Closeted homosexual quarterback Aaron Rodgers has been looking to protect his reputation with his conservative fan base by shopping around for a "beard" — a sham girlfriend who will give him a normal, even ladies-man reputation. This item from Blind Gossip mentions that Taylor Swift was an early option for Rodgers, both of whom appeared for photo ops to float the idea of them as a couple.
Nothing unusual about beards and homos in the entertainment industry, but what's striking about Swift's story is that she had begun telling her friends that she thought or hoped that eventually her fake gay boyfriend might start to actually fall for her. The woman who Rodgers' team ultimately opted for, late Gen X-er Olivia Munn, had no illusions about gay men falling for women.
Swift's delusion reveals two major changes in the psychology of young women over the past 20-odd years.
First, the Millennial generation that Swift belongs to, and speaks on behalf of, has been so socially isolated by helicopter parents and yet so propagandized by the mainstream media and the educational establishment that "queers are normal just like us," that a 25 year-old female could be so pathetically clueless as to think that one of them would have a change of heart... er, change of cock? Whatever. They are that out-of-touch, and rely primarily or exclusively on the media to tell them how the real world works. Young women in the '80s sought to become savvy and streetwise, not naive and stunted.
Second, the ideal relationship for Millennial girls is shown to be one where the non-boyfriend will "fall for" the girl, i.e. shower her with attention and make her feel desirable, while expecting and asking nothing in return from her physically — perhaps even feeling averse to the very thought of it. Maximum ego-inflation, and zero putting-out? — awesome sauce! Back in the '80s, girls were more boy-crazy, and put at least equal weight on getting it on as on getting attention.
Now that I think about it, this may be what's underlying the whole "Christian dating" / Promise Ring phenomenon. The guy is supposed to be getting nothing physically, or not very much at any rate. Nothing wrong with that, if it's part of a larger religious lifestyle of chastity and modesty. But is the girl being denied by him as well — denied the attention, flattery, etc., that is meant to puff up her pride and vanity about how desirable she is?
My impression is that the girl is still getting plenty of attention and ego-inflation lavished upon her, and gets to feel the thrilling rush of desirability on a regular basis. (Remember that this is what the average female wants most — to feel desirable, not to feel a man's body.) This undercuts the argument that this phenomenon is a counter-trend to the broader zeitgeist. Rather, it is just another example of girls having their egos inflated, which corrupts their character, while the dude gets jack in return. Only there's a veneer of Christian / religious respectability to it.
I don't think this fig leaf is there only for moralizing to non-Christians. Most of them live in fairly religious regions, and there's little point when you're a teenager or young adult to moralistically antagonize your enemies in a different part of the country. Instead, the rationalization is meant to make female ego-inflation palatable to religious males — the non-boyfriend, both sets of parents, and the menfolk in the wider community. "Not to worry, Daddy — why would I put out when he's already puffing up my pride for free?"
July 19, 2014
July 17, 2014
Hovering parents give children short attention spans
Millennials and small children these days have the attention span of a fly. Yet kids were more comfortable just being at ease, perhaps having nothing much to do, back in the '80s. As boring as the day may have seemed, something was bound to come along and make things engaging again. That's the natural rhythm of human interactivity. Or even when you're playing by yourself -- sometimes there's a lull in your imagination, then it picks up again.
It's like eating to satiate your appetite. Most of the day you're not-so-hungry, then there are a handful of times when your stomach starts growling, and hence only a handful of times when you devote special attention to satisfying your hunger with a proper meal. Craving nearly constant stimulation ("entertainment" AKA distraction) is like jonesing for a snack every five minutes, and is a sign of malnutrition since no person can thrive on snacks alone.
Kids who grew up after the Midcentury heyday of Dr. Spock -- and before his resurrection under helicopter parents -- learned this natural rhythm from not being constantly attended to by their parents, other adults, or even their peers. In a climate where folks are treated more equally, rather than children being the center of the universe, there were good stretches of time when whoever you wanted attention from would be otherwise occupied.
With helicopter parents cocooning their children in the home for their entire upbringing, they never learn the rhythm that comes from trying to set something up with their peers. Y'know, sometimes your best friend is home, and sometimes he isn't. Sometimes they're available to talk on the phone, sometimes they aren't. Peers and friends don't place you at the center of the universe, so you gradually learn humility, compromise, and patience -- rather than remain stuck toddler-like with arrogance, stubbornness, and impatience. By preventing contact with peers, helicopter parents have shut off this pathway toward social and emotional development.
The same goes for unrelated adults, not that a kid has many opportunities to interact with them. Still, you go to ask a shop clerk a question, and they might be busy for a few minutes. You go by yourself to a fast food place, and you can't just whine and shout your way to the front of the line, or get the workers to speed up your order. Children who are locked indoors have no experiences like these: they scream "Jump!" and their parents say "How high?!"
More important for children of a bubble-wrap generation are the interactions with their helicopter parents. Such parents want to keep their kids constantly stimulated, whether passively soaking up mass media content or actively participating in activities (around the home or one of the many that they're shuttled to and from).
It needs to be emphasized that even if the parents shut off the TV, DVD, video games, internet, etc., they are still at their kids' beck and call. They respond right away to complaints of boredom, have back-up lists of dozens of activities they can "entertain" their kid with, and generally aim to fill up 100% of the kid's free time with activity.
What other outcome is possible than a mind that expects to be doing something, always?
I think it's that mindset that drives their adoption and excessive use of digital distractions like "feed" websites and "leveling-up" video games. Gen X is fine walking around with nothing in particular to do, hence we do not lock our heads down into smartphone mode the second we step foot outside (or inside for that matter).
I know, we should be more understanding of helicopter parents -- they're only trying to make up for the unsupervised childhoods that they had, and want their own kids to be attended to more closely.
So, if the parents had grown up in lean times, we'd forgive them for stuffing their kids with starch and sugar to fatten them up, as part of a continual regimen of eating-eating-eating? No, we'd say, "Look, we know food was scarce when you were little, but get a grip -- look at how your fanatic over-reaction is warping these children."
What strand of common sense leads these parents to believe that constant activity and being the constant center of attention will be good for their social and emotional growth? Seeking constant stimulation in order to alleviate boredom moment-by-moment is like masturbating all day long instead of just going for a roll in the hay a few times.
When mass hysteria goes so hard against common sense, it's tough to cut the parents some slack "based on how they grew up." If they were only providing more supervision than they'd received, fair enough. But their obsessive-compulsive extreme is not a mere correction back to normal, it's throwing things farther outta-whack than they ever were before.
For better or worse, the Millennials will someday have kids of their own, and they'll have the opposite parental impulse -- let the kids roam around and get into a little mischief ("like I wish I could have!"). A good chunk of roaming-around time, though, isn't very engaging or exciting. Only when they are allowed more unstructured free time will they learn to cope with boredom and come to realize that the whole rest of the world is not at their beck and call.
It's like eating to satiate your appetite. Most of the day you're not-so-hungry, then there are a handful of times when your stomach starts growling, and hence only a handful of times when you devote special attention to satisfying your hunger with a proper meal. Craving nearly constant stimulation ("entertainment" AKA distraction) is like jonesing for a snack every five minutes, and is a sign of malnutrition since no person can thrive on snacks alone.
Kids who grew up after the Midcentury heyday of Dr. Spock -- and before his resurrection under helicopter parents -- learned this natural rhythm from not being constantly attended to by their parents, other adults, or even their peers. In a climate where folks are treated more equally, rather than children being the center of the universe, there were good stretches of time when whoever you wanted attention from would be otherwise occupied.
With helicopter parents cocooning their children in the home for their entire upbringing, they never learn the rhythm that comes from trying to set something up with their peers. Y'know, sometimes your best friend is home, and sometimes he isn't. Sometimes they're available to talk on the phone, sometimes they aren't. Peers and friends don't place you at the center of the universe, so you gradually learn humility, compromise, and patience -- rather than remain stuck toddler-like with arrogance, stubbornness, and impatience. By preventing contact with peers, helicopter parents have shut off this pathway toward social and emotional development.
The same goes for unrelated adults, not that a kid has many opportunities to interact with them. Still, you go to ask a shop clerk a question, and they might be busy for a few minutes. You go by yourself to a fast food place, and you can't just whine and shout your way to the front of the line, or get the workers to speed up your order. Children who are locked indoors have no experiences like these: they scream "Jump!" and their parents say "How high?!"
More important for children of a bubble-wrap generation are the interactions with their helicopter parents. Such parents want to keep their kids constantly stimulated, whether passively soaking up mass media content or actively participating in activities (around the home or one of the many that they're shuttled to and from).
It needs to be emphasized that even if the parents shut off the TV, DVD, video games, internet, etc., they are still at their kids' beck and call. They respond right away to complaints of boredom, have back-up lists of dozens of activities they can "entertain" their kid with, and generally aim to fill up 100% of the kid's free time with activity.
