What Cloud Be Worng With Me Part Nein: On A Spectrum

 Disclaimer:

I'm just speculating, almost on the verge of making shit up, whole cloth. I am not a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist or capable of making a diagnosis. 

The Quantity/Quality Trade Off

We all get a lot of practice talking about ourselves. I think I saw on Qi that there was an early psychology study that involved psychology majors hiding under dorm room beds to listen to what people spoke about in private when they didn't think they were being observed, and 80% of the time people talk about themselves.

Even with practice though, it is my experience that it can take a lot of time to figure out how to talk about yourself in a competent way. Like say a boy moves from the country to the city at age 16 goes to a big high school and discovers in the change room, that he has a really big penis.

It might take that kid a while to learn, that you don't talk about your really big penis in most contexts. 

This post is going to be about autism, and the TL;DR of it for me, is that I don't think we actually know much about it. In the sense that it might sound impressive to say our understanding of something has increased 300% in the last decade, but if the baseline was 1% then that means we are at 4% now.

What has exploded, is the number of people who are diagnosed with ASD, and the number of people who self-identify as autistic, And as life will remind you again and again at every opportunity, you can't just increase the quantity of something and expect the same quality. 

We actually have very little capital so under utilised that we can go from 10,000 to 10,000,000 with the push of a button and expect the same quality product we are used to.

So even if a great many people have found a great many answers and experienced a massive uptick in their quality of life in the past two decades thanks to learning about autism, this is wave upon wave of adults who do not know how to talk about it, and the people on the frontier like hometown hero Chloe Hayden I feel are still in the process of figuring it out, and 'figuring out' autism information communication is somewhat predicated on having an established body of knowledge that is going to be stable for a while, and even having some stability in our media consumption habits.

I feel that this is very very young, such that a concept like autism that has been researched by scholars and debated and peer reviewed and explored with emerging technologies like genome mapping, fMRIs etc. etc. is a body of knowledge that is likely a rounding error on some bullshit I made up myself in a previous post like my 'plutophobia.'

Being able to say it is definitely a thing is not to say that collectively, communally we actually know much about it, like the oarfish, or giant squid, or the moons of Saturn. And certainly I know almost nothing compared to people who are actually interested in these things.

The First time someone calls you a horse

“If one person tells you you're a horse , they are crazy. If three people tell you you're a horse, There's conspiracy afoot. If ten people tell you you're a horse,it's time to buy a saddle”

― Jack Rosenblum

In my life, for its total duration I've had one person suggest I was autistic. A second, much later, may have implied it but I was too mind blind to tell, and furthermore they were not independent from the same hobnobbing social circle as the first. When this person suggested it, they'd known me over a decade, so I was confused. Possibly shocked even. 

One thing I cannot recall, is what they based this on. I may not have even thought to ask, and may have assumed its because I have people in my family who are diagnosed on the spectrum.

Now, what I didn't do was dismiss the suggestion out of hand. I thought of this good old Keanu Reeves meme that possibly never got any traction, but I think about a lot where a picture of a confused Keanu is captioned with: "What if I actually have Down's Syndrome...and everyone's just being nice to me?" Our subjective states all being our benchmark of 'normalcy' that there are all kinds of things we cannot ourselves perceive.

Could it have been possible I wasn't able to perceive something so fundamental to myself?

I should also point out, this was way before like, 20% of the population diagnosed themselves as autistic, or paid for someone to diagnose them as autistic - and on this front I don't make light, I mean literally there is a problem in the Australian secondary education system now, where wealthy people's children are something like a bajillion times more likely to have a diagnosis of ASD and ADHD and whatever else. There are private (pay to play) schools in my town where over 50% of the student cohort qualify for 'special consideration' meaning they get extra time, can complete written assessments on a laptop etc. If the schools own staff won't give a diagnosis, parents often then pay top dollar to obtain one. There are real advantages above and beyond the private school advantages, so there's a kind of race-to-the-bottom to get diagnoses that confer advantages without debilitating treatment plans. 

Hence the abundance of ASD with no real growth in rates of bipolar or schizophrenia that can onset in symptoms prior to secondary graduation, that can come with medication that have debilitating side effects.

So I entertained it for a while, ran it past the psychologist I was seeing at the time, spoke to my parents about it and probably read the Wikipedia page on it. 

It just didn't really get any traction, it could be true I guess...

Other People's Testimony

I am sympathetic to videos I've watched by other people, particularly adults who often enough, discovered in the 21st century that they were autistic by having their children diagnosed with ASD. 

I haven't done a complex survey, only two or three, but these people testified that their lives changed for the better after their diagnosis. 

I'd also heard testimony from my parents that a diagnosis really helped the family member gain confidence and understand the world.

This isn't something I'm closed to, I think what I'm closed to is the scene. Most people on the spectrum I know don't behave like the person on the spectrum closest to me. That's a sentence to parse. We were discussing it and they shared with me their impression, which I also share 'most people I talk to who tell me they have autism its like the center of their identity." or core of their being, or whatever.

The Self-Diagnosis that Won't be The Diagnosis of Summer 2026

One morning I woke up to a message from my friend, she'd read a book about Autism in Women & Girls, and the book is called 'Women & Girls on the Autism Spectrum' by Sarah Hendrickx, her 'about the author' bio states she is an autistic writer, speaker, autism diagnostician and specialist living in the south of France.

OH DEAR FUCKING GOD

I apologise, just you know, these are the things that irritate me, so I tried to find a bio about the book's co-author and found more detailed descriptions, the authors are Sarah and Jess Hendrickx sisters, and while they are autism diagnosticians, their bios specify that both are 'non-clinically trained' now, I don't know what that leaves, and Jess is listed as having a PGCE (post graduate certificate) in Autism. 

So like, just fyi, if you ever want to not impress me with your credentials as an expert on a subject matter, like that's the way to go about it. I was expecting something like MD, at the very least a BA in psychology or maybe a PhD in nueroscience something like that.

The second bio I found actually contained the phrase 'diagnosed or self-identify as'

Anyway, this is a digression. When my friend brought it to me, via dms, I was left with a kind of two part lob into my court - part 1 being they thought they were autistic, and part 2 asking me what I thought.

I'll keep ensuing conversations private, but what I can divulge is I thought 'Oh god this is what I'm going to have to put up with at barbecues and parties all summer.' Living in Mexico as an illegal immigrant had spared me the summers of adult-onset ADHD, I had had to deal with a friend bringing to me their diagnosis based off youtube research once before, but that was way before it went viral.

As you can guess, I'm sceptical of both the frequency and significance of these diagnoses that spawn articles in news periodicals like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Economist etc. with cover stories like 'Why is everyone ADHD now?' but I'm not outright dismissive. The main thing I dread is having to hear about it, for the aforementioned 'center of their identity' impression.

I have a good friend that would describe what many of these people need is somebody to 'hold space' for them as they process the adjusted schema of their lives. I believe feminists refer to this as 'emotional labour' and that's not a concept I am skeptical of at all. We probably need a discussion around the (not-etiquette-but) manners of emotional labour, as in you can't just fucking demand it of people who approached you for conversation at a social gathering.

That's what I was thinking about when my friend asked me 'so what do you think?' and I knew that's not what they anticipated me thinking about, which was myself, and the fresh new hell the summer promised of the latest trending self-diagnoses. They were asking me what I thought of their epiphany about them, and I didn't really have any thoughts, and I pretty much still don't. 

Anticipation was the worst thing, and at Hathor's feast it was I that mentioned it in the context of remarking how delighted I was that nobody had mentioned that they thought they were an undiagnosed autistic woman at the party, because I'd been worried about it. One of the women in the group did not then step forward and say "actually I'm autistic" and I haven't experienced the explosion I was dreading. What a woman said was "yeah well a lot of women go undiagnosed/women are underdiagnosed because women tend to mask the symptoms." 

This is possibly even an excerpt from the blurb of Sarah and Jane's book, certainly the most common synopsis. I am not attuned to how word-of-mouth promotes such a book, but over the summer I would hear this assertion repeated pretty much verbatim again and again as received wisdom. It was even in the summary my first friend shared as to why they think they'd never been diagnosed until they diagnosed themselves just now.

"Girls go undiagnosed because they mask the symptoms" I feel, is dangerously close to the "Asymptomatic Tourette" syndrome mocked  by dromedy "The English Teacher"

Now before eventually getting to the point of this section, I just want to flag, that with any breakthrough in the discourse around historically stigmatised identities, conditions, disorders or whatever leading to an explosion in diagnoses, this is usually hypothesised (or at least notionally) explained as the reduction of stigma allowing people to come forward. I feel this should always be tested against the null-hypothesis of 'OR are teenage girls doing what teenage girls have always done?' (which is act as a social contagion vector)

Now before you panic, I don't have teenage girls slipping into my DMs, society rather has been infantilised such that adolesence can last until however old Gen Xers are now.

The promised point is, that the self-diagnosis that isn't going to sweep through small talk at this summer's forthcoming bbqs and garden parties and even dinner parties is this: Stupidity.

Right, even though the epiphany that someone is in fact, a moron, had tremendous sense-making and predictive power.

I am not going to meet someone who wants to bore me with everything they realised about themselves from a book or podcast: "So it turns out, all my life, I've been stupid, I'm a fucking moron. You see, I get around the fact that I don't understand what the fuck is going on, by just copying everyone else as best I can, and I've been exerting so much effort trying to conceal the fact that I'm stupid by like, just not taking responsibility for anything or taking any risks. And like, I just try and figure out what the smartest sounding people I know like, and they like the New York Times and PBS so I just listen to their podcasts and repeat the opinions on it as if they were my own, often verbatim. Other symptoms are like, that I find big words and jargon impressive and adopt it into my own speech, oh and like a language model marketed as 'AI' that uses personal pronouns, that will confuse me into thinking I'm speaking with a conscious being. I get impressed by horoscopes because I don't have the critical thinking skills to recognise a barnum statement when I see one, and the same applies to the personal, legal and medical advice I seek from chatbots..."

Stupidity is a robust, evidenced psychological construct. It has tremendous predictive power being able to predict up to 20% of our career outcomes, which is higher than a factor like conscientiousness/laziness. It is furthermore likely to be the case that as few as 50% of us, and as many as 95% of us, just aren't smart enough to make sense of the world we live in.

I am serious, when I think if people could read a book about stupidity and approach it with half the energy and enthusiasm they might apply to ADHD, Autism, the power of introverts, emotional intelligence, repressed childhood trauma or any of the myriad psychological constructs that have been made big by pop culture, I think many people would benefit.

But it's just not going to happen because aside from maybe the George W Bush presidency, nobody has really come close to making stupidity socially desirable.

I Miss Aspergers

My autistic relative was originally diagnosed with Aspergers, and they were not so much rediagnosed through any second opinion, but reclassified in the 2010s to being 'on the spectrum', and the clinically trained psychologist that had diagnosed them and specialised in Asperger's syndrome resented the reclassification citing that it was all because Hans Aspeger the Austrian physician that had first formulated the construct, and become posthumously famous in the 1980s, was alleged to have been involved in some way with the Nazis.

I'm not a believer in Ad Hominem generally, and under the auspices of Godwin's Law would use Hitler as an example - that if Hitler says 2 + 2 = 4, he's not wrong because he is Hitler.

I could accept this concept of an Autism spectrum, not because I had any expertise, but that it sounded plausible that Asperger's and Autism were closely related, and then it could develop such that they were the same thing at different degrees. One of the functional descriptions I had heard for Asperger's was that it was a 'high functioning form of Autism' 

So that's what I assumed the spectrum to refer to.

When my friend hit me up thinking she was autistic and wondering what I thought, and yeah, I was too annoyed to be flattered by someone being vulnerable with me about their recent change in self-perception, most of that annoyance comes from being old enough to remember when Autism described people who needed a lot of help. Not only did autistic people need a lot of help, but the people who cared for them needed a lot of help.

I can remember where progressive discourse about Autism was centered on how, it actually rarely conferred autistic-savant abilities as depicted in the movie "Rain Man" with Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman. Many autistic people struggled to function like Dustin Hoffman's depiction, without being able to count cards or even the parlour trick of memorizing phone books or being able to tell what day of the week someone was born on just from dd-mm-yyyy.

By 1980s diagnostics, I don't know anybody with autism. By 2020s, I would say it is at least 50% of the children I know under 18 years of age, excluding Mexico where by 2020s standards, I don't know anybody autistic of the 200 or so people I met while over there, and I met some really weird people and even went to the local comic-con.

That though, is unambiguously a product of concept creep, one that has not reached the Latin America...

Leave Lionel Messi Alone

With the world cup on, Youtube is throwing up a lot of shorts, like things explaining why Haarland runs like an ostrich and many shitty "AI" ones, and then there was one that was titled "Lionel Messi top 5 Autism moments" and I was like what but didn't watch it, because I mean seriously, who fucking cares. But I was curious as to whether this was the now better known symptom of whiteness that is just diagnosing people as autistic with no real qualifications or evidence.

So I gave it a google, and you know, I do believe Argentina is like the global capital of engagement with psychoanalysts, it's not just in Envidiosa, so there is some plausibility that Messi may have got a diagnosis at some point and made it a matter of public record. But...no.

Messi has never publicly identified as autistic, and there is no confirmed diagnosis. What the speculation does open up, though, is a genuinely useful question...

That quote is taken from an 'Applied Behaviour Analysis' therapy website that I know too little about to promote right and this is the kind of to put it bluntly fucking pseudoscience by OG Karl Popper's definition that detracts from my interest in autism. Like I watched that youtube short, and what a nothing burger. 

One clip in particular lowers the credibility, which is Messi sitting at some awards ceremony, billed as 'staring into space' while someone next to him is talking to him, and I would assume Messi is looking either towards a monitor or a stage and nobody else is because he is the subject of that moment, something we see happen repeatedly at every awards show, everywhere all the time.

I will admit, that the first impression I ever got of Messi, was that he does look perpetually confused but this caused me to speculate on a story I'd heard about Babe Ruth's eyesight, like maybe they both had a condition that made them particularly coordinated.

If you work from the reverse, you can just establish as fact that Lionel Messi (and Babe Ruth) are particularly coordinated. They then also, likely have a condition. 

Having watched a few videos attempting some kind of data based analysis of Messi's play style, it seems there a hypothesis that he constructs and constantly updates his mental model of the playing field, 'scanning' at higher rates and also notably, spending far more time walking all of which suggest to me, speculatively, that Messi at least is showing symptoms of intelligence - playing with a high cognitive load.

It may even be, a particular manifestation of autism, but most people who identify as autistic do not manifest incredible coordination, they manifest tedious boorish conversations about autism and with late diagnoses this is often after having been previously capable of interesting conversations about movies, books, sport, the economy and current affairs. 

These are the people hard at work restigmatizing autism for those who suffer it to the debilitating extent that it creates sensory overload, emotional overload, distress and debilitation.

The Unique Problem of Whiteness

Okay this is total speculation now, but it seriously is a fairly accurate stereotype that 'white people call out autism' and I can certainly say, of the other cultures I'm most familiar with, it is not a thing Mexicans do, even whitexicans who are generally more fixated on securing their place in a gated community and a 4WD monster truck capable of crushing any boarder wall to escape socialism coming to Mexico. I have yet to see the Japanese comic, cartoon or videogame willing to surrender their obsession with fascist bloodlines to talk about autism in anyway. Certainly in popular culture it does appear to be a unique obsession of white people, whether you are a conspiratorial anti-vaxxer, a Karen who just wants their child to go to an Ivy League school or Queer whiteness seems to converge on autism.

I think it might be because, nobody is in charge. That's my speculation. Life is a confusing, frighteningly random semi-stable collision of social animals who are actually not being coordinated, they just aren't that creative.

If you are not white, you have to hand a sensemaking schema to oppose on the difficulty of life - colonialism, and yes, it is real, as is neoliberalism. What's unreal is the idea that Ronald Reagan sits down in the oval office with student of Hayek, Milton Friedman and has an intelligent discussion about neoliberalism. More likely, Milton is a blustering ideologue, pretending to know more than he feels he actually does, and enjoying the privileges afforded him by his confidence and having plenty of wealthy people wanting to believe in him as he dismantles open societies and nudges us back onto the road to serfdom. 

And this is what white people are privileged to experience, having greater access to the corridors of power, they get to see that nobody has any real idea what they are doing. They get enough time with the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bushes, certainly the Trumps, the Gates, the Jobs, the Musks to realise a lot of the time these people are just pulling shit out of their asses. 

That's skewed toward a super structure. I think autism for white people, functions somewhat like racism for marginalised people - it is certainly a real phenomena, but one can fall prey to using confirmation bias and use it to diagnose everything that confuses you.

Which is to say, this is how white people explain the disorganised nature of white people, like if we just take a two factor personality model - whether people prefer to ask or tell (introversion/extraversion) and whether people prioritise tasks or people (concrete/abstract) we get a a 2 dimensional spread of 4 personality types.

Here we can go into a workplace and observe two extraverts - one motivated by esteem, the other motivated by productivity and I'll bet if they are ignorant or have left unprocessed the concept of personalities, they will be prone to diagnosing the analysts and support workers in their organisation as autistic or nuerodivergent.

Again, reminding you that this is unqualified speculation on my part, this is what I'd expect based on how many people I've encountered that don't realise there is sufficient variation in human populations that not-even most people share your motivations. This can commonly result in a fairly benign misanthropic view that everyone else is trying to do what you are doing and just getting it wrong, a kind of manifestation of the 'illusion of superiority' I believe.

It's what allows a high-school dropout who built up a property portfolio that they borrow against to fund conspicuous consumption to look down on a civil servant who dedicated ten years to getting asbestos safely removed from a local public school. The civil servant was likely not trying to get rich so they could have a beach house weekender and they just fucked it up brilliantly by going into a low-paying career that absorbed all their time to read books and attend seminars about property investment, but may instead be motivated by being of service to their community.

And in these mindsets of sense-making white people and their adoption of amatuer diagnostics should reflect on the cautionary tale of the previous two centuries of white racism. There is an abundance of documentation of white people misdiagnosing character flaws as inherent traits of the construct of race up to and including the Irish and Italian. People constantly diagnosing Mexicans as 'lazy' while they drive their SUV to a place to have someone make a coffee for them, and blatantly disregarding the millions of Mexicans who work 6 days a week at a minimum wage job, and may have worked since they were 6 or 8 years old walking from restaurant to restaurant selling fruit, stickers and pencils.

White people who have a quite bad track record of misdiagnosing a lack of inherited estates and an obligation to pay taxes and rents as laziness, should not get confident they can diagnose complicated psychological constructs like an autism spectrum that, it seems to me, relative to introversion-extraversion, or perhaps even sexuality experts barely understand, and lay people don't understand how to even identify an expert.

Thresholds

Part of why I miss Asperger's, was that it defined a threshold. Kids in that brief historical window where they would get an AS rather than an ASD, often faced the main difficulty of being perceived as difficult. That is how close to 'normal' they were in functioning. 

The language made it unambiguous to recognise, that some kids would get bullied because they had no innate ability to read the room, they would attract mockery and ridicule for being particular, and showing weakness over sensory stimuli that would not endear them to their peers.

And then you could talk about autistic people, in that historical time period, who needed a lot of support, like a designated human-adult support worker to sit next to them in class just to keep them included in society.

Bringing it back to me, I was open to the suggestion, indeed actively looking for answers with explanatory power.

What I found, is nothing autism could really explain, that helps me in any way. I for example, have never struggled with bullying, I do not have light sensitivity, nor sensitivity issues when it relates to clothing tags. I have all my life gravitated toward chaos, when choosing between institutions, often disorganisation is a big plus, as I dislike having to be organised myself.

I didn't struggle in school, at least not in a way that can't be better explained by being raised without a growth mindset understanding that ability was intrinsic and dismissing the idea that competence can be gained through effort. But for the most part that made school a joke, and I was fortunate to struggle through difficult maths subjects out of pride, learning the lesson of effort that would later help me rebecome an artist.

So the question of my placement on the spectrum, becomes a question of resource allocation. Both my own and communal - what is the cut off where my time is just better spent on other things?

To give an analogy, imagine a person who was diagnosed with schizophrenia age 25 and whose parents got acrimoniously divorced when they were 13. Now at age 26 for them the clear priority is to stabilize their schizophrenia in treatment though, were they to experience no effects of schizophrenia they would not coincidentally be happier and better adjusted than I, they would still probably benefit from something like talk therapy to work through the impact their parents divorce had on their life and how they view the world, how they meet and choose partners, how they approach relationships etc etc. 

All stuff that can significantly impact peoples' quality of life, but when you are experiencing scary auditory hallucinations, it is hard to address.

In my own case, from visiting and revisiting the autism spectrum, it doesn't rise to the explanatory power or impactfulness of the other shit I've written about in this series. It was worth some of my time, but not much more, admittedly I will probably have to invest more time, because this outcome is unsatisfactory to my white friends.

So while I thought I was wrapping up, in a disordered manner, I have to revisit loose threads of this question of resource allocation. How does someone wind up with a late diagnosis of Autism, or for that matter ADHD etc? 

Clearly this person has likely met some threshold of behaviour, where they 'passed' as ordinary in whatever dimension, and maybe because there wasn't an army of white people engaged in the habit of spotting them.

They need some contact with the construct in question, at which point they likely come across a list of symptoms and via confirmation bias - self-diagnose. eg. Yeah I really hate the smell of garbage, and I like putting my tools in order and I prefer playing video games than playing sport. etc.

After which, someone might then seek out a tool online, in the case of autism, the 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes' test, and another one.

This is still self diagnosis though, and I had a friend who upon learning of the RME test, self administered it in a gamified way trying to get higher and higher (and therefore, less autistic) scores. But I can easily imagine the scenario where the opposite is true, if one wanted a diagnosis of being 'on the spectrum' it would not be hard to recognise the emotion based on the picture and choose the obviously wrong answer.

But assuming someone engages with good faith, then I feel the results would dictate whether it is worth going any further like seeing a professional.

At which point, I'll introduce the stand up set by Janet McNamara where she talks about how many times she has failed to get a diagnosis of autism, after experiencing frequent suggestions she get tested for autism.

The set is funny, and while I'm sure it is embellished to create a more amusing world where people go to see an expert in autism and they use some simple heuristic like 'your IQ is too low for autism' or 'your clothing tags don't bother you therefore its a no' which I'm sure happens sporadically because dazzling incompetence is everywhere, but unlikely to happen systemically and Janet says she has taken the RME test and just aced it all.

What I'd draw attention to are comments that youtube helpfully cycled through while I watched the video that for me cause me to infer a bunch of muddiness in the diagnostic issue:

Man, the whole "everyone thinks you're autistic except for the person evaluating you for autism" thing is so relatable. I think I've counted five nurses/doctors/counselors/therapists etc who've mentioned that they think I'm autistic, but whenever I actually sit down to speak with someone for an evaluation, I'm always dismissed for one reason or another. It's really freaking annoying.

What annoys me about this comment, is this person is saying 'people who aren't experts think I might be this thing they've heard of, but when I talk to an expert in this thing they give me an expert opinion that I'm not. It's really freaking annoying.' what I don't know, is whether they are annoyed with the everyone, or if they are annoyed with the evaluators. It would be frustrating if people who do not know what they are talking about refused to accept the opinion of someone who does, let alone someones. But if its the reverse 'I'm so annoyed experts don't agree with people who don't know what they are talking about' then my sympathy is for everyone who has to live in this society.

Her therapist knew that the doctors didn't ask enough specific questions for a diagnosis of "being too specific" 😂

This comment when I first saw it, I only half read it so found it more inane than it actually turns out to be, which is pointing out a kind of irony. I must have originally only read the 'her therapist knew that the doctors didn't ask enough specific questions..." at which point I probably became insensed. This is Popper's original criticism of psychology - his comparisons of Freud to Einstein, where Einstein's theory of relativity was empirically falsifiable, Einstein bet big on being right or wrong and an eclipse of something proved it. By contrast, everything just proved Freud right, and this is a running joke I have with my Aunt whom I go to galleries with, and I insist that all art is phallic, and if you are looking for a way to prove any piece of art is actually about a penis, you'd be surprised at how easy it is to spot the penis in any artwork. But in this comment based on a bit about the therapist questioning whether Janet disclosed to the last autism diagnostician that she wore a life jacket for two years, we get this pseudoscientific mindset displayed that if you have convinced yourself that you or someone else is autistic, then you are not actually seeking a diagnosis of autism, but you are diagnosing autism expertise. That is just arse backward.

Honestly, this is why I haven't gotten officially tested. I know I'm autistic but those tests were created by people who observed autism in others, not people who actually know the inner experience of autism.

Yeah okay, but at some point we need some system to determine what private school girl gets 4 hours to sit her final exam and what private school girl gets the regular 3 hours.  So there's autism where the kid is like non-verbal, has sensory meltdowns, needs early intervention to even have a chance to live independently as an adult someday.

Thene there's kids that would previously have been diagnosed with AS, and they may get bullied, screw up their face at pungent foods, misread social cues, but historically provided the bullying doesn't reach levels where an adult would be charged with criminal assault. They do fine, they form social groups around playing DnD, they buy the box set of LOTR and actually watch it for fun, they don't get sports and work in IT or accounting or some shit and likely generally have better life outcomes than many of the kids that bullied them in primary school.

Then there's me, undiagnosed, loves the smell of wet dog, will try anything once, never been bullied, often wind up giving the toast, like sport but don't like stats and would probably rather die than ever have to sit through LOTR again in whole or part, unless its the cut where every time Sam Gamgee takes a step it cuts back to the scene where he says "with this step it'll be the furthest I've ever been from the shire."

What resources should be allocated to me from the spectrum? I would argue, almost none. What then is left? 

By my biases and prejudices, what appears to be left, is the opportunity to talk about yourself at length in a way that others, should not fucking care.

There is a moment right at the end of Janet McNamara's set, a set about how three times experts have rejected the diagnosis of ASD, including that she absolutely aced the reading the mind in the eyes test. The whole set is delivered in a cadence and posture and outfit that is evocative, to me, of Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man, and then right at the very end, Janet kind-of empahasis kind-of code switches, to more of a "That's my time thank you you've been a wonderful audience." Like a Vegas magician or something.

It was too thin a slice, so I watched some of her appearance on a podcast to get a sense of how she comes across when she is not performing.  I cannot stress how little of this actual podcast interview I watched, largely because the subject matter is painful to me. 

The host, Kory Andreas, comes across as less autism coded than Janet. Literally the only cue locatable is that Kory tells us she is AuDHD. Janet comes across as (to my ear) culturally similar to comedian Robby Hoffman, whom to the public record is not autistic, but they have very similar accents, with Robby being Brooklyn and Janet being Boston. The eye contact and rapport, the cadence pretty much everything else I would describe as 'neurotypical'. 

Now I am atypical-white it seems, in that I don't have this hobby of trying to sniff out autism, so maybe I just don't see what I'm not looking for. In my life I've met one or two kids that remind me in any way of the one ASD person I personally know.

I've met a bajillion others that tell me about their autism, but that is just one of the many ways in which they do not resemble the ASD person I know. 

My End of The Spectrum Extends Beyond The Flying Fucks

So maybe, whatever, here's how I'd put this baby to bed. It's November 2008, and I'm ladelling soup on Wall Street. The person handing out the dinner rolls next to me, whispers to me what each person has suffered so I can dictate if they get soup or no soup, as the extraordinary times demand.

"This person lost their house, they had to move into their childrens basement." A ladle of soup. That's bleak. That's having what used to be called autism in the 80s and 90s.

"This person lost their job, a new graduate, their young but they are going to have to move home, their big city dreams are dead." A ladle of soup. Tough times don't last, tough people do. This is the kid that can function, but has to cognitively compensate for their mind blindness and was bullied in school, what would have been diagnosed as AS up until 2013.

"This person lost their brunch. They had a lovely brunch planned, but it took them so long to find a park, that then they were told they had to wait up to an hour for a table inside but they could sit el fresco but it's late fall, it's pretty cold and they were worried they'd get worse tableservice." Fuck these people, I don't fucking care. What they have, are the problems of having preferences, and somehow they've been enabled to bitch and fucking moan about it. No soup for them, these are people who are indistinguishable from somebody performing autism. They have no diagnosis, they just identify with liking habit and routine maybe, and don't like glare, and think beef rendang is a bit pungent.

If there's anywhere I am going to be on the spectrum, it is in that last group. I don't think anyone should give me soup, I'm not even interested in talking about my preferences, or medical conditions in general. I also have no fucking idea how many different potential explanations there could be, but I'm certainly not convinced by the most popular one.

 

"One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This"

Disclosure - I haven't read the book "One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This" by Canadian author Omar El Akkad.

The titular 'this' being nominally the Isreali ground invasion and bombardment of the Hamas administered, Palestinian territory known as the Gaza Strip, and often simply Gaza.

But also, in terms of flowers and chocolates, I understand the title to also just be a general socialogical observation. It is very akin to Peter Boghossian (somebody who predicts for example, that the West is so on track to capitulate to the spread of Islam, that they may as well just surrender now - something I for the record, evaluate to an embarrassingly garbage take) predicting maybe circa 2023 that the 'awokening' would transmute into gaslighting, people would claim that they were never into cancel culture, BLM, DEI, gender affirming care etc. which I feel by the cover of the aforementioned book, though likely ideologically the polar opposite of the Omar El Akkad, is a reasonable prediction of human behaviour.

To some extent I read the assertion of the title both as plausible and a kind of rephrasing of "Stein's Law" which Cory Doctorow, a fellow Canadian author has been sighting a lot in his most recent book tour (quarterly book tour?):

"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." ~ Herbert Stein, 1989

Which as far as law's go, is kind of a truism, but what it might free you from is a sense that you need to arrest something that is by its nature constrained and doomed to fail.

But I think the innovative thing is the paradoxical title the "One day" coupled with "Always been".

I'm going to save my observations about fashion for another spot in another post, to which I think this kind of revisionism definitely applies and thought I'd interrogate the personal with regards to whether I have drifted towards that day where I will always have been against the Isreali response to the October 7th attack by Hamas. Am I tempted to revise?

The answer is almost certainly, as far as temptation. Have I revised? No. But nor have I been good at publishing on this blog for example, my position, or evolving position.

Certain things are documented though, like I have always thought the establishment of Israel was a shit idea. I don't like, nor trust Benjamin Netanyahu to do any good by Israel and I worry that Ben likes Hamas and Hamas likes Ben. I maintain ire at Hamas for attacking in the first place, as a contravention of 'when your enemy is making a mistake, don't interrupt them'  I do kind of believe there was an implicit or even coincidental triple-alliance of Likud-Iran-Hamas as three unpopular regimes that parasitically benefitted from getting into shit with each other.

None of that changed, but that's not "always" being against "this" the fact is, I find it hard to appreciate the destruction wrought by the IDF on the Gaza strip, now what I have been 'always' opposed to was Benajamin Netanyahu remaining in office post Oct 7th. his ability to remain there has, diminished my opinion of the larger Israeli population whom at some point become culpable for not removing him, just as I can pinpoint the moment the Republican Party in the United States became culpable for not removing President Trump being the second senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump where in my opinion under the leadership of Mitch McConnell, the Republicans demonstrated their complete lack of interest in upholding the amended constitution of the United States.

Like I'd argue that they should have impeached him earlier, much earlier on ethical, philosophical, