Russia, a little ways north of the Steppe.

How would the creators of the Nihon Shoki know so much about horse sacrifice, and why would they want to use that as such a crucial example of Susanoo's causing ritual impurity? He also destroys Amaterasu's rice fields, but it's not described in cruel gut-wrenching detail like flaying a horse backwards while still alive. They really wanted to emphasize the importance of horses, and of horse sacrifices, in their culture.

A mainly agrarian culture would not care so much about defiling the horse sacrifice ritual -- and probably would not even refer to such a ritual, since there was never any such thing in their culture. It occupies center stage in the Japanese narrative because they hailed from a nomadic horse-centric culture before arriving in Korea and Japan -- which in that part of the world, means the Eastern Steppe.

Its similarity to the Cheremis horse sacrifice ritual suggests a common ritual all across the Steppe, whether the practitioners were Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, or otherwise.

* * *

However, the Japanese myth's emphasis on the piebald / skewbald / spotted / etc. color pattern of the horse, narrows down which range of the Steppe they originated from.

First, tribes or clans or chiefdoms being associated with particular color patterns of their horses is mainly an Eastern Steppe phenomenon, from the Turkic tribes all the way to Glorious Nippon. It makes their favored breed of horse into a totem animal for the social unit.

Amaterasu is not just any ol' goddess in the foundational texts of Japanese culture -- she is the deity through whom the Japanese imperial family traces their bloodline. So this means that the piebald horse is a totem animal for the ruling clan of Japan.

Where else is the piebald horse the totem animal for a ruling clan? Why, where else, and when else? -- in the Xiongnu confederation during the late 1st millennium BC, and several of its off-shoots after its break-up.

And not just any ol' clan within the Xiongnu, but their ruling clan, the Luandi, whose name likely derives from "piebald horse".

Then there was the Alat tribe, whose name also likely means "piebald horse", a Turkic tribe who also belonged to the Xiongnu, and were either related to the Luandi, or identical to them, or perhaps they coincidentally shared the same totem animal due to there only being so many color patterns to choose from, and due to every clan preferring a horse rather than some other species for their totem animal.

The same situation must have been true for the ruling tribe or clan among the Yayoi-like people who arrived in southern Korea and then Japan. Their totem animal was also the piebald horse, whether their clan was related to the Luandi or Alat by lineage, or just sharing a totem animal by happenstance. In either case, it places the continental component of the future Japanese culture among the Xiongnu confederation during the 1st millennium BC -- not Southeast Asia, not the far Arctic north, not during the 1st millennium AD, etc.

As with the horse sacrifice portion of the myth, specifying the color pattern of the heavenly horse reveals that the myth-makers of Japan were intimately familiar with Eastern Steppe practices for choosing a totem animal, like including its color pattern instead of a broadly defined breed or species name alone.

I don't think the Alat tribe being Turkic means that the ruling clan of the Yayoi-like people were Turkic. They could have been Mongolic or Tungusic. Making the horse your totem animal, and emphasizing its color pattern, was common among all of those Altaic speech communities.

And perhaps the Yayoi-like population was not ethnically homogeneous -- there could have been Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Uralic, or other groups among them. All sorts of people mixed with each other on the Eastern Steppe. Perhaps they only homogenized when they landed in Japan and were defined by a new ethnic opposition, between the various continental arrivals and the native Emishi / Ainu.

* * *

Over the past 10 years in Japan, there has been an insanely popular media franchise called Uma Musume ("Horse Girl") Pretty Derby, mostly based on an anime series and related video games, which revolve around a group of horse-human girls training to compete in horse-girl races. Yes, like in a traditional horse-racing track. They look mostly human, with horse ears, and as a side project devote themselves to singing and dancing on stage as idols.

This is yet another case of the horse-centric origins of Japanese culture re-asserting themselves in the modern age, after having lied dormant or secondary for many centuries.

But by now, horse racing is a very popular sport in Japan, and has been for decades. It's so popular that Lui, a vtuber from Hololive, hosts regular watching parties / informal betting streams as the major Japanese horse races are being broadcast. She can't re-broadcast the sound and image of the race on her own stream, due to copyright, but even just as a watching party, she gets close to 10K live viewers, judging from the one she held a few days ago (pretty good numbers for livestreams).

And as the very beginnings of Japanese literature show, their fascination with horses is neither new nor imported from the West. And far from viewing them as only a neat form of entertainment, they hold them to be one of the most sacred animals in creation, a testament to their origins in the Eastern Steppe, and the OG badass nomadic steppe empire in particular, the Xiongnu.

Physical anthropology of orchestral musicians: jocks, not nerds

It's been a very long time since I got to see a professional orchestra IRL, probably the first time in adulthood. And in a Roaring Twenties picture palace, no less, where I could see them fairly well.

I was simply amazed at how corporeal their body types are -- perhaps not surprising if you think of playing a musical instrument as a kinesthetic activity, but I don't think most people do. And if they do, they don't think of a symphony orchestra as "that kind" of musical performance -- so much more brainy, therefore the performers should look the part, right?

All the women were butt women, not boob women -- and not just like they had relatively more around back than up front, we're talking bubbles and thighs so thicc you couldn't help but notice them from 50 feet away. I thought it was a group of gymnasts, dancers, shot-putters, and field hockey players. They were built like jocks, not nerds.

Some were more heavy-set, some more slender, but all were butt people. The strings section was more corporeal than the brass or woodwind section -- bigger butts, more corpulent bodies overall. Still, even the wispy French horn player was conspicuously bending over to arrange things on her chair, with her back to the audience, just like the butt girls in high school bend over their desks to get attention from boys (or the hot guy teacher).

I attribute that difference to how physical the activity is -- strings involve larger / longer motion of the limbs, namely the arm used for bowing. Brass and woodwind motor activity is more fine than gross, you can barely see them moving around at all.

I didn't notice any big difference within the strings section, as though the ones with a cello between their legs had to have more developed bodies than the violinists, or as though the upright bass players needed more leg & butt muscle to put into their standing activity. All of them have the same range of gross motor activity, i.e. their dominant arm that's bowing. Sitting vs. standing doesn't involve motion, and neither does opening vs. closing your legs while sitting.

Naturally the harpist was a meaty butt woman -- that instrument is huge, and requires full extension and contraction of both arms. While executing a glissando, she looks like one of those women who can start a pull-cord lawnmower. I'm guessing the women who play a lyre, which fits on your lap, don't look like they hang out at the squat rack in the gym.

I couldn't help but think of a certain WASP-y Twitter persona who mentioned how much she wanted to learn the harp, and also mentions her weightlifting activities and being a dumptruck ass-haver, all of which are out-of-place on the cerebral platform. (Except for being a Millennial, she'd fit in better with the TikTok accounts.) I won't name her because she probably blushes easily, this is just to provide further confirmation of the correlation. She would stand out as the blonde in the orchestra, though, so maybe she would opt for small cozy recitals, as blondes are evidently more prone to stage-fright.

The guys were similar to their female counterparts in the section, with a fair share of the cellists and bass players -- and the conductor himself -- having pot bellies, while the flautist looked like a twink. This is the only respectable profession that suits fat people.

Hardly any blondes, and this is the Midwest, so there's an ample supply of them in the general population. At least one fiery redhead, although I couldn't make out some of those toward the back, so there could have been another here or there. Blonde hair reflects a recent domestication event in Europe, so brown and red-haired Europeans are the wilder back-to-nature type. Neanderthals had red hair, too. I'll bet that, just like the case with popular music, the elite orchestral musicians in Sweden are way more brunette than the highly-blonde population at large.

Music is inextricably linked with dance, and both of those activities are kinesthetic and put us back in touch with our grug-brain past. Even the forms of it that are intended for -- and performed by -- an elite stratum of society, and are more graceful than lumbering, reflect the animal side of human nature, not the cogitating symbol-manipulating side.

The symphony and the ballet are ways for the modern commercial / financial elite, who are supposed to suppress their brute ancestry, to still indulge their animality -- on occasion, and provided it has the all-important gracefulness to keep the libido from getting out of control once it's started up.

To end on, after figuring out who was present, I was struck by who therefore was absent -- skinny queens, big-naturals, nerds, and all the other people who populate 95% of online platforms. Specifically, the type who if they do make or listen to music, it's always something with minimal musicianship behind it, and never danceable / moshable / headbangable -- indie, punk, lyrics-heavy rap (as opposed to crunk), etc.

Who also makes up 95% of music critics at any media outlet? Yep, the same two-left-feet-having cerebral type who sneer at fat people (anyone with a BMI over 20) as morally unclean and creatively bereft. So delusional -- but what else would you expect from people who are literally lost in their own thoughts for their entire lives?

The Brazil mania of the 2000s (and its place in the history of multicultural globalism)

I was reminded of the mania for all things Brazilian during the 2000s (some of which have continued through today), while tuning in to a recent karaoke stream by Kiara, Hololive's in-house choreographer. She was covering a song that used to be a standard in the dance clubs in the late 2000s and early 2010s -- "Hey Mama" by the Black Eyed Peas.

This was always a personal fave of mine, and I danced a modified samba. The tempo is way too fast to do both the fancy footwork of the samba and get a lot of motion or range at the same time. And when you're up on the main stage, hyping up the whole crowd, they want to see you take up lots of space and move around, not just do footwork in one place. So I would land each foot heavily on the main beat, and then instead of lifting and re-landing my feet on the half or quarter beats in between, I kept each foot fairly grounded, but pushed my legs up and down off of the ball of my feet on those off-beats, to simulate the fast-paced footwork of the samba.

That allows you to keep your feet close to the ground, and glide from side to side in wide strides that end on the main beat, to get more range over the floor. It's a sleight-of-hand -- most of the crowd won't notice, and they're convinced. And it frees up more of your body's energy to get your upper body, arms, and facial expression into the whole performance, rather than the relatively stiff upper body that comes with an emphasis on fancy footwork.

Anyways... I always wished there had been more songs like to get crazy to, but as far as I remember, that was the only samba-friendly staple of the clubs back then. However, after hearing Kiara singing that song, my mind opened up like a volcano, and ancient subterranean MySpace memories came flowing to the surface of my consciousness.

I knew that rhythm sounded familiar, but it wasn't from "Hey Mama" itself -- they sampled the beat of their own song when they released an enhanced re-mix of the '60s samba classic "Mas que Nada" by Sergio Mendes, in 2006. Although I never heard it in the clubs, it did hit #13 on the Billboard Dance Club Play chart here, and made the year-end charts in several European countries. I mainly remember it from the MySpace music player, where it was popular enough that I saw it on someone's profile, and started playing it over and over myself. Pretty sure they had the video for it, not just the audio.



However, the Brazil craze was not limited only to dance-focused genres like rap. Sidebar: it may sound strange today, but rap during the 2000s was at its most dance-crazy -- from crunk, to the Latin dance crossovers ("Hey Mama," "Hips Don't Lie," etc.), to the electropop of "Lollipop". Even mellow pop rock songs like "She Will Be Loved" by Maroon 5 borrowed from samba rhythms and Latin sensuality:



On the less mainstream side of things, samba and bossa nova were prevalent in the Thievery Corporation's lounge music, although it was not strictly focused on Brazil, but including Brazilian music in with other world genres.

Instead, the main rejuvenation source was the indie group Nouvelle Vague, whose concept was to record bossa nova covers of late '70s and '80s new wave icons. This hit so many different 2000s trends all at once -- the '80s revival, Brazil mania, and the whimsical "is it ironic or sincere?" tone of the indie crowd back then. It risked becoming a gimmick, and certainly their live performances got way too self-aware and hammed-up to be sincere tributes to the original, and more "look at how friggin' whimsical we are" contests for the spotlight.

And yet that doesn't detract from the recorded versions, which were popular enough that I heard the one below, "Teenage Kicks" (from the Undertones), as part of the in-flight music during a plane ride. The pining for a girl who doesn't know you exist, really resonates with the original bossa nova classics, like "The Girl from Ipanema". That keeps it from sounding too discordant tonally, which would make it too annoyingly self-aware -- like, "woah, get a load of how wacky we are, doing bossa nova covers of death metal" or something.

Even though a female voice is singing, I still hear it as being about a guy who is pining for a girl, narrated in a third-person by a different girl who has a crush on the guy in the lyrics.

* * *

As a music & dance guy, those are the examples that really stand out to me, but Brazil mania was not confined to music. I'll briefly survey some other domains of culture now, but I'll add any other examples in the comments later if I think of them. Readers feel free to as well.

In food & drink, there was the birth of the obsession with the acai berry. Yeah, I'm sure it has good nutritional value, but so does food from all over the world. This particular berry only became popular because it rode the wave of Brazil mania. Brazilian barbeque restaurants also took off like crazy during the 2000s. Why not something closely related, like Argentine cuisine? Because Argentina is not Brazilian. Gen X club-goers were so saturated in Braziliana that they knew their national drink -- the caipirinha. Any ol' normie could've known about the related lime cocktail, the Cuban mojito, but the trend-setters ordered caipirinhas.

Even the babes in commercials for food & drink were part of the Brazil craze. "Wanna Fanta -- don'tcha wanna?" It was the 2000s, so one of the Fantana girls had to be Brazilian (Andrea De Oliveira, the purple one).

Brazilian models Adriana Lima, Ana Beatriz Barros, Gisele Bundchen, and Alessandra Ambrosio were familiar to both the lad-mag readers and runway audiences of the 2000s.

Brazilians in general were the It Girl exotic ethnicity, from mainstream ads to porn and everything in between. Brazil-themed sexuality was so prevalent that assmen not only learned the Spanish word "culo" but the Brazilian Portuguese counterpart, "bunda". Britney Spears' hanger-on husband, Kevin Federline, released an album in 2006 that went nowhere, but whose first attempt at a single was titled "PopoZao", after the Brazilian term for "big ol' booty".

Brazilian waxing took off during this decade, and it could have been named after any place where women removed more hair down there than had been the norm in America. But those other countries were not Brazil.

Then there was the interest, if not much of the practice, of capoeira -- the mixture of martial arts and dancing. Far more popular was specifically Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, as the UFC rebranded and took over the youth sports culture. What other sport had the under-30 guys watching a reality TV competition to choose its next star athlete? Commentator Joe Rogan introduced this massive audience to the Brazilian pronunciation of Portuguese, every time he referred to "Hoyce" (Royce) Gracie, leader of an influential school of BJJ.

For established high-profile events, it took longer for Brazil mania to result in that country being host to the World Cup (2014) and the Summer Olympics (2016), but both of those decisions were made during the late 2000s planning stage.

Not many movies crossed over to American audiences; City of God was about it, and only indie / art house audiences knew of it. But foreign movies are also a tough sell, since audiences have to read subtitles to understand the plot.

* * *

I haven't said anything about why it had to be Brazil, and why this time period. The main goal here is simply to catalog this phenomenon, which does not show up under simple Google searches for Brazil craze, Brazil mania, Brazil 2000s, etc.

But briefly, I think it was trying to present an optimistic and exciting vision of the future of globalization led by the American empire. The nasty reality was something entirely different, as NAFTA de-industrialized our economy, and most of the heavy-scale immigration here was not from culturally vibrant middle-class Brazilians, but de facto slaves from Central America who aren't very exciting. The global depression that began in 2008, and never ended for most people, also put an end to the rosy view of globalism's future.

During the woke 2010s, there was very little interest in culturally integrating the Third World with the American empire. The Brazil craze had some momentum behind it, but that impetus came from the pre-woke 2000s. Elite culture-makers and lay audiences alike found no interest in the rest of Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, India, China, or sub-Saharan Africa. Maybe some interest in shawarma, hookah bars, and MENA baddies, but that's about it.

The primary focus of multiculturalism was other advanced nations in the empire, namely Japan and South Korea. Obsession with the culture of those nations had never been a fraction of what it exploded into during the 2010s, and that trend continues through the 2020s so far. Approaches to global integration have taken something of a step in the realistic direction, seemingly after the dividing line of the 2008 depression, which blew up the untempered end-of-history optimism of the Nineties.

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.

Rent cathartic experiences, own addictive ones (theory and examples from media, arts, entertainment, sex)

The discussion of ad-infested streaming entertainment made me seriously think about buying mp3s for the first time in my life, rather than rely on YouTube for songs that are too recent for me to own on CD, and that probably wouldn't be worth owning the whole album for anyway. This led me to a more general conclusion on whether to rent or own, based on how frequently and repeatedly you want to re-experience something. In short, whether it is cathartic vs. addictive. But more on that later.

Till now, for songs that I didn't own on CD, streaming via YouTube has been the best option for price and convenience: the only cost is an internet connection, and with an ad-blocker installed on your web browser, you don't have to pay the cost of watching ads. However, with the recent aggressiveness of YouTube in the arms race against ad-blockers, it's possible that the era of cost-free and ad-free streaming will be as brief as the era of pirated file-sharing in the early-mid 2000s.

Today, the option that the IT cartel is pushing is paid streaming services. Even Apple threw in the towel on that one, when they were pioneers in buy-to-own digital music distribution. See here for an overview. You pay a flat fee per month, and get "unlimited access" to their music library. Spotify Premium is the leader there, costing $10 per month to stream anything in their library without ads.

The alternative, older model, is buying mp3s a la carte from some site that is still offering them, say the iTunes store. I didn't use that model when it was popular, but only because I was buying CDs -- not because I was pirating 100s or 1000s of mp3 files. I was still buying-to-own, and supplementing that in the 2010s with streaming via YouTube (free, no ads) to get songs that were too hard to find on CD or weren't worth the cost of the entire album.

There are certain advantages of buying over streaming that are obvious to normal people -- though not necessarily to the IT geeks who dominate discussion of these matters -- but have already gotten a fair amount of treatment.

Briefly, these things stem from uncertainty. Will the streaming service exist in 1, 2, 5, 10 years down the road? If not, you no longer have access to jack shit, and you have nothing to show for all the years that you did -- you were not renting-to-own. What if the corporate board of some record label decides, for any reason, to remove songs you like from a streaming library, or refuses to make them available in the first place? Now you have unlimited access to far fewer songs that you want, just like the absence of Star Wars and other mega-popular movies on Netflix. What if they merely put an expiration date on their songs for streaming access, just like movies on Netflix? Great -- unlimited access to a limited-time-only experience.

Here, the instability comes from the fact that the streaming platforms are distributors only, they did not produce the songs to begin with. The actual producers -- the record labels, the movie studios, etc. -- have final say over what is available in the libraries of any streaming service.

But there is a separate, undiscussed matter of genre -- is some form of entertainment worth experiencing again and again, or are you unlikely to want to experience it again -- even if you liked it the first time? If you will feel like experiencing it again, you should own it for good, so you don't have to pay an ongoing fee, time after time. If you are unlikely to experience it again -- even when you already liked it the first time -- then you might as well rent it once, rather than own something that will sit idle potentially forever.

The contrast between feature-length movies and songs is revealing. We'll start with history because that tells us about evolution and adaptation. If some model has passed the test of time, it means more than a model having passed through only the "possible fluke, but not absolute failure" test.

The overview in Variety linked above quotes Steve Jobs as stating flatly that people don't want to rent their music, they want to own it -- as though Jobs had been proven wrong by subsequent developments in the streaming music model. But he was correct -- if people wanted to rent music, they would have done so at any point in the past, in at least some format of recorded music. And yet, nobody rented music at any time in the past, in any format (reel-to-reel tapes, vinyl records, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, mini-discs, etc.). Public lending libraries might have had a music section, but they were free to check out, and nobody relied on that as their primary way of listening to music, only to sample albums occasionally.

The closest example of renting music is live concerts or nightclub attendance -- you pay to hear music that you cannot play back or re-experience later on. But notice that a concert or night at a club lasts for hours, unlike a single song or even album, and that it is much more of a spectacular event than listening to songs or albums. And again, that was never the primary way of listening to music for anyone at any time. Nor are streaming services offering anything similar to an IRL concert -- just those same old single songs or albums that you could've bought on CD, not the spectacular event.

There were no technical reasons that prevented people from renting music in earlier times. Hit songs were released as singles, if listeners just wanted that one song, and albums were popular as well. So why not rent a single 45 / tape / CD that was your earworm du jour? Or the album that all your music friends recommended? For some reason, people just don't want to rent music.

That means that the current moment of paid streaming music services is the anomaly of dubious durability, not the old iTunes store. Especially when it is used as the primary way of listening to music. It doesn't matter what exactly is causing the anomaly -- IT geeks chasing a shiny new app for novelty's sake, a professional class so flush with free money from the central bank that they have nothing better to spend it on than music subscriptions, an increasingly cartelized supply side dominating the demand side against the consumers' preferences, or whatever else it may be. The point is, people do not want to rent music, they want to own it.

And yet look at movies. For decades the main way people saw movies was renting them -- paying at the box office to see it in a theater, after which they could not see it again without paying another rental fee. Renting vs. owning does not depend on where you experience it, or where you pay for it. Watching a movie in a theater is renting.

After theaters, the most common way was renting from a store, across all manner of formats -- Betamax, VHS, LaserDisc, DVD, Blu-ray, and even film prints for niche audiences. In the 2000s, people rented movies through the mail, with the original Netflix. Then Redbox stands popped up to cater to yet another form of demand for renting movies.

Even when people bought these formats, it was not necessarily to own them. It was also common to buy a movie, watch it a few times max, and then sell it into the second-hand market. That is a form of renting -- paying an a la carte fee to temporarily enjoy the thing. Maybe the rental period was a bit longer than 3 days, and was decided by the viewer, and maybe the rental fee was steeper as a result. (You buy for $20, sell for $5, net rental cost is $15 as opposed to $5 or whatever for a standard 3-day rental.) Still, buy-then-sell is just a form of renting, not owning.

For the past decade, as Netflix switched from physical to digital rentals, the most common way of seeing movies outside of theaters -- certainly if they are no longer in theaters -- is renting via streaming. That does not depend on the particular terms of the rental -- a flat subscription fee for "all access," a rental per title akin to the old video rental stores, or whatever else comes down the pike.

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Over all these decades of watching movies, renting was always more common than buying-to-own, no matter the format. So, unlike songs, movies are something that people do want to rent rather than own. What distinguishes songs from movies? At the surface level, people want to listen to specific songs over and over again, while they can be satisfied after watching a specific movie once in their entire lifetime.

At a deeper level, this reflects two separate traits. First, movies are narratives with clearly defined informational content (the who, what, when, where, why and how of the plot), whereas songs are not narratives and do not have such clearly defined semantic content, nor is this information of central concern to listeners (the lyrics are more evocative, and listeners care more about the music itself).

A major part of watching a movie is learning the who / what / when / where / why / how, which is why people don't like having the entire plot spoiled ahead of time. Once you've learned that, it's hard to forget, so why watch it again? Song lyrics are evocative, not narrative, so there's not much to learn about what they're conveying, and we wouldn't mind if somebody told us in advance what the lyrics were.

Songs are more about evoking a mood, whether vague or highly detailed, for the listener to resonate with. So whenever you want to get into that mood -- or are already in that mood, but want some amplification -- you will feel like playing a specific song that you know works in setting the desired mood. That's why you keep coming back to that one, and the others like it.

Second, movies are a more cathartic emotional experience than a single song or even an entire album. Movies put your mind in a refractory state at the end. After watching a movie that you like (we understand why you wouldn't want to re-watch a movie that you hated), you can't watch it right afterward. Probably not even the next day -- maybe the next week, although more likely within the next year, or years later. Listening to a song you like does provide a little catharsis, with its build-up / climax / winding-down of tension, but not nearly as much as a feature-length movie. You can easily put a favorite song on repeat 10 times in a row.

The same goes for entire albums -- and although some are as long in duration as a movie, they are not as cathartic. So it isn't duration per se that matters. What matters is that albums are usually not structured into a holistic gestalt like a movie, but more like an anthology. They can be decomposed into the separate songs, and you could play them in any order and still enjoy it. Albums are not narrative either, but lyrical and evocative. Because the scale of the catharsis is smaller for albums than movies, it's no big deal to put an album on repeat, or at least play it once a day, week, etc., unlike playing the same movie multiple times per day, week, etc.

Novels are like movies, and most readers would rather rent them from a library or buy-then-sell. Today it's more of an activity for collectors, enthusiasts, and the like, so there is more of a buy-to-own behavior, but not when it was a mass-based medium.

TV shows can go either way. The heavily serialized narratives of prestige TV are like movies, and those ones people prefer to rent (stream). Anthologies that are less drama and more comedy, like the golden age of the Simpsons, people would rather own than pay an ongoing rental fee. The bits, the sight gags, the punchlines are like riffs from a song that never get old no matter how many times you experience them. Others may rent such shows for trial-and-error purposes, or to briefly re-visit a show for nostalgia reasons. But for those who really like the early years of the Simpsons, they'd rather own them than rely on streaming them.

Video games can go either way as well. A pseudo-movie with a narrative focus and cathartic experience -- just rent it. Even if you liked it, you couldn't start it over for awhile anyway. I've been out of the loop on video games since the 2000s, but I have regularly heard video game players complain about buying one of these narrative games, and then it just sits on the shelf without getting played again, even if they liked it. They would've preferred renting it.

For a non-narrative game that is more of a steady addiction than a catharsis with a refractory phase at the end, own it so you don't have to pay an ongoing fee to feed your ongoing addiction. Early video games were like this. They were non-narrative and did not produce a soaring high and satisfying ending, but rather more of a steady engagement of interest. That was true for side-scrolling platform games like Super Mario Bros. 3, racing games like Super Mario Kart, or first-person shooters like GoldenEye 007. Not to mention arcade games from the '80s or '90s.

It may be true that, during the first couple decades of the medium, video games were popular at video rental stores, seemingly against the theory here. But that was just because the target audience was children, and renting them was only for cost reasons -- not because they were a standalone experience that the players only wanted to rent once and be done with, perhaps for life. The same goes for arcade games -- players would have rather owned them than rent the machine in the arcade by pumping in quarters. But that would've been far too expensive.

The pattern is easier to see today, when the audience is more grown-up and has more disposable income, and where the expensive original physical devices are not the main way people play them (arcade cabinets are rare, and home cartridges and discs are hard to come by as well). They're going to be a low-cost digital emulation of the original game from the '80s or '90s. And it turns out people would rather download them to own -- e.g., from Nintendo's Virtual Console store on its home consoles since the Wii -- than pay a subscription or a la carte rental fee to access them for a limited time.

Sports events are like movies. They have a highly narrative focus -- who did what when, how did the score progress, and who ended up winning. And they tend to be highly cathartic, with tension building up, reaching a climax, and leaving viewers satisfied for awhile after. The action may be unscripted, unlike a movie, but it follows a similar course and produces a similar effect in the audience. And sure enough, almost no one wants to own a recording of a sports event they've already seen, even those they highly enjoyed. Just rent it by forking over the pay-per-view fee, or buy a ticket to see it in-person (like a music concert), and then never worry about it or pay for it again. Only events that reward repeated viewing (historical records reached, or whatever), would people want to own.

The same goes for other performing arts. If you can't or won't make it in person to the ballet, opera, theater stage, or circus arena, first there must be a recording of the performance. Assuming there is, and even assuming you like it, would you rather rent it or own it? Rent, of course. Those performances, even when not strictly narrative like some ballets, still have a holistic gestalt organization that cannot be decomposed into pieces that could be rearranged and enjoyed in any order. So there still is some long, complex sequence of events that unfold in a certain order. And they are more cathartic than a song or album.

For high / classical music, operas would come last for owning (rent a performance or recording), followed by symphonies, which are highly structured and holistic. What most people buy-to-own in classical music is anthologies, whether intended to be that way by the composer or curated later by a publisher. That's why a typical listener's classical music collection is less likely to have the complete symphonies of Beethoven or Wagner's operas, and more likely to have Chopin's nocturnes, Bach's fugues, and Schubert's lieder. As much as those latter three may differ, they share a lower level of "narrativity" compared to symphonies and operas. It makes them more able to be played regularly, perhaps even on repeat if it's catchy enough and puts you in the mood you want to be in.

Finally, to show the generality of the theory by providing a case study outside of media, arts, and entertainment, consider what kinds of experiences people have paid prostitutes for over the millennia. They are renting her body, not owning it. What do you know, the theory checks out again -- the acts are the highly cathartic types of physical intimacy, not the acts that just set a mood and that do not produce catharsis and a refractory period afterward. They all involve the guy climaxing.

Why not those like kissing, petting, fondling, and so on? Assuming he liked the girl, and he's in a horny mood, but either didn't want to or couldn't afford to pay for climaxing, why not at least pay for making out? Because that just leaves the john wanting more, like a catchy song, and would lead to paying over and over for an indefinite make-out session that kept him in that mood. Those addictive rather than cathartic acts are more for a girlfriend or wife, someone whose body you come closer to owning than renting. If he rented those acts, he would be visiting the prostitute every day, rather than only once in awhile for climaxing.

Strange as it may seem, the guy's primary partner (gf / wife) is defined more by her engaging in these lower-intensity addictive acts than in the high-intensity cathartic sex acts. He may have a regular side piece, irregular one night stands, or visits to prostitutes -- but those all involve climaxing only, not necessarily making out and other lower-level acts. The sign that he wants to own your body, rather than just rent it, is engaging in the mood-setting, addictive, touchy-feely, lovey-dovey stuff in an indefinite, ongoing manner -- not the climax that he might feel OK experiencing with a rental body in a one-and-done manner.

Women realize that, and are more likely to get jealous and vengeful if they picture their bf / husband in a hot-and-heavy make-out session of indefinite duration, where even after he's left her room he may want to go back to her in only a matter of hours. Not so much if they picture a pelvic jackhammering bound to end with him in a refractory period sooner rather than later, therefore wanting to GTFO of her room for the next several days / weeks / months, and return to his gf / wife.

The generality of the theory holds up so well that when we see departures from it, we can treat it as anomalous and requiring special, perhaps case-specific explanations. Fad, fluke, fashion. Imbalance of forces between the two sides that render the decider unable to do what they prefer. And so on and so forth. We don't just assume that some micro-trend du jour proves, or disproves, some grand claim about human nature -- especially in light of the relevant history. To reiterate the original motivation here: people do not want to rent music, they want to own it.

Rhythm & exercise video games surge during restless and manic phases, crash during vulnerable phase, of excitement cycle

I haven't looked at video games within the framework of the 15-year cultural excitement cycle, since the last time I regularly played contemporary games was Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and Street Fighter / Mortal Kombat in the arcades. I do try to keep up somewhat with what's going on, out of curiosity, but even there I stopped paying attention around 2015. So, I generally don't have enough fine-grained knowledge to write about how the excitement cycle is reflected in that domain of pop culture.

There is one exception, though -- video games based on rhythm and exercising. Those are straightforward adaptations of real-life physical activities, so their popularity should mirror the popularity of the real activities.

Specifically, they should be least popular during a vulnerable phase, when people's energy levels are in a refractory state. They should catch on during the following restless warm-up phase, when energy levels are back to baseline and people want to do simple exercises to get back into the swing of things, especially if it involves a social setting where they can mix it up with others rather than continue hiding under a pile of blankets. And they should last into the following manic phase, even if they won't be quite so popular because they've already gotten used to the simple-step exercises and now want something more physically demanding, if anything.

What do you know, that's exactly the pattern of popularity across several cycles. And unlike other genres, these two were both highly popular with females as well as males, and were often played in social groups, even in public places.

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The rhythm game genre first hit it big during the manic phase of the late '90s with PaRappa the Rapper and more importantly Dance Dance Revolution, which involves moving your feet onto various positions of a pressure-sensitive dance mat according to the timed sequence of moves shown on the screen, as music blares in the background.

During the vulnerable phase of the early 2000s, the genre nearly vanished. Only two titles are even remotely familiar to a non-gamer like me -- Donkey Konga and Samba de Amigo, which use special percussion controllers. Neither was a mega-hit like Dance Dance Revolution, though. The DDR series itself saw only a couple releases during this five-year phase. Everyone was in too emo of a mood, and their energy levels were negative.

Then all of a sudden in 2005, when the restless warm-up phase began, a mass phenomenon of rhythm games took over the video game world, lasting through the final year of the phase in 2009. Most notable were the Guitar Hero and Rock Band series, which used all manner of special controllers shaped and played like real guitars, drums, and so on. The games test the player's rhythm by having them press various buttons, use the whammy bar, etc., according to the timed sequence on the screen, as the song plays.

Dance games also saw a revival with the Just Dance series in 2009, not to mention a flood of releases from the DDR series.

These instrumental games were so popular that you could find groups of people playing them together in public nightlife places like bars. They weren't just for teenagers playing with a group of friends inside their home.

As the manic phase began in 2010, the instrumental rhythm games were still popular, although less so than during their restless phase peak. The dance games became more popular, as the Dance Central series joined Just Dance in 2010 (plus more DDR games). Perhaps people had become comfortable with simpler rhythmic activities only involving the hands, like Guitar Hero, and wanted to move onto whole-body rhythms now.

However, when energy levels began crashing in 2015 with the arrival of the vulnerable phase, the rhythm genre nearly vanished again, as in the early 2000s. In 2015, the last major installments in both the Rock Band and Guitar Hero series were flops, and they haven't bothered with either series since.

Similarly, Just Dance stopped receiving numbered titles after 4 in 2012, and stopped receiving new system titles after the one for Wii U in 2014. The Nintendo Switch system came out in 2017, but did not get a dedicated "Just Dance Switch". Now they're just yearly updates with more topical songs. The Dance Central series did not last into the vulnerable phase at all -- its four games were released from 2010-'14, entirely within the manic phase. (In 2019, they did make another for a virtual reality system that no one owns.) And the DDR series only saw a couple releases, just like during the early 2000s.

Now that the restless warm-up phase has begun again in 2020, this genre is ripe for revival. TikTok has already shown the (re-)emergence of dance fever, and the rhythm genre hit its peak in mobile games during the last restless phase (the Tap Tap series of the late 2000s). As for home consoles, I have no idea whether kids born after 2004 (and who have no experience with the last wave of instrumental games) would go for the physical instrument approach. But why wouldn't they? And the older Millennials could fuel their late 2000s nostalgia by having mock instruments to play along with -- akin to the nostalgic fitness craze of "adult kickball" in the late 2000s among late 20-somethings.

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Exercise games show the same pattern over time. The Power Pad for the original Nintendo (late '80s vulnerable phase), and the only game anyone played with it, World Class Track Meet, are not exercise games because they don't involve sustained activity. It was not a hit in any case, but I did know one friend who had it. It was basically 10 seconds of furious running in place on the pressure-sensitive mat, then the event was over; repeat a few more times, then turn the game off. Not much exercise. And there was no rhythm to the motions, so it was not a rhythm game either.

Dance is a kind of exercise, so Dance Dance Revolution also made the exercise genre popular during the late '90s manic phase.

Then nothing during the early 2000s vulnerable phase, when energy levels plummeted into a refractory state.

It wasn't until 2005 -- when else? -- that the genre came back to life, with EyeToy: Kinetic. The motion-sensitive camera used for the game had already been released in 2003, so why didn't they do the obvious and make a fitness game for it at launch? Because people didn't feel like exercising in '03 and '04, being mired in a refractory state. Suddenly in 2005, their energy levels were back to baseline, and they felt like moving around more.

By far the most popular examples of the genre, though, were from the Nintendo Wii, whose pack-in game was Wii Sports that had players using motion-sensitive controllers to simulate tennis and other sports. The Wii Fit from 2007 included its own balance board to track the player's center of gravity, and became one of the best-selling games not to be included with a console. Its sequel in 2009, Wii Fit Plus, was also a mega-hit.

The genre lasted through the early 2010s manic phase, albeit to a lesser extent than before (Wii Fit U; Nike+ Kinect Training; Zombies, Run!). People had become used to simple exercises, and felt successfully awakened from their early 2000s hibernation.

By the time the next vulnerable phase struck from 2015-'19, the whole motion-sensitive mode of play was over. Energy levels crashed into a refractory state all over again, and people went back into hibernation for the first time in 15 years.

But as with the rhythm games, now that 2020 has seen the beginning of another restless warm-up phase, it's the perfect time for exercise games to make a comeback. There's novelty value for the younger kids, and nostalgia value for the older Millennials, in playing an exercise game with some device that is motion- or pressure-sensitive.

And it would fit in well with the quarantine atmosphere, where people are afraid of getting bed sores from being holed up indoors all day long for months on end. That would re-create the social setting of the original Wii games, where parents and children would play them at the same time in the home.

Who knows exactly what form the revivals of rhythm and exercise games will take, but the demand for them will be shooting through the roof now that people are restless again.

Female athletes to make comeback as hot girl type during restless phase, and athletes are butt women not boob women

Out of nowhere YouTube started pressuring me to watch clips of women's track & field events that showcased the ass-and-thighs of the athletes. OK, you got me.

Aside from looking nice physically, they're decently entertaining to watch -- not long and boring, no complicated rules, and minimal equipment. Just a brief burst of display of overall athleticism and coordination. Not so different from watching dancers, just leaning more toward the athletic than the coordination side.

First impression: 100% of athletes are butt women rather than boob women, confirming yet again that corporeal people are ass people rather than boob people (who are cerebral). It has nothing to do with having low body fat -- there are plenty of women who are skinny and busty. Fitness does not melt away breast tissue. And there are plenty of women with a normal or chubby level of body fat who carry more of it in the back than in the front. It's the kinesthetic orientation itself that is tied to being a butt woman rather than a boob woman.

As for above the neck, the relay sprinters have the prettiest faces. Perhaps because this is not a championship sport, it lets in less tomboy-ish women who don't have to make the sport the main focus of their lives.

Then I wondered why YouTube was pushing this type now. Athletes haven't been a hot girl type for awhile in pop culture. In fact, throughout the vulnerable phase of the excitement cycle, from 2015-'19, the most resonant portrayal of them was as sexual assault victims, i.e. the US gymnastic sex abuse scandal. Far from being confined to the sports world, one of those victims (Aly Raisman) was featured in "Me Too: the Music Video," AKA "Girls Like You" by Maroon 5, one of the mega-hits of that emo phase.

It seems like not too long ago, female athletes could become instant sex symbols, like this 2012 viral video of Australian hurdler Michelle Jenneke doing her bouncy warm-up dance:



But then that was the manic phase of the excitement cycle, 2010-'14, before energy levels crashed into a refractory phase and everyone went emo. There was nothing incompatible, though, about sexy athletes and a zeitgeist marked by soaring energy levels.

There was even greater popular horniness over athletes during the restless warm-up phase just before, during the late 2000s. Consulting the first list I could find of most attractive female athletes, I narrowed it to only those I have actually heard of. (I'm not a sports fan, so if I don't know them, they were not a pop-culture-wide phenomenon.) From 2005-'09, there was Danica Patrick, Maria Sharapova, and Gina Carano (during the original MMA craze).

Left off of that list because she was only a 17 year-old high schooler at the time, is the most pined-after athlete of the late 2000s, Allison Stokke from California. All those little men trying to pole-vault up into her eyes...

From the vulnerable phase of the early 2000s, there's no one I recognized, although Anna Kournikova was a sex symbol during both the late '90s and early 2000s. But no one who became a hit sensation during 2000-'04. The parallels with 2015-'19 are striking.

There were plenty of them before then, however, beginning in the restless warm-up phase of the early '90s and lasting into the late '90s manic phase (when Kournikova first broke out). The most memorable was beach volleyball player Gabrielle Reece, who became a model and host of a show on MTV. At the same time, swimmer Summer Sanders during the 1992 Olympics was singled out for her pretty looks, and by the late '90s was the face of VO5 in TV commercials.





And who can forget the 1994 episode of Seinfeld that revolves around lusting after and dating a former Olympic gymnast? Or the fact that in that same year tabloid newspapers and TV shows, as well as Penthouse, made a sex symbol out of figure skater Tonya Harding by publishing images from a sex tape of hers? Gross if you ask me, but it resonated widely enough to be sought after by the media. In 1999, soccer player Brandi Chastain became famous for tearing off her shirt to reveal her sports bra after winning the Women's World Cup.

I can't find any major examples from before the '90s -- women's sports were just not a big thing, and the handful of athletes who were widely known were not also babes, let alone cultural icons of beauty.

Still, that leaves two full cycles' worth of history, and it does look like athletes lose their sex symbol status during the vulnerable phase. People's energy levels are so negative, the guys can't imagine being with a woman who they assume would be too full of energy in bed, and the girls can't imagine wanting to be the type of sex symbol also known for bursts of athletic activity. Everyone just wants to hide under a pile of blankets until their energy levels recover.

When their energy does recover during the restless warm-up phase, the appeal of warm-up exercises leads both guys and girls to naturally look toward athletes as role models of attractiveness. That only continues into the following manic phase, when energy levels are on a sustained spike.

With the restless phase having begun this year, expect to see the return of athlete babes in pop culture over the next 5 to 10 years. Judging from history, it will be one from an individual rather than a team sport. Whoever it turns out to be, we do know in advance that she'll be showing off a great set of buns rather than breasts.

Dancers show that corporeal women are ass women, not boob women

We return to an ongoing investigation that has shown that corporeal people are ass men / women, while cerebral people are boob men / women. Where else can we look for evidence? Dancing -- there are few activities more corporeal than that (there's basically no cerebral component to it).

After playing "Red Light Special" for the previous post, and knowing that I'm a fan of dancing, YouTube's algorithm suggested I watch this choreography video set to the song. "Choreography" may be stretching it -- stripperography is closer to what it is (no stripping or nudity, but NSFW).

Videos like these provide a large sample size of people that clarifies statistical impressions that might otherwise elude someone. There are dozens of women in the room, whether actually dancing or watching nearby. And there are dozens of other videos on that channel and others like it, which all show a pretty similar profile of dancers.

Notice that hardly any of them are large-breasted, and that if anything they tend to have more shapely ass-hips-and-thighs.

Aside from their static shape, which parts of their body do they emphasize while actively dancing? Far more from the waist down -- and when the upper body is involved, it's the arms and hands, not the chest region. They play up their facial expressions, whip their hair around, touch their hair or head or face with their hands -- literally the only part of their body that they avoid emphasizing is their tits.

Now, this is exotic dancing, and there are plenty of moves that are highly sexual. So it's not that they avoid drawing attention to their chests because it's too refined to indulge in such vulgar displays. If they all had big boobs, they would absolutely be heaving them around, bouncing them up and down, and touching or slapping them -- since that's what they're doing with their ass, hips, and thighs.

This tendency is true even for the women who are about equal above and below the waist. It's not just a matter of emphasizing whichever is larger.

It is already well understood that ballet dancers tend to have small-to-modest breasts, but the case of exotic dancers helps to rule out all of the existing theories about ballet dancers. It's already known that small-chested women tend to be the ones who join ballet to begin with -- not that ballet transforms large chests into small ones.

But the answers offered all suppose that it's about ballet's high degree of athleticism (at least in modern times), which would weed out women whose breasts were large enough to get in the way of the gymnastic-like movements. Or something -- it's not clear what the arguments are for large boobs being an impediment per se to athletics -- there are plenty of guys with flabby bellies and man-boobs who are on football, baseball, and hockey teams, not to mention bowling and golf.

My hunch is rather that large-breasted women are not as athletically gifted as a matter of their inner kinesthetic sense. I predict that they could remove their large breasts, and small-breasted women could get large implants, and their success in athletic training and performance would mirror other women who were similar to their original chest size. Big boobs and lower athleticism is correlation, not causation (they're both correlated to kinesthetic sense). That applies to all athletics -- dancing, gymnastics, cheerleading, soccer, softball, volleyball, whatever.

In any case, the exotic dancers show that athleticism is irrelevant. The kinds of dances you see in that video do not require minimal body fat, intense activity, explosive movements, or gymnastic-level skills. If it were the high degree of athleticism that kept large-breasted women out of ballet, then why are they also kept out of exotic dancing?

It clearly is not the physical requirements of the activity. The weeding-out process is at the level of "are you corporeal or cerebral?" or "do you have a high or low kinesthetic sense?" If big boobs don't make the cut at this basic level, it means that "ass woman or boob woman?" is related to the fundamental trait of "corporeal or cerebral," not just certain athletic activities that a corporeal person might pursue.

You could also ask them how clumsy they are. I'll bet boob women are clumsier on average than ass women, even at tasks that do not involve either region -- catching a ball, for instance. Related: rhythmic skill (one aspect of kinesthetic sense). I'll bet ass women have better rhythm, even at tasks that don't involve dancing -- tapping back or humming back a rhythm that you've just heard.

Finally, there's the matter of the target male audience for dancing -- are they ass men or boob men? I'm guessing ass men, judging again from the moves of the dancers that overwhelmingly emphasize the fertility region rather than the mammary region. (This dance fan is definitely an ass man.)

If boob men wanted to see the chest emphasized, they wouldn't watch a dance routine, but something simple like women jumping on trampolines (a la The Man Show), jogging, jumping rope, or whatever. Or an upper-body striptease. But nothing that would fall under "dancing".

The anti-woke left against rootlessness

Great discussion from Aimee Terese and Benjamin Studebaker on the What's Left? podcast, with several variations on the theme of rootedness vs. rootlessness (as well as criticism of the MeToo movement). Unlike generic leftists, they're against rootlessness and anomie, and are in favor of preserving and conserving the distinct character of things, places, and collectives over time. A refreshing example of the overlap between the cultural left and right, provided both are populist in their economic goals.



That's also an indictment of most of the leftist media / social media / podcaster world, who glorify being transplants to the courtier zip codes, while bad-mouthing their roots as backward garbage dumps. It's the same libertarian Satanism as you find among the mainstream right. Today's elites are mainly split between culturally left libertarians and culturally right libertarians (i.e., who support all the degeneracy that left libertarians do, but like to complain about non-white people on the internet).

Right-wingers like to say that if we import enough Third Worlders, it's no longer America -- and the same goes for everyone living in Brooklyn being from outside the Mid-Atlantic, it's no longer New York. Under a regime of free markets uber alles, cities and countries become mere brands controlled by elite brand managers who shape it in whatever ways will deliver the most profit from the consumer base du jour. Radically alter that consumer base, and radically alter the product being offered.

Not only do we have to close the national borders to foreign scabs, we have to make moving around internally more difficult, to protect cities, states, and regions from being chewed up and spit out by status-striving carpetbaggers. It's bad enough when a rural person is forced into an urban area, but that can at least be contained within a state or region.

When the top 20% of society all struggles to converge on the same 10 cities -- really, a handful of courtier magnets within those cities -- then it's only feeding the problem of elite over-production. They have no right to occupy that land, and long-time residents and political stewards ought to be exercising power to prevent such a deluge of new residents, despite the higher profits it would deliver to private-sector slumlords and employers.

Crucially, the existing deeply rooted elites of those cities have a vested material interest in keeping out the scabs at their level of the class pyramid. Old wealthy New York families would rather not have to pay 10 times as much to hold onto their positions, just to outbid the legions of elite families who hail from outside of New York, whether they're coming in from Chicago or China.

That opens up a strange bedfellows alliance between the top and lower layers of the class pyramid, within a city / region, and makes it much more feasible in the short-term since there would be buy-in from the local elites (until the bottom 80% become collective actors again).

If you're somewhat new around here, I covered these themes in depth during 2014-'16. I mainly looked at the temporal pattern, where rootlessness tracks the status-striving and inequality cycle (high during the Gilded Age, falling during the Great Compression, soaring again in the neoliberal era). But I also looked at psychological and sociological differences between transplants and natives in a state or region.

The obvious link is between status-striving and transplanting in pursuit of ambition (vs. reining in your ambition and remaining where you came from), but there are others as well. Search the blog for "rooted," "rootless," "transplant," etc. to find those old posts, which should be a subset of the "geography" category tag.

If you're an older reader, give What's Left? a listen to hear similar conclusions being reached by those who are more culturally liberal. Follow "them" on Twitter (@whatisleftpod), where Aimee Terese posts after having been censored off of her own account by an anarcho-liberal witch hunt -- all for pursuing realignment with those who are culturally conservative or moderate while being populist on economic matters and anti-interventionist on foreign policy.

It's not quite the same as her old account, maybe just because of the avatar being impersonal on the new one. She could change the avatar to her Red Bull selfie, modified with a #FreeAimee banner underneath. There's just something about that iconic avatar that soothes her fans and triggers her haters, it's unbeatable.

MeToo moral panic officially dead, as theme of rape / trauma disappears, leaving only generic non-physical "sexism"

About a year ago, I noted that MeToo was winding down during the final year of the vulnerable emo phase of the excitement cycle. The refractory state that people are in during the vulnerable phase makes them hyper-sensitive to unwanted social contact, and primes them to resonate with the theme of unwanted attention or contact, or with victimization in general.

The hysterics were trying to MeToo Bernie at the very end of 2018 and beginning of 2019 -- not by accusing him directly of sexual assault, but by airing accusations against former staffers and aides of his, insinuating that the leader had a culture of sexual harassment and violence in his political operation. Then they went after Biden for being a handsy creeper who had a pattern of unwanted sexual touching toward female staffers.

Neither of those attacks stuck, which showed that the hysteria was dying down, but not over with -- after all, the mainstream press spent multiple news cycles stoking the theme of rape.

By now, as we enter the warm-up phase of the excitement cycle, the hysteria is over with altogether, and before long a full-on backlash will erupt. The latest round of attacks relating to the battle of the sexes was Lyin' Liz lying that Bernie said he didn't think a woman could be elected president. There is not even a tangential aspect of rape, physical harassment, touching, trauma, invasion of personal space, or any related part of the overall theme.

The lying press, including half or more of the left, have tried to smear Bernie indirectly by pointing to politically incorrect statements made by Joe Rogan, who has only said positive things about Bernie and Tulsi during this electoral season, and whose favorable comments the Bernie campaign put into a video clip. But they didn't involve the theme of rape or any physical harm by men against women.

If anything, Rogan's "problematic" statement was anti-rape in theme, as he said he didn't want men dressed as women to fight in the mixed martial arts ring against actual women. Anyone claiming that cross-dressing men should have the right to pummel a woman's skull in, against her desire (she would only want to fight other women), are clearly the women-haters and rape apologists.

But that doesn't matter, because identity politics is for elites only -- and culturally liberal elites have decided that tranny degeneracy, up to the point of allowing someone with male hormones and muscle to beat the living shit out of a woman, are to be sanctified by woke norms, and that the collective protection of women from violent men must be sacrificed if necessary.

In any case, neither Rogan himself nor his legions of listeners were accused of physical harassment or sexual violence. They were smeared with generic accusations of toxic masculinity, sexism, problematic beliefs about women, etc.

By this point in the excitement cycle, the feminazis have realized that the theme of rape does not resonate anymore with a morally panicked audience. So they have to fall back on all-purpose accusations that someone does not adhere to woke gender norms. OK, BFD then. They can impotently hector us all they want at this point, but it won't be an outright witch hunt that is feeding and being fed by a morally panicked mob.

This reflects the normalization of our energy levels -- they are no longer plunged into the refractory state, but are returning to baseline, albeit not rocketing off onto another spike just yet. We are only entering the warm-up phase now, not the manic phase, which will hit during the late 2020s. Not being hyper-sensitive to unwanted contact anymore, we aren't marks for appeals to protection from unwanted violation of physical privacy. If you don't want to be touched, reject the person or go somewhere else or whatever -- it's not going to overload your nervous system and be the end of your life.

In this new "back to baseline" state, we don't feel the need for a savior to swoop in and rescue us from all the would-be rapists out there. This will generalize into no longer feeling the need for saviors in general to deliver us from would-be victimizers -- and that will end the leftist bubble since roughly 2015, as well as the Trumpist bubble of the same time. But that's a topic for a separate post.

(In the meantime, see here for an analysis of these leftist "savior for the victims" bubbles occurring during the vulnerable phase of the cycle, and then evaporating after that phase is done with.)

Would you self-defend me? I'd self-defend me: The crypto-tranny appeal of gun-nut girl propaganda

One of the major changes that the NRA has made in their propaganda over the past few years is to feature women rather than men as the empowered subjects. They've also made some of them black women, but the change is strictly on gender rather than race, as they have not featured black or Hispanic men wielding guns -- probably not the image the NRA wants to associate itself with.

At first I wrote these ads off as typical cuckservative appropriation of liberal frameworks -- true female empowerment, true women's liberation requires owning guns, or else you're easy prey for the predatory men always roving around out there.

But in the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting, and the deluge of gun nut messaging that kicked in to prevent any talk about gun control, I've noticed that their "girl with a gun" message is something different. It is not aimed at women, but at men.

First, the typical spokeswoman is attractive and portrayed in a highly sexualized and almost fetishistic way -- not a pretty girl in common everyday clothing, or a Plain Jane. The eroticized portrayal clearly appeals to men rather than women.

Second, the guns are typically large rather than the supposed handgun that a woman might realistically carry on her for protection. That appeals to men, who get off on bigger guns.

Third, women rarely indulge in elaborate revenge fantasies about those who have harmed them -- or self-defense fantasies, which are a sub-class of revenge fantasies, where the person fantasizes about preventing the harm that the offender was trying to do to them.

And to the extent that women do think about these scenarios, it does not involve guns, let alone assault-style guns featured in the gun nut propaganda -- maybe poisoning, character assassination, or hiring a hitman if guns must be used. Women do not get that psychically invested in direct violent confrontation. That's men, especially those who get picked on or are easily intimidated.

Fourth, men are overwhelmingly the customers for guns, and therefore also for gun-related propaganda. They are more likely to live in a household where there's a gun (37% vs. 29% for women, during the 2010s), and are more likely to own the gun in households where there is one (84% vs. 34% for women). Data are from the General Social Survey.

The number of guns owned is a heavily skewed distribution, where a very heavily armed 3% of the population owns 50% of the guns, and most of the remainder of gun owners only have a few. We can be sure the heavily armed are men. So, manufacturers will be targeting men (a certain kind of heavily armed man) when they seek to sell the most products, and club operators will be targeting men when they seek to recruit heavily armed enthusiasts.

Thus, ad campaigns that feature eroticized attractive women carrying AR-15s who are fantasizing about getting revenge or preventing the bully from beating them up, belong not to the genre of "We can do it!" feminism, but to the genre of "butt-kicking babe" masturbation material, where the guy fantasizes about being an erotic girl who gets off on violence in a male-typical fashion.

I call this type of sexual deviance "latent transgender" or "crypto-tranny," and detailed the profile at length here and here. They are similar to the autogynephile types of trannies, who are heterosexual but who don't want to get physically involved with women -- either from awkwardness or total narcissism -- and who therefore view themselves as the object of their own lust, requiring them to take on both male and female sexual attributes. Unlike overt trannies who cross-dress, wear make-up, and otherwise try to "pass" as women, these crypto-trannies do not, even in secret.

The explosion of the crypto-tranny phenomenon has not been appreciated or discussed much at all. If its symptoms are noticed, the observer tends to write it off as a woman who the guy fantasizes about fucking, rather than a woman who the guy fantasizes about being -- and perhaps also fucking, in that autogynephile way of thinking. They aren't just looking for a tomboy who can hang with the guys, and who happens to be sexy -- they are looking to be that sexy tomboy themselves, and play with themselves.

These are the kinds of guys who unironically confess to fantasizing about "If I were a girl, I'd stay at home all day and play with my boobs in front of a mirror," while feeling aroused in their male sex organ. In their fantasy, they have both huge tits and a hard dick.

Here is a typical example of gun-nut girl propaganda, with NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch:

The eroticized rather than a no-nonsense portrayal of the woman speaks for itself, and the large gun gives her a masculine persona. But more than that, they clearly portray the gun as a dick -- it could not look more phallic in the upright position with the base at hip level, nor could the eroticized way that she's holding it.

"Hands off my gun" would be a sexual double-entendre for a man, not for a woman: "This is my rifle, this is my gun; this is for shooting, and this is for fun." It does not represent some kind of sex toy that she would use on herself, since she would be using the gun on someone else. Getting a thrill from spraying bullets out of the tip is clearly more like an ejaculating dick than a toy that women might use on themselves.

What could make better bait for crypto-trannies? How about being a woman who had not just one but two big dicks to stroke while staring at her large breasts in the mirror as she fantasized about violent revenge against bullies?

Or the favored fantasy of crypto-trannies that involves someone other than themselves -- girl-on-girl, where the guy does not project himself into the place of a stand-in male, but into one of two or more babes:

Earlier posts here and here examined the rise of female bloodsports and butt-kicking babe roles in movies as a kind of pornography for the crypto-trannies. Now we can add "gun nut girl" propaganda.

A recent post showed that gun nuts are libertarians rather than conservatives, so it's not surprising to see that they are more likely than the average person to have sexually deviant fantasies -- certainly more so than the average conservative. Libertarianism implies tolerance of all forms of deviance, as part of the larger laissez-faire prohibition on prohibitions.

Like, as long as no one else gets harmed or defrauded by it, then go on ahead and fantasize about being a long, dark-haired babe with big boobs, rocking a red dress and stiletto heels, fondling your big black gun as you anticipate the cathartic thrill of spraying a stream of bullets from its tip. Especially if it's to get back at those bullies who keep messing with you.

Gun nuts never fantasize about vigilantism in the service of a conservative cause in the sexual domain, like shutting down a pornography studio, a brothel, a strip club, a dirty magazine / movie vendor, a sex toy shop, or a gay nightclub. That would fit into their overall fantasy of filling the void left by an ineffectual law enforcement system, only standing in for the police's role as vice squad enforcers. But then libertarians do not recognize the legitimacy of vice laws, so what is there to stand in for, in their minds?

The last popular persona of a gun nut who became a vigilante for a conservative cause was Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, who shut down a brothel and freed an underage prostitute. He was disgusted by cross-dressers and other deviants he saw every night -- he did not share their fantasies about being a woman or anything weird like that. He just wanted to be the nice protector-and-provider male for the alluring girl-next-door Betsy.

That was right as the gun nut culture was emerging, though, in the later part of the 1970s, when the libertarian approach to politics (deregulation of laws, including gun laws) and morality (consenting adults) began to take over.

We will know that the zeitgeist is returning to the conservative morality of the Midcentury when NRA ads return to themes of being a responsible provider-and-protector male, with scenes of hunting, confronting burglars, and patrolling the neighborhood with a posse when bad guys are on the loose.

Degeneracy will still prevail as long as the ads convey themes of solipsistic masturbation as you imagine yourself to be a babe staring at her own boobs in the mirror while fondling your dick-gun.

GSS variables: owngun, rowngun, sex, year