What other outcome is possible than a mind that expects to be doing something, always?
I think it's that mindset that drives their adoption and excessive use of digital distractions like "feed" websites and "leveling-up" video games. Gen X is fine walking around with nothing in particular to do, hence we do not lock our heads down into smartphone mode the second we step foot outside (or inside for that matter).
I know, we should be more understanding of helicopter parents -- they're only trying to make up for the unsupervised childhoods that they had, and want their own kids to be attended to more closely.
So, if the parents had grown up in lean times, we'd forgive them for stuffing their kids with starch and sugar to fatten them up, as part of a continual regimen of eating-eating-eating? No, we'd say, "Look, we know food was scarce when you were little, but get a grip -- look at how your fanatic over-reaction is warping these children."
What strand of common sense leads these parents to believe that constant activity and being the constant center of attention will be good for their social and emotional growth? Seeking constant stimulation in order to alleviate boredom moment-by-moment is like masturbating all day long instead of just going for a roll in the hay a few times.
When mass hysteria goes so hard against common sense, it's tough to cut the parents some slack "based on how they grew up." If they were only providing more supervision than they'd received, fair enough. But their obsessive-compulsive extreme is not a mere correction back to normal, it's throwing things farther outta-whack than they ever were before.
For better or worse, the Millennials will someday have kids of their own, and they'll have the opposite parental impulse -- let the kids roam around and get into a little mischief ("like I wish I could have!"). A good chunk of roaming-around time, though, isn't very engaging or exciting. Only when they are allowed more unstructured free time will they learn to cope with boredom and come to realize that the whole rest of the world is not at their beck and call.
July 14, 2014
The all-female band died from '90s feminism and cocooning
You are probably starting to hear louder and more desperate attempts to make that whole '90s revival happen, but it ain't happenin'. Way too lame of a decade.
One of the major exhibits that's always brought out to establish the politically correct bona fides of the Nineties is the so-called surge of the girl bands, such as L7 and Luscious Jackson, and mostly-girl bands like Elastica and Hole.
This was an obviously bogus argument at the time, and has only gotten more shameful 20 years later. The peak of female bands was back in the good old 1980s, while during the '90s the format was in fact in steep decline, and is non-existent today. (Data and analysis to follow below.)
How can that be, when the Eighties were more macho and gung-ho than the Nineties, which -- so the feminist theory goes -- should have scared off or crowded out women more so than during the decade of meek and mopey? Dial down the testosterone level, and women will feel more comfortable stepping forward and taking part, right? Wrong.
Women produce testosterone, too, and it makes them feel confident, too. When T-levels fell off a cliff during the wussification of the '90s, they were still high enough for guys to continue working in teams to make music -- just not nearly as well as in the '80s, when the rising-crime climate had average people in a higher state of arousal. But since women start with much lower levels -- even when they're relatively high -- a decent drop will leave just about all of them below the threshold necessary to play in a real band. (Unserious and unknown bands that exist only to indulge the feminist vanity of the performers, do not count.)
Along with confidence, you need trust to hold a band together. Folks in outgoing times are more trusting -- otherwise they would isolate themselves like they do in cocooning times. Social groups among women are harder to hold together than a guys-only group, not because there's no drama or fighting among men, but because we trust that we can make amends and move on, while women are more likely to perceive drama as "dealbreaker" events, burn their bridges, and cut their losses. So, when trust levels fell during the '90s, it left far many more women below the threshold for holding together a group of genetically unrelated people.
This is the greatest and least remarked-on irony of the past 20-some years -- that the feminization of society has made it nearly impossible for women to accomplish something impressive in popular culture.
Now onto a look at the cold hard facts, which you aren't going to read about in some puff piece about how the '90s were da bomb (...NOT!).
I'm ignoring girl groups and sticking with bands because playing instruments requires more skill than just singing. I'm also sticking with female-only bands to make the interpretation unambiguous; if I included mostly-female or female-fronted bands, you wouldn't know what the relative mix was over time. Wikipedia has a category page for all-female bands, most of which are wishful thinking and vainglory for the feminazi editors, but which do contain many legit examples.
As for pop culture visibility and resonating with the average person, I'm judging by the Billboard and UK charts. The band had to have at least one hit in the top 40 or 50. What particular chart didn't matter too much, but not an obscure one. Top 40, Mainstream Rock, Modern / Alternative Rock, Country, etc. I looked up the chart success on the discography entry for the band, or if there was none, from scanning through their main page.
Here are the all-female bands who enjoyed some level of chart success (as defined), by the decade that their singles were released in. Bands are listed only once, no matter how many hits they had.
1970s
Clout
Fanny
1980s
Bangles
Belle Stars / Bodysnatchers
Calamity Jane
Coyote Sisters
Girlschool
Go-Go's
Klymaxx
Vixen
Wendy & Lisa
We've Got a Fuzzbox and We're Gonna Use It
Wild Rose
1990s
Babes in Toyland
Dixie Chicks
Drain STH
Hepburn
Indigo Girls
L7
Luscious Jackson
Thunderbugs
2000s
78violet
Client
Donnas
2010s
Haim
Wow, zero bands from the '60s. Hardly any from the '70s either, just two. The peak of 11 is where everyone who isn't brainwashed should expect it to be, in the '80s. Then it's all downhill from there: 8 in the '90s, 3 in the 2000s, and 1 from the 2010s so far.
Let's set the bar a little higher. A clueless person might think that those groups from the '80s were just a series of tokens, while the real chart-toppers blew up in the '90s. Here are those that scored a top 20 hit on the main chart (not a genre chart) of either the US or UK. And now let's list them by songs to show just how enduring the success of the earlier groups used to be, spanning three or four calendar years. Each line has the year, band name, song name, and highest chart rank (US if blank, UK if specified). Again they are separated by decade to make the pattern jump out.
78 Clout "Substitute" (2 UK)
81 Go-Go's "Our Lips Are Sealed" (20)
81 Go-Go's "We Got the Beat" (2)
82 Go-Go's "Vacation" (8)
82 Belle Stars "The Clapping Song" (11 UK)
83 Belle Stars "Sign of the Times" (3 UK)
84 Go-Go's "Head Over Heels" (11)
85 Klymaxx "I Miss You" (5)
86 Bangles "Manic Monday" (2)
86 Bangles "Walk Like an Egyptian (1)
86 Klymaxx "Man Size Love" (15)
87 Bangles "Walking Down Your Street" (11)
87 Bangles "Hazy Shade of Winter" (2)
87 Klymaxx "I'd Still Say Yes" (18)
88 Bangles "In Your Room" (5)
89 Bangles "Eternal Flame" (1)
89 Belle Stars "Iko Iko" (14)
89 We've Got... "International Rescue" (11 UK)
89 We've Got... "Pink Sunshine" (14 UK)
99 Thunderbugs "Friends Forever" (5 UK)
99 Hepburn "I Quit" (8 UK)
99 Hepburn "Bugs" (14 UK)
00 Hepburn "Deep Deep Down" (16 UK)
00 Dixie Chicks "Goodbye Earl" (13)
07 78violet "Potential Breakup Song" (17)
13 Haim "The Wire" (16 UK)
Now things are looking even worse for the supposedly women-empowering Nineties. That decade had merely 3 big hits, and all are British-only hits. It's just as sparse in the 2000s, and so far there's only 1 hit in the 2010s. Just 1 hit remains from the '70s. And then there's the reliable Eighties to give us 18 positive role models for songs performed by women-only bands. You can also see a peak more in the later part of the '80s, when cocooning had reached its minimum (and so, just before the whole society would change direction circa 1990).
Let's raise the bar higher still, and make the dominance of the '80s unambiguous. Below is every song by an all-female band that was a top 10 hit in the US. (Not coincidentally, the bands are all from the L.A. area, back when California was more conservative, and not from the liberal bastions of the Upper Midwest and the East Coast.)
81 Go-Go's "We Got the Beat" (2)
82 Go-Go's "Vacation" (8)
85 Klymaxx "I Miss You" (5)
86 Bangles "Manic Monday" (2)
86 Bangles "Walk Like an Egyptian (1)
87 Bangles "Hazy Shade of Winter" (2)
88 Bangles "In Your Room" (5)
89 Bangles "Eternal Flame" (1)
Have you heard of the Bechdel test? It's an attempt to measure women's independence from men in movies. A pretty bad attempt, but I think it would work better in a short medium like pop songs.
We already have groups of women who have a recognizable name and perform together. Of the elite songs listed just above, which ones are not primarily about boy-girl relationships? "We Got the Beat," "Manic Monday," "Walk Like an Egyptian," and "Hazy Shade of Winter." One of these four was also written by the band themselves -- "We Got the Beat." The Bangles did co-write most of their hits, but these three were by outside songwriters.
Funny -- it's almost as though not beating women over the head with feminist guilt allows them to live and behave like natural human beings, and to write and perform songs that are about topics other than boys. Once there is such a self-conscious feminist cocooning impulse, then the focus shifts to boys only -- sometimes as part of the usual boy-girl song, sometimes as part of the new self-aware "Independent Woman" song. But you aren't going to hear something that's not self-consciously not-about-boys, like "Manic Monday," that anyone can relate to.
It may sound obvious after discovering it, but let's repeat that point: outgoing people's music is easy for the audience to relate to, while cocooners' music is bland, distancing, and harder to relate to -- and in both cases, by design.
And yet, as socially and emotionally avoidant as the climate may have become by now, women, being naturally more fearful, have withdrawn much farther into their cocoons than men have. And that makes all the difference in playing a role where you're meant to break through and connect with a broad audience.
As any strip club performance will show, there need be no emotional connection with the audience for a woman to parade herself around and soak up free attention. That's about all that is left in a women's culture that is so profoundly afraid of men. Female bands have vanished, and in their place are the quasi-strippers and pseudo-sluts that make up "girl groups" and "strong independent singers" nowadays.
We've heard a lot from lefty circles about how the mass media disseminates frightening images and messages in order to create a "culture of fear," the better to paralyze the populace and sap away their "agency." Well, what do they have to say about the widespread hysteria stoked by feminists about how all men are crypto-date-rapists, and hence you can only be safe by keeping apart from them? That has paralyzed women into holing up inside their domestic prisons all day long, on the one hand, and removed the "agency" of the counter-minority whose imaginary empowerment comes from strutting their stuff to get a rise out of men.
Hardly the outcome that the feminazi propagandists envisioned, is it? That's what happens when you get arrogant and fuck around with something that's already working well. Women were already competent and confident back in the '80s -- how exactly was becoming frightened of everyone, everything, and every place going to improve on that? But then you can't expect hysterical ideologues to really be thinking any of this through, down the line.
Now let's end on a more pleasant reminder of the good old days.
Competent, confident, engaging, curious, revealing, fun-loving, and tender.
One of the major exhibits that's always brought out to establish the politically correct bona fides of the Nineties is the so-called surge of the girl bands, such as L7 and Luscious Jackson, and mostly-girl bands like Elastica and Hole.
This was an obviously bogus argument at the time, and has only gotten more shameful 20 years later. The peak of female bands was back in the good old 1980s, while during the '90s the format was in fact in steep decline, and is non-existent today. (Data and analysis to follow below.)
How can that be, when the Eighties were more macho and gung-ho than the Nineties, which -- so the feminist theory goes -- should have scared off or crowded out women more so than during the decade of meek and mopey? Dial down the testosterone level, and women will feel more comfortable stepping forward and taking part, right? Wrong.
Women produce testosterone, too, and it makes them feel confident, too. When T-levels fell off a cliff during the wussification of the '90s, they were still high enough for guys to continue working in teams to make music -- just not nearly as well as in the '80s, when the rising-crime climate had average people in a higher state of arousal. But since women start with much lower levels -- even when they're relatively high -- a decent drop will leave just about all of them below the threshold necessary to play in a real band. (Unserious and unknown bands that exist only to indulge the feminist vanity of the performers, do not count.)
Along with confidence, you need trust to hold a band together. Folks in outgoing times are more trusting -- otherwise they would isolate themselves like they do in cocooning times. Social groups among women are harder to hold together than a guys-only group, not because there's no drama or fighting among men, but because we trust that we can make amends and move on, while women are more likely to perceive drama as "dealbreaker" events, burn their bridges, and cut their losses. So, when trust levels fell during the '90s, it left far many more women below the threshold for holding together a group of genetically unrelated people.
This is the greatest and least remarked-on irony of the past 20-some years -- that the feminization of society has made it nearly impossible for women to accomplish something impressive in popular culture.
Now onto a look at the cold hard facts, which you aren't going to read about in some puff piece about how the '90s were da bomb (...NOT!).
I'm ignoring girl groups and sticking with bands because playing instruments requires more skill than just singing. I'm also sticking with female-only bands to make the interpretation unambiguous; if I included mostly-female or female-fronted bands, you wouldn't know what the relative mix was over time. Wikipedia has a category page for all-female bands, most of which are wishful thinking and vainglory for the feminazi editors, but which do contain many legit examples.
As for pop culture visibility and resonating with the average person, I'm judging by the Billboard and UK charts. The band had to have at least one hit in the top 40 or 50. What particular chart didn't matter too much, but not an obscure one. Top 40, Mainstream Rock, Modern / Alternative Rock, Country, etc. I looked up the chart success on the discography entry for the band, or if there was none, from scanning through their main page.
Here are the all-female bands who enjoyed some level of chart success (as defined), by the decade that their singles were released in. Bands are listed only once, no matter how many hits they had.
1970s
Clout
Fanny
1980s
Bangles
Belle Stars / Bodysnatchers
Calamity Jane
Coyote Sisters
Girlschool
Go-Go's
Klymaxx
Vixen
Wendy & Lisa
We've Got a Fuzzbox and We're Gonna Use It
Wild Rose
1990s
Babes in Toyland
Dixie Chicks
Drain STH
Hepburn
Indigo Girls
L7
Luscious Jackson
Thunderbugs
2000s
78violet
Client
Donnas
2010s
Haim
Wow, zero bands from the '60s. Hardly any from the '70s either, just two. The peak of 11 is where everyone who isn't brainwashed should expect it to be, in the '80s. Then it's all downhill from there: 8 in the '90s, 3 in the 2000s, and 1 from the 2010s so far.
Let's set the bar a little higher. A clueless person might think that those groups from the '80s were just a series of tokens, while the real chart-toppers blew up in the '90s. Here are those that scored a top 20 hit on the main chart (not a genre chart) of either the US or UK. And now let's list them by songs to show just how enduring the success of the earlier groups used to be, spanning three or four calendar years. Each line has the year, band name, song name, and highest chart rank (US if blank, UK if specified). Again they are separated by decade to make the pattern jump out.
78 Clout "Substitute" (2 UK)
81 Go-Go's "Our Lips Are Sealed" (20)
81 Go-Go's "We Got the Beat" (2)
82 Go-Go's "Vacation" (8)
82 Belle Stars "The Clapping Song" (11 UK)
83 Belle Stars "Sign of the Times" (3 UK)
84 Go-Go's "Head Over Heels" (11)
85 Klymaxx "I Miss You" (5)
86 Bangles "Manic Monday" (2)
86 Bangles "Walk Like an Egyptian (1)
86 Klymaxx "Man Size Love" (15)
87 Bangles "Walking Down Your Street" (11)
87 Bangles "Hazy Shade of Winter" (2)
87 Klymaxx "I'd Still Say Yes" (18)
88 Bangles "In Your Room" (5)
89 Bangles "Eternal Flame" (1)
89 Belle Stars "Iko Iko" (14)
89 We've Got... "International Rescue" (11 UK)
89 We've Got... "Pink Sunshine" (14 UK)
99 Thunderbugs "Friends Forever" (5 UK)
99 Hepburn "I Quit" (8 UK)
99 Hepburn "Bugs" (14 UK)
00 Hepburn "Deep Deep Down" (16 UK)
00 Dixie Chicks "Goodbye Earl" (13)
07 78violet "Potential Breakup Song" (17)
13 Haim "The Wire" (16 UK)
Now things are looking even worse for the supposedly women-empowering Nineties. That decade had merely 3 big hits, and all are British-only hits. It's just as sparse in the 2000s, and so far there's only 1 hit in the 2010s. Just 1 hit remains from the '70s. And then there's the reliable Eighties to give us 18 positive role models for songs performed by women-only bands. You can also see a peak more in the later part of the '80s, when cocooning had reached its minimum (and so, just before the whole society would change direction circa 1990).
Let's raise the bar higher still, and make the dominance of the '80s unambiguous. Below is every song by an all-female band that was a top 10 hit in the US. (Not coincidentally, the bands are all from the L.A. area, back when California was more conservative, and not from the liberal bastions of the Upper Midwest and the East Coast.)
81 Go-Go's "We Got the Beat" (2)
82 Go-Go's "Vacation" (8)
85 Klymaxx "I Miss You" (5)
86 Bangles "Manic Monday" (2)
86 Bangles "Walk Like an Egyptian (1)
87 Bangles "Hazy Shade of Winter" (2)
88 Bangles "In Your Room" (5)
89 Bangles "Eternal Flame" (1)
Have you heard of the Bechdel test? It's an attempt to measure women's independence from men in movies. A pretty bad attempt, but I think it would work better in a short medium like pop songs.
We already have groups of women who have a recognizable name and perform together. Of the elite songs listed just above, which ones are not primarily about boy-girl relationships? "We Got the Beat," "Manic Monday," "Walk Like an Egyptian," and "Hazy Shade of Winter." One of these four was also written by the band themselves -- "We Got the Beat." The Bangles did co-write most of their hits, but these three were by outside songwriters.
Funny -- it's almost as though not beating women over the head with feminist guilt allows them to live and behave like natural human beings, and to write and perform songs that are about topics other than boys. Once there is such a self-conscious feminist cocooning impulse, then the focus shifts to boys only -- sometimes as part of the usual boy-girl song, sometimes as part of the new self-aware "Independent Woman" song. But you aren't going to hear something that's not self-consciously not-about-boys, like "Manic Monday," that anyone can relate to.
It may sound obvious after discovering it, but let's repeat that point: outgoing people's music is easy for the audience to relate to, while cocooners' music is bland, distancing, and harder to relate to -- and in both cases, by design.
And yet, as socially and emotionally avoidant as the climate may have become by now, women, being naturally more fearful, have withdrawn much farther into their cocoons than men have. And that makes all the difference in playing a role where you're meant to break through and connect with a broad audience.
As any strip club performance will show, there need be no emotional connection with the audience for a woman to parade herself around and soak up free attention. That's about all that is left in a women's culture that is so profoundly afraid of men. Female bands have vanished, and in their place are the quasi-strippers and pseudo-sluts that make up "girl groups" and "strong independent singers" nowadays.
We've heard a lot from lefty circles about how the mass media disseminates frightening images and messages in order to create a "culture of fear," the better to paralyze the populace and sap away their "agency." Well, what do they have to say about the widespread hysteria stoked by feminists about how all men are crypto-date-rapists, and hence you can only be safe by keeping apart from them? That has paralyzed women into holing up inside their domestic prisons all day long, on the one hand, and removed the "agency" of the counter-minority whose imaginary empowerment comes from strutting their stuff to get a rise out of men.
Hardly the outcome that the feminazi propagandists envisioned, is it? That's what happens when you get arrogant and fuck around with something that's already working well. Women were already competent and confident back in the '80s -- how exactly was becoming frightened of everyone, everything, and every place going to improve on that? But then you can't expect hysterical ideologues to really be thinking any of this through, down the line.
Now let's end on a more pleasant reminder of the good old days.
Competent, confident, engaging, curious, revealing, fun-loving, and tender.
July 12, 2014
In wholesome graffiti, families have replaced peer groups as the participants
I went for a stroll around the old neighborhood today, keeping an eye out as usual for signs of what's going wrong in the world nowadays.
In an earlier post, I covered the rise and fall of wet cement carvings -- a harmless rite of passage for 10-15 year-olds. I look for this stuff almost anywhere I'm walking and have the time to browse around my surroundings. I wouldn't change anything from that original post, but have noticed further patterns in the meantime.
One is that, in this domain as well, we see the nuclear family replacing the peer group as the only social unit for young people, as cocooners distrust everyone beyond close genetic relatives. I found a very rare sidewalk carving from the current decade (2011), right in front of a suburban house. On closer inspection, it turned out to be the names and handprints of the family that lived there -- two names were noticeably more out-of-date-sounding and were next to two much larger handprints.
In the good old days, it was a group of friends, a couple, or an individual who happened upon the wet cement alone. Siblings were nowhere to be seen -- let alone their friggin' parents. Now that the parents have fenced their kids off from all the other kids in the community, the only possible group that will leave a memento in wet cement is a nuclear family.
It also feels like, even if our parents had brought the wet cement to our attention and encouraged us to carve our names, they would not have taken part themselves. They understood that it was a rite of passage for children, hence something that grown-ups were forbidden from. The family's sidewalk carving is not a rite of passage for a peer group, but an expression of family togetherness, and of all activities needing to be "for the whole family" -- thereby precluding any rite of passage specifically for the young ones.
About 10 minutes away, there is a park at a former Boys & Girls Club (itself on the site of a former elementary school). I was checking all over for recent graffiti, coming up empty-handed, until I spied something on the top of the backrest for a bench -- not a typical spot to leave your mark on. There were nine names, followed by the phrase "oldest to youngest." Definitely not a peer group -- what social group would contain both a Jessica and a Jenny, alongside a Gabby and an Ada?
The two oldest were female names, so that ruled out the parents from being present. Still, it was a group of siblings -- not friends -- who wanted to memorialize their group identity by leaving their names in a public space.
(I suppose the oldest name could've been the single mother of eight children, but the phrase "oldest to youngest" makes it sound like they all come from a group where ages may vary. The parent is obviously way older, hence would sound weird to be specified as the "oldest.")
No date was left with that one, but since "Ada" isn't even in the top 1000 most common baby names until 2004, I'm guessing this is another rare example that has been left within the past 5 years.
In an earlier post, I covered the rise and fall of wet cement carvings -- a harmless rite of passage for 10-15 year-olds. I look for this stuff almost anywhere I'm walking and have the time to browse around my surroundings. I wouldn't change anything from that original post, but have noticed further patterns in the meantime.
One is that, in this domain as well, we see the nuclear family replacing the peer group as the only social unit for young people, as cocooners distrust everyone beyond close genetic relatives. I found a very rare sidewalk carving from the current decade (2011), right in front of a suburban house. On closer inspection, it turned out to be the names and handprints of the family that lived there -- two names were noticeably more out-of-date-sounding and were next to two much larger handprints.
In the good old days, it was a group of friends, a couple, or an individual who happened upon the wet cement alone. Siblings were nowhere to be seen -- let alone their friggin' parents. Now that the parents have fenced their kids off from all the other kids in the community, the only possible group that will leave a memento in wet cement is a nuclear family.
It also feels like, even if our parents had brought the wet cement to our attention and encouraged us to carve our names, they would not have taken part themselves. They understood that it was a rite of passage for children, hence something that grown-ups were forbidden from. The family's sidewalk carving is not a rite of passage for a peer group, but an expression of family togetherness, and of all activities needing to be "for the whole family" -- thereby precluding any rite of passage specifically for the young ones.
About 10 minutes away, there is a park at a former Boys & Girls Club (itself on the site of a former elementary school). I was checking all over for recent graffiti, coming up empty-handed, until I spied something on the top of the backrest for a bench -- not a typical spot to leave your mark on. There were nine names, followed by the phrase "oldest to youngest." Definitely not a peer group -- what social group would contain both a Jessica and a Jenny, alongside a Gabby and an Ada?
The two oldest were female names, so that ruled out the parents from being present. Still, it was a group of siblings -- not friends -- who wanted to memorialize their group identity by leaving their names in a public space.
(I suppose the oldest name could've been the single mother of eight children, but the phrase "oldest to youngest" makes it sound like they all come from a group where ages may vary. The parent is obviously way older, hence would sound weird to be specified as the "oldest.")
No date was left with that one, but since "Ada" isn't even in the top 1000 most common baby names until 2004, I'm guessing this is another rare example that has been left within the past 5 years.
July 11, 2014
Suburban woods reverting to overgrown jungles -- an effect of cocooning?
When I've visited home the past several years, I've been amazed at how overgrown the woods are around suburban Washington, DC. I started playing around or trekking through these woods in the mid-1990s, so I know them pretty well -- at least I thought I did.
Many paths have shrubs and saplings blocking their entrance and obstructing the way off-and-on along the rest of the course. The only exception is paths that are paved. There is so much underbrush sprawling in all directions that there are hardly any more clearings to be found. Not to mention a number of invasive species that would have been totally unfamiliar just 20 years ago.
With so much overgrowth and so few human beings tramping around, there are now deer thriving in spots just behind suburban parks. And they've become so settled-in that they don't startle and run off when they see a person nearby. Twenty years ago, you had to travel farther back into the woods to see deer; now you can spy them from a playground in a residential area.
I would've taken pictures, but that would only be useful if I had similar pictures from the '80s or early '90s to compare them with. Nothing much comes up on Google Images, though. For lack of a closer comparison, then, let's take a look at the woods as they appear in two horror films, a genre that loves to shoot on location. The first is from Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986), the second from The Lashman (2014), a movie that turned up when I searched for "friday the 13th woods," and which is an attempt to shoot an '80s slasher flick in the 2010s.
Granted, the two shots are not from the same spot in the same woods, may have been filmed in different seasons, and so on. But all the memorable wooded scenes from movies of the '70s and '80s look walkable -- Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Swamp Thing, The Princess Bride, Heathers, and so on and so forth. They're just how I remember them, and the shot from The Lashman and other candid pictures from Google Images look just like my neck of the woods today.
The simplest explanation seems to be that in a climate of cocooning, people have abandoned the woods as one of those public spaces that they visit every now and then. Each person has a small effect on tramping down the underbrush and knocking twigs, branches, and shrubs out of their way, but cumulatively the effect is huge -- carving out entire paths and clearings in what would otherwise be a hostile habitat.
When I've gone out to the woods these days, I've never seen another person back there who was wandering off of the paved path. At most you see folks walking, jogging, biking, or walking their dog along the official bike path. So even when cocooners do visit the woods, they are still paranoid and fearful of what lurks just 10 to 20 feet away from the officially designated path.
In an earlier post I mentioned another clear sign of how the woods have been abandoned over the past 20-odd years -- the decline in tree carvings (which usually carry dates), and the sparse amount of litter from recent compared to earlier years. Close to the official paths, you can still find current-day beverage cans and plastic wrappers, but once you go off the beaten path, you are only going to find glass Coke bottles, rusted cans, pull tabs, narrow-mouth openings, old logos, and long defunct brands like Schlitz, Stroh's, and Nehi.
Many paths have shrubs and saplings blocking their entrance and obstructing the way off-and-on along the rest of the course. The only exception is paths that are paved. There is so much underbrush sprawling in all directions that there are hardly any more clearings to be found. Not to mention a number of invasive species that would have been totally unfamiliar just 20 years ago.
With so much overgrowth and so few human beings tramping around, there are now deer thriving in spots just behind suburban parks. And they've become so settled-in that they don't startle and run off when they see a person nearby. Twenty years ago, you had to travel farther back into the woods to see deer; now you can spy them from a playground in a residential area.
I would've taken pictures, but that would only be useful if I had similar pictures from the '80s or early '90s to compare them with. Nothing much comes up on Google Images, though. For lack of a closer comparison, then, let's take a look at the woods as they appear in two horror films, a genre that loves to shoot on location. The first is from Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986), the second from The Lashman (2014), a movie that turned up when I searched for "friday the 13th woods," and which is an attempt to shoot an '80s slasher flick in the 2010s.
Granted, the two shots are not from the same spot in the same woods, may have been filmed in different seasons, and so on. But all the memorable wooded scenes from movies of the '70s and '80s look walkable -- Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Swamp Thing, The Princess Bride, Heathers, and so on and so forth. They're just how I remember them, and the shot from The Lashman and other candid pictures from Google Images look just like my neck of the woods today.
The simplest explanation seems to be that in a climate of cocooning, people have abandoned the woods as one of those public spaces that they visit every now and then. Each person has a small effect on tramping down the underbrush and knocking twigs, branches, and shrubs out of their way, but cumulatively the effect is huge -- carving out entire paths and clearings in what would otherwise be a hostile habitat.
When I've gone out to the woods these days, I've never seen another person back there who was wandering off of the paved path. At most you see folks walking, jogging, biking, or walking their dog along the official bike path. So even when cocooners do visit the woods, they are still paranoid and fearful of what lurks just 10 to 20 feet away from the officially designated path.
In an earlier post I mentioned another clear sign of how the woods have been abandoned over the past 20-odd years -- the decline in tree carvings (which usually carry dates), and the sparse amount of litter from recent compared to earlier years. Close to the official paths, you can still find current-day beverage cans and plastic wrappers, but once you go off the beaten path, you are only going to find glass Coke bottles, rusted cans, pull tabs, narrow-mouth openings, old logos, and long defunct brands like Schlitz, Stroh's, and Nehi.
July 9, 2014
German national soccer team from the hills and mountains -- an influence of pastoralism?
Not being a soccer fan at all, my basic picture of which countries dominate the sport is the Mediterranean and its off-shoots in Latin America. But Germany has one of the best records in the World Cup. How does that fit into the big picture?
When Germany joins with the Mediterranean more than Scandinavia or Eastern Europe, it must really be a fact about Western and Southern Germany, not Northern or Eastern. Recall this original post on the great civilizational fault-line that runs through Europe, separating the hilly and mountainous regions from those of the Great European Plain.
Western and Southern Germany are Catholic like the Mediterranean, while Northern Germany is Protestant like Scandinavia, and Eastern Germany is increasingly de facto godless like the Balto-Slavic Plains. Also recall this post showing that Eastern Germany has historically been more (Balto-)Slavic than Germanic.
So let's take a look at the roster of their 2014 World Cup team. Of 17 ethnic Germans, only 2 were born in the North, and 0 in the East. (There are also 2 Poles from Silesia.) In contrast, 5 were born in the South, and 10 in the West.* This does not map onto the size of the population in each state. Rather, there is something about hailing from the Western and Southern regions -- and it's probably not the Catholic church.
Hilly and mountainous areas tend to be favored by on-the-move livestock herders more than sedentary farmers. (The farmers squat on the low-lying fertile plains, and the herders have nowhere to go but up.) This hunch is supported by the ethnic backgrounds of the German players who aren't from the general area. One is Albanian and another Turkish, both from the mountainous region of Southeastern Europe. Another is half-Tunisian and half-German (I couldn't find out where in Germany that parent is from), and Tunisia is another mountainous pastoralist region of the Mediterranean. Another is half-German (I couldn't tell where that parent is from) and half-Ghanaian. West Africa is generally less pastoralist than Eastern Africa, although there are a good deal of herders and milk-drinkers in the West as well.
Also, Scandinavia and most of Eastern Europe failed to qualify for the World Cup to begin with. Tiny little Alpine Switzerland out-performed all of Mother Russia. Nords and Slavs dominate those strongman competitions where the goal is to re-enact the daily tasks of Conan the Barbarian.
What about pastoralism selects for good soccer players? Beats me, since I haven't given the sport any thought since elementary school. It does seem like more of an endurance sport -- all that constant jogging around -- and mobile pastoralists are going to be better at that than farmers who only need to stoop over a small plot of land all day long, day-in and day-out. (Hence the absence of Chinese soccer players.) See this earlier post about pastoralism and endurance sports.
I think being constantly vigilant is another big factor -- herders need to be on alert for anything that might run off with their livestock, whether an animal predator or a human rustler. Is the soccer ball like a member of your flock that you're steering along a course, and the opposing players are rustlers trying to drive your property away from you, and you then have to be vindictive enough to chase them down and get it back, rather than cut your losses or rely on a central authority to go get it for you? Soccer as ritualized cattle raid.
If there is an influence of pastoralism, it wouldn't be the more nomadic kind. We don't see Ethiopians and Kenyans dominating soccer like they do distance running, where we see selection for being on-the-move for a long time. Nor do Central Asians rank very highly.
The type of pastoralism practiced among the soccer nations way back when was transhumance, not nomadism. They roamed around a decent amount each day, but they did have something like a "home base" for days, weeks, and sometimes months. Over the course of the year, they'd move toward more favorable areas -- mountains in summer and valleys in winter -- but it was not like the constant meandering around with no particular destination in mind that the nomadic pastoralists practice.
There's more to look into here, but this exhausts my interest in soccer.
* Here is the list of the player's birth state and name. The non-Germans and half-Germans are listed below.
Bav, Goetze
Bav, Lahm
Bav, Mueller
Bav, Schweinsteiger
B-W, Ginter
R-P, Durm
R-P, Schuerrle
R-P, Weidenfeller
NR-W, Draxler
NR-W, Grosskreutz
NR-W, Hoewedes
NR-W, Hummels
NR-W, Kramer
NR-W, Neuer
NR-W, Zieler
L.Sax, Mertesacker
M-V, Kroos
Boateng - Berlin, Ghanaian / German
Mustafi - Hesse, Albanian
Khedira - B-W, Tunisian / German
Klose - Polish
Ozil - NR-W, Turkish
Podolski - Polish
When Germany joins with the Mediterranean more than Scandinavia or Eastern Europe, it must really be a fact about Western and Southern Germany, not Northern or Eastern. Recall this original post on the great civilizational fault-line that runs through Europe, separating the hilly and mountainous regions from those of the Great European Plain.
Western and Southern Germany are Catholic like the Mediterranean, while Northern Germany is Protestant like Scandinavia, and Eastern Germany is increasingly de facto godless like the Balto-Slavic Plains. Also recall this post showing that Eastern Germany has historically been more (Balto-)Slavic than Germanic.
So let's take a look at the roster of their 2014 World Cup team. Of 17 ethnic Germans, only 2 were born in the North, and 0 in the East. (There are also 2 Poles from Silesia.) In contrast, 5 were born in the South, and 10 in the West.* This does not map onto the size of the population in each state. Rather, there is something about hailing from the Western and Southern regions -- and it's probably not the Catholic church.
Hilly and mountainous areas tend to be favored by on-the-move livestock herders more than sedentary farmers. (The farmers squat on the low-lying fertile plains, and the herders have nowhere to go but up.) This hunch is supported by the ethnic backgrounds of the German players who aren't from the general area. One is Albanian and another Turkish, both from the mountainous region of Southeastern Europe. Another is half-Tunisian and half-German (I couldn't find out where in Germany that parent is from), and Tunisia is another mountainous pastoralist region of the Mediterranean. Another is half-German (I couldn't tell where that parent is from) and half-Ghanaian. West Africa is generally less pastoralist than Eastern Africa, although there are a good deal of herders and milk-drinkers in the West as well.
Also, Scandinavia and most of Eastern Europe failed to qualify for the World Cup to begin with. Tiny little Alpine Switzerland out-performed all of Mother Russia. Nords and Slavs dominate those strongman competitions where the goal is to re-enact the daily tasks of Conan the Barbarian.
What about pastoralism selects for good soccer players? Beats me, since I haven't given the sport any thought since elementary school. It does seem like more of an endurance sport -- all that constant jogging around -- and mobile pastoralists are going to be better at that than farmers who only need to stoop over a small plot of land all day long, day-in and day-out. (Hence the absence of Chinese soccer players.) See this earlier post about pastoralism and endurance sports.
I think being constantly vigilant is another big factor -- herders need to be on alert for anything that might run off with their livestock, whether an animal predator or a human rustler. Is the soccer ball like a member of your flock that you're steering along a course, and the opposing players are rustlers trying to drive your property away from you, and you then have to be vindictive enough to chase them down and get it back, rather than cut your losses or rely on a central authority to go get it for you? Soccer as ritualized cattle raid.
If there is an influence of pastoralism, it wouldn't be the more nomadic kind. We don't see Ethiopians and Kenyans dominating soccer like they do distance running, where we see selection for being on-the-move for a long time. Nor do Central Asians rank very highly.
The type of pastoralism practiced among the soccer nations way back when was transhumance, not nomadism. They roamed around a decent amount each day, but they did have something like a "home base" for days, weeks, and sometimes months. Over the course of the year, they'd move toward more favorable areas -- mountains in summer and valleys in winter -- but it was not like the constant meandering around with no particular destination in mind that the nomadic pastoralists practice.
There's more to look into here, but this exhausts my interest in soccer.
* Here is the list of the player's birth state and name. The non-Germans and half-Germans are listed below.
Bav, Goetze
Bav, Lahm
Bav, Mueller
Bav, Schweinsteiger
B-W, Ginter
R-P, Durm
R-P, Schuerrle
R-P, Weidenfeller
NR-W, Draxler
NR-W, Grosskreutz
NR-W, Hoewedes
NR-W, Hummels
NR-W, Kramer
NR-W, Neuer
NR-W, Zieler
L.Sax, Mertesacker
M-V, Kroos
Boateng - Berlin, Ghanaian / German
Mustafi - Hesse, Albanian
Khedira - B-W, Tunisian / German
Klose - Polish
Ozil - NR-W, Turkish
Podolski - Polish
July 7, 2014
Kids today not excited by games and toys, as helicopter parents forbid play (a field report)
During a day-long excursion with my 6 year-old nephew yesterday, I decided to take him to Toys R Us. I remember getting lost in there for over an hour when I was his age, and it must have been a welcome break for my dad — just turn them loose and gather them back after awhile. I didn't know what to expect in the opposite role, but I knew it would be a good opportunity for observing "kids these days" no matter what.
It didn't sink in until after we'd returned home, as I began replaying the mental videotape. The whole time we were there in that sprawling toy store — around 45 to 60 minutes — there wasn't one moment where he started begging me to buy something that he'd had his mind set on for awhile. Nothing fascinating that he had been waiting for the right big occasion — Christmas, birthday, etc. — to finally get his hands on.
He showed up with an almost blank set of expectations about what would be on offer, and he therefore had no ranking of what mattered more than what else. It was as though he'd never seen a single toy commercial in his whole life.
(Perhaps that's no joke - I thought back on all the hours and hours of kids' TV shows I've seen him watch, and I don't recall seeing commercials for any of the major toy categories. They may have been in there somewhere, but it's not like when I was his age, and our parents saw us watching commercial after commercial for the next big thing that we just had to have, and dreaded the endless begging that followed.)
When we were six years old, we always had a list in the back of our minds of the toys and games that we were dying the most to play with. I'm using "toy" broadly — action figures, play weapons, board games, stuffed animals, pocket-sized vehicles, kid-sized vehicles, and sports-like novelties (the pogo ball, the Koosh ball, Nerf fencing, Skip-It, and so on).
This not only showed how much our parents encouraged the spirit of play in children. It also taught us how to weigh competing alternatives, rank them, and set about trying to reach those goals. And in the case of trying to get our hands on desirable toys, it gave us a vivid and frequent reminder that we don't always get what we want right away, and may have to wait awhile until we do — Christmas, birthday, visit to a spoiling grandmother, or what have you.
Since my nephew had no clear picture of what would be there, and which things he wanted more than which others, he instantly latched onto the first dazzling display upon entering the store — some small wind-up toys that didn't look cool or do anything cool, and that were cheaply built.
I left him unattended for about 10-15 minutes, telling him to look around the store, and I'd check in with him then to see what he really wanted — after inspecting more than just the first thing he saw. When I got back, he was still with those dumb wind-up toys, raised his voice about wanting these and nothing else, and nearly went into a meltdown when I told him he was going to look through some other things before he made a final decision.
Well, whaddaya know? The next place that had toys for a boy his age, he latched onto the first thing that caught his attention — some kind of hot wheel vehicle, only in the form of an elongated reptile. He nearly threw another fit when I told him to keep browsing through the other aisles again.
Amazingly, with every aisle we looked through, it was the same thing — no recognition of something he'd been waiting for and was dying to get. Not only that — no real attachment to anything he was seeing for the first time. Something that he would keep in his mental list for later. After we left, he didn't bug me for any of the things that he was shouting about just a half-hour earlier, and he didn't mention that he couldn't wait until next time when he could get his second or third-choice toys. He'd totally forgotten about all of them.
His mindset was just, latch onto the least boring thing in the array of things that I'm looking at right now, and let's get out of here already. Who knew that children have come to view a visit to the toy store as one of those "just get it over with" kind of activities? There were quite a few other families there, and their experience didn't appear to be any different.
Now, he did recognize the brands of many of the toys (Spiderman, Star Wars, etc.), but he didn't recognize the toys themselves, and wasn't drawn to them as toys — only as a product that came from a familiar brand.
Contrast that to when I was his age, and a good deal of the sought-after toys were from a wholly unfamiliar brand, and as far as we knew, only existed in toy form (although there were often very brief, basically invisible tie-ins like cartoons and comic books). Starriors, Inhumanoids, Battle Beasts, M.U.S.C.L.E., Cabbage Patch Kids, Teddie Ruxpin, just to name a few hit toys, were known to us only from the toy shelves.
If children nowadays don't get excited about games and toys, then what? I do recall seeing commercials on today's kid shows for glowing-screen "content" - other TV shows, movies, video games, "visit the website / download the app," etc.
Why give your kids toys and games for a spirited round of playing around, when you can knock them out with digital Benadryl instead? I also recall seeing ads on kids' shows for food and drink, AKA a steady injection to feed their sugar addiction. That's about the only exciting event in the day that they have to look forward to - their hourly fix as they plod along the carbohydrate treadmill, while vegging out in front of a screen.
Remember: helicopter parents are the ones who lobbied both the government and the private sector to filter out all stimulation from children's products, whether real or virtual. The uber-helicopter parents in Sweden are nazis about "advertising to children," so it wouldn't come as a surprise to find a similar movement going on in America. Ban commercials that offer children a means to use their imagination and get a little rambunctious, and rationalize it as shielding our darlings from the corporate Pied Pipers.
Thus, to soothe their own anxieties about where playing with toys and games might lead their children — drugs, pregnancy, murder — parents have weeded out play, engagement, and using your imagination in favor of vegetation, distraction, and painting-by-numbers.
Related:
Declining innovation in toys and games
Familiar mega-franchises supply most toy lines nowadays
Thing-oriented toys most popular with today's not-so-empathetic children
Millennials nostalgic about not having a life as kids
It didn't sink in until after we'd returned home, as I began replaying the mental videotape. The whole time we were there in that sprawling toy store — around 45 to 60 minutes — there wasn't one moment where he started begging me to buy something that he'd had his mind set on for awhile. Nothing fascinating that he had been waiting for the right big occasion — Christmas, birthday, etc. — to finally get his hands on.
He showed up with an almost blank set of expectations about what would be on offer, and he therefore had no ranking of what mattered more than what else. It was as though he'd never seen a single toy commercial in his whole life.
(Perhaps that's no joke - I thought back on all the hours and hours of kids' TV shows I've seen him watch, and I don't recall seeing commercials for any of the major toy categories. They may have been in there somewhere, but it's not like when I was his age, and our parents saw us watching commercial after commercial for the next big thing that we just had to have, and dreaded the endless begging that followed.)
When we were six years old, we always had a list in the back of our minds of the toys and games that we were dying the most to play with. I'm using "toy" broadly — action figures, play weapons, board games, stuffed animals, pocket-sized vehicles, kid-sized vehicles, and sports-like novelties (the pogo ball, the Koosh ball, Nerf fencing, Skip-It, and so on).
This not only showed how much our parents encouraged the spirit of play in children. It also taught us how to weigh competing alternatives, rank them, and set about trying to reach those goals. And in the case of trying to get our hands on desirable toys, it gave us a vivid and frequent reminder that we don't always get what we want right away, and may have to wait awhile until we do — Christmas, birthday, visit to a spoiling grandmother, or what have you.
Since my nephew had no clear picture of what would be there, and which things he wanted more than which others, he instantly latched onto the first dazzling display upon entering the store — some small wind-up toys that didn't look cool or do anything cool, and that were cheaply built.
I left him unattended for about 10-15 minutes, telling him to look around the store, and I'd check in with him then to see what he really wanted — after inspecting more than just the first thing he saw. When I got back, he was still with those dumb wind-up toys, raised his voice about wanting these and nothing else, and nearly went into a meltdown when I told him he was going to look through some other things before he made a final decision.
Well, whaddaya know? The next place that had toys for a boy his age, he latched onto the first thing that caught his attention — some kind of hot wheel vehicle, only in the form of an elongated reptile. He nearly threw another fit when I told him to keep browsing through the other aisles again.
Amazingly, with every aisle we looked through, it was the same thing — no recognition of something he'd been waiting for and was dying to get. Not only that — no real attachment to anything he was seeing for the first time. Something that he would keep in his mental list for later. After we left, he didn't bug me for any of the things that he was shouting about just a half-hour earlier, and he didn't mention that he couldn't wait until next time when he could get his second or third-choice toys. He'd totally forgotten about all of them.
His mindset was just, latch onto the least boring thing in the array of things that I'm looking at right now, and let's get out of here already. Who knew that children have come to view a visit to the toy store as one of those "just get it over with" kind of activities? There were quite a few other families there, and their experience didn't appear to be any different.
Now, he did recognize the brands of many of the toys (Spiderman, Star Wars, etc.), but he didn't recognize the toys themselves, and wasn't drawn to them as toys — only as a product that came from a familiar brand.
Contrast that to when I was his age, and a good deal of the sought-after toys were from a wholly unfamiliar brand, and as far as we knew, only existed in toy form (although there were often very brief, basically invisible tie-ins like cartoons and comic books). Starriors, Inhumanoids, Battle Beasts, M.U.S.C.L.E., Cabbage Patch Kids, Teddie Ruxpin, just to name a few hit toys, were known to us only from the toy shelves.
If children nowadays don't get excited about games and toys, then what? I do recall seeing commercials on today's kid shows for glowing-screen "content" - other TV shows, movies, video games, "visit the website / download the app," etc.
Why give your kids toys and games for a spirited round of playing around, when you can knock them out with digital Benadryl instead? I also recall seeing ads on kids' shows for food and drink, AKA a steady injection to feed their sugar addiction. That's about the only exciting event in the day that they have to look forward to - their hourly fix as they plod along the carbohydrate treadmill, while vegging out in front of a screen.
Remember: helicopter parents are the ones who lobbied both the government and the private sector to filter out all stimulation from children's products, whether real or virtual. The uber-helicopter parents in Sweden are nazis about "advertising to children," so it wouldn't come as a surprise to find a similar movement going on in America. Ban commercials that offer children a means to use their imagination and get a little rambunctious, and rationalize it as shielding our darlings from the corporate Pied Pipers.
Thus, to soothe their own anxieties about where playing with toys and games might lead their children — drugs, pregnancy, murder — parents have weeded out play, engagement, and using your imagination in favor of vegetation, distraction, and painting-by-numbers.
Related:
Declining innovation in toys and games
Familiar mega-franchises supply most toy lines nowadays
Thing-oriented toys most popular with today's not-so-empathetic children
Millennials nostalgic about not having a life as kids
July 4, 2014
Hit shows from the '90s were shot on film
After regularly tuning in to Seinfeld for the first time in about 15 years, I started to notice how much better it looks compared to either today's digital shows or the video-taped shows from the '70s and '80s. And sure enough, IMDb says it was shot on 35mm film stock.
It doesn't have video's fast frame rate which makes it look more like you're right there in the audience of a live play performance. The slower frame rate stylizes movement enough to distance you from the show's world. The lighting and colors also come out much better than on a typical sit-com from the '80s, which were shot on video.
And it wasn't only Seinfeld -- ER, Friends, Frasier, Murphy Brown, Law & Order, The Drew Carey Show, just to name the ones I checked. Some were still being video-taped if they were in the vein of the '80s sit-com, such as Roseanne and Home Improvement.
Perhaps that's one reason why some people respond best to TV shows of The Nineties (meaning, '93 and after). They probably didn't know it, but just sensed that they had better visual production put into them. Like me, you might not respond to some of them for reasons of tone -- wacky/zany, emo, glib, etc. -- but at least they are nice to look at.
During the 2000s, first it was all the game shows and reality shows that brought the video look back to mainstream TV. Reality-based content calls for greater photorealism in capturing motion, so video's high frame rate won out. Now even the comedies and dramas are leaving film for digital. The Big Bang Theory, about the only 21st-century sit-com to break into the top of the Nielsen ratings, started out on film but switched to digital.
Why didn't they care to shoot all the big shows on film in the '80s? (Some in the action genre were, like Magnum, P.I.) I think TV shows that looked film-y only appealed to audiences once the cocooning climate had set in. Since then the ideal has been to never leave the house. But they still want something cool-looking to watch for entertainment. If the small screen was the new big screen, then why not start shooting TV shows on film?
It doesn't have video's fast frame rate which makes it look more like you're right there in the audience of a live play performance. The slower frame rate stylizes movement enough to distance you from the show's world. The lighting and colors also come out much better than on a typical sit-com from the '80s, which were shot on video.
And it wasn't only Seinfeld -- ER, Friends, Frasier, Murphy Brown, Law & Order, The Drew Carey Show, just to name the ones I checked. Some were still being video-taped if they were in the vein of the '80s sit-com, such as Roseanne and Home Improvement.
Perhaps that's one reason why some people respond best to TV shows of The Nineties (meaning, '93 and after). They probably didn't know it, but just sensed that they had better visual production put into them. Like me, you might not respond to some of them for reasons of tone -- wacky/zany, emo, glib, etc. -- but at least they are nice to look at.
During the 2000s, first it was all the game shows and reality shows that brought the video look back to mainstream TV. Reality-based content calls for greater photorealism in capturing motion, so video's high frame rate won out. Now even the comedies and dramas are leaving film for digital. The Big Bang Theory, about the only 21st-century sit-com to break into the top of the Nielsen ratings, started out on film but switched to digital.
Why didn't they care to shoot all the big shows on film in the '80s? (Some in the action genre were, like Magnum, P.I.) I think TV shows that looked film-y only appealed to audiences once the cocooning climate had set in. Since then the ideal has been to never leave the house. But they still want something cool-looking to watch for entertainment. If the small screen was the new big screen, then why not start shooting TV shows on film?
July 2, 2014
Not Earth to Echo: Characters who looked and sounded creepy, but proved themselves as trustworthy friends in '80s kid culture
Coming out this week is another one of those nauseatingly cutesy, inoffensive, painless, and unchallenging kids' movies, Earth to Echo (trailer here). By all accounts, the plot is a shameless rip-off of E.T. In one major respect, however, they deliberately took the opposite approach from the original -- in designing the alien creature to look like a cute baby owl who purrs like a guinea pig.
I guess an ugly-ass naked midget with a slow raspy voice would be too much for today's generation of wimpy kids.
Although it may seem like a trivial difference, making the alien so cutesy completely undercuts the intended themes of bridging a trust gap between wary strangers, tolerance of that which we initially fear if it proves itself friendly, and judging others by their character and conduct rather than their outward appearance. The cute little robo-owl looks harmless, and acts harmless -- wow, what a challenging lesson to learn!
Children haven't been exposed to characters like E.T. for so long that it's worth taking a look at how common that type used to be back in the '80s. They all frightened us at first, with their ugly appearance and weird voice, but by asking for our help and then returning the favor, they proved that they were to be trusted as friends, not turned away as enemies.
E.T. from E.T. (1982), the prototype who started the phenomenon.
Lame rip-offs of E.T. are nothing new. But back in 1988, Mac and Me still featured an ugly-looking alien because that was such an important part of the whole "strangers growing to trust each other" thing.
Even when the tone was purely comedic, not dramatic, the alien was still ugly. In the TV show ALF (1986-'90), the alien is a wisecracker who creates and "odd couple" dynamic with the serious and cautious head of the household, Willie, who nevertheless does his best to keep others from finding out about his family's new alien companion. ALF was also made into a popular stuffed animal for kids.
Speaking of hideous-looking, potentially frightening stuffed animal friends, 1986 saw the release of My Pet Monster, which was like the My Buddy doll, only ugly and scary. Its bulbous green schnoz was covered in warts, its eyebrows pointed downward, and its yellowy fangs hung out in plain sight (although it looked more like an overbite than an aggressive display). But it still looked friendly enough to be your partner-in-crime when you were playing make-believe.
In Labyrinth (1986), Ludo the gentle beast has an ugly mug, and Hoggle the cynic looks downright repulsive. After an initial scare, both of them help the protagonist Sarah navigate the dangers of the labyrinth to rescue her kidnapped baby brother from the Goblin King, whose glamorous evil contrasts with the ugly yet kind-hearted pair of helpers.
Just about all of the friends that Atreyu makes along his adventure in The NeverEnding Story (1984) look weird, ugly, or creepy. In fact Morla, the giant old tortoise, looks almost like E.T. in the face. But by far the most disturbing is Falkor the luck dragon, whose likable doggie face does not seem to match with his pedo grooming voice, or the reptilian scales that cover his back. (As a kid I thought those were large blisters -- no joke, it made my skin crawl when I first saw it.) But he helps the kid along his journey, rather than take advantage of him, so our initial revulsion was misplaced.
Then there was that creepy, personal space-invading robotic fish eye lens, voiced by Pee Wee Herman himself, who commanded the spaceship that the young protagonist flew in Flight of the Navigator (1986).
Gizmo from Gremlins (1984) has a soft voice and a generally cutesy look, but his naked wing-like ears look a little off-putting when seen against his overall primate appearance. If they really wanted to take it easy on the kids, they wouldn't have included those freaky-looking ears.
Also in the vein of freaky primates was the sasquatch Harry who befriends a middle-class family in Harry and the Hendersons (1987 movie, 1991-93 TV show). Something about how close together his eyes are, and how often you see his lower row of teeth, give him a disturbing rather than cutesy primate look.
Then there's the title character of the children's picture book Gorilla (1983), who startles a little girl when he comes to life from her imagination, but then earns her trust as he whisks her away from her depressing latchkey kid existence for a night of adventure around town.
Is he human or not-quite-human? Sloth from The Goonies (1985) scares the hell out of all children when his twisted face and horrible scream are first revealed. Yet this lovable abomination of nature proves himself ever faithful and sacrificing when the shit is about to hit the fan for the adventurous kids who stumble upon him chained up in a dark cellar.
By the early '90s, the alien/monster gave way to more familiar creatures who were still creepy-looking yet benevolent. In Home Alone (1990), there's a sinister-seeming old man who turns out to only be upset from being estranged from his son. He and the pint-sized protagonist Kevin have a heart-to-heart understanding in church, and the old man later clobbers the pair of robbers who have Kevin cornered in his own house.
Finally, in The Sandlot (1993), a band of baseball-playing kids discover that the neighborhood dog with Cujo's reputation is in fact a gentle giant, and that his blind owner is not as creepy as they'd thought either. The avuncular owner simply prefers his privacy.
That's about the last example I came across in looking things over. Since then, any aborted attempts at the character type have made it too cute on first impression, or disarmingly campy (which amounts to the same thing). The Nickelodeon show Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Quasimodo in Disney's take on The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Pixar's cute-ification of Shrek (who looks grotesque in the original picture book from 1990), Monsters, Inc., How to Train Your Dragon, and so on and so forth.
Helicopter parents devote their entire effort toward insulating their child's body and brain with bubble wrap. No hard falls, no hard lessons. Anything awkward must be smoothed over, anything yucky must be sterilized. If this warps your kid's development and stunts them permanently, don't worry -- at least you won't personally feel uncomfortable having to watch them grope toward maturity.
With such a seismic change in the goals of parents, it can come as no surprise to see the repulsive yet trustworthy character from the '80s replaced by the cutesy and harmless ones over the past 20 years.
I guess an ugly-ass naked midget with a slow raspy voice would be too much for today's generation of wimpy kids.
Although it may seem like a trivial difference, making the alien so cutesy completely undercuts the intended themes of bridging a trust gap between wary strangers, tolerance of that which we initially fear if it proves itself friendly, and judging others by their character and conduct rather than their outward appearance. The cute little robo-owl looks harmless, and acts harmless -- wow, what a challenging lesson to learn!
Children haven't been exposed to characters like E.T. for so long that it's worth taking a look at how common that type used to be back in the '80s. They all frightened us at first, with their ugly appearance and weird voice, but by asking for our help and then returning the favor, they proved that they were to be trusted as friends, not turned away as enemies.
E.T. from E.T. (1982), the prototype who started the phenomenon.
Lame rip-offs of E.T. are nothing new. But back in 1988, Mac and Me still featured an ugly-looking alien because that was such an important part of the whole "strangers growing to trust each other" thing.
Even when the tone was purely comedic, not dramatic, the alien was still ugly. In the TV show ALF (1986-'90), the alien is a wisecracker who creates and "odd couple" dynamic with the serious and cautious head of the household, Willie, who nevertheless does his best to keep others from finding out about his family's new alien companion. ALF was also made into a popular stuffed animal for kids.
Speaking of hideous-looking, potentially frightening stuffed animal friends, 1986 saw the release of My Pet Monster, which was like the My Buddy doll, only ugly and scary. Its bulbous green schnoz was covered in warts, its eyebrows pointed downward, and its yellowy fangs hung out in plain sight (although it looked more like an overbite than an aggressive display). But it still looked friendly enough to be your partner-in-crime when you were playing make-believe.
In Labyrinth (1986), Ludo the gentle beast has an ugly mug, and Hoggle the cynic looks downright repulsive. After an initial scare, both of them help the protagonist Sarah navigate the dangers of the labyrinth to rescue her kidnapped baby brother from the Goblin King, whose glamorous evil contrasts with the ugly yet kind-hearted pair of helpers.
Just about all of the friends that Atreyu makes along his adventure in The NeverEnding Story (1984) look weird, ugly, or creepy. In fact Morla, the giant old tortoise, looks almost like E.T. in the face. But by far the most disturbing is Falkor the luck dragon, whose likable doggie face does not seem to match with his pedo grooming voice, or the reptilian scales that cover his back. (As a kid I thought those were large blisters -- no joke, it made my skin crawl when I first saw it.) But he helps the kid along his journey, rather than take advantage of him, so our initial revulsion was misplaced.
Then there was that creepy, personal space-invading robotic fish eye lens, voiced by Pee Wee Herman himself, who commanded the spaceship that the young protagonist flew in Flight of the Navigator (1986).
Gizmo from Gremlins (1984) has a soft voice and a generally cutesy look, but his naked wing-like ears look a little off-putting when seen against his overall primate appearance. If they really wanted to take it easy on the kids, they wouldn't have included those freaky-looking ears.
Also in the vein of freaky primates was the sasquatch Harry who befriends a middle-class family in Harry and the Hendersons (1987 movie, 1991-93 TV show). Something about how close together his eyes are, and how often you see his lower row of teeth, give him a disturbing rather than cutesy primate look.
Then there's the title character of the children's picture book Gorilla (1983), who startles a little girl when he comes to life from her imagination, but then earns her trust as he whisks her away from her depressing latchkey kid existence for a night of adventure around town.
Is he human or not-quite-human? Sloth from The Goonies (1985) scares the hell out of all children when his twisted face and horrible scream are first revealed. Yet this lovable abomination of nature proves himself ever faithful and sacrificing when the shit is about to hit the fan for the adventurous kids who stumble upon him chained up in a dark cellar.
By the early '90s, the alien/monster gave way to more familiar creatures who were still creepy-looking yet benevolent. In Home Alone (1990), there's a sinister-seeming old man who turns out to only be upset from being estranged from his son. He and the pint-sized protagonist Kevin have a heart-to-heart understanding in church, and the old man later clobbers the pair of robbers who have Kevin cornered in his own house.
Finally, in The Sandlot (1993), a band of baseball-playing kids discover that the neighborhood dog with Cujo's reputation is in fact a gentle giant, and that his blind owner is not as creepy as they'd thought either. The avuncular owner simply prefers his privacy.
That's about the last example I came across in looking things over. Since then, any aborted attempts at the character type have made it too cute on first impression, or disarmingly campy (which amounts to the same thing). The Nickelodeon show Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Quasimodo in Disney's take on The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Pixar's cute-ification of Shrek (who looks grotesque in the original picture book from 1990), Monsters, Inc., How to Train Your Dragon, and so on and so forth.
Helicopter parents devote their entire effort toward insulating their child's body and brain with bubble wrap. No hard falls, no hard lessons. Anything awkward must be smoothed over, anything yucky must be sterilized. If this warps your kid's development and stunts them permanently, don't worry -- at least you won't personally feel uncomfortable having to watch them grope toward maturity.
With such a seismic change in the goals of parents, it can come as no surprise to see the repulsive yet trustworthy character from the '80s replaced by the cutesy and harmless ones over the past 20 years.
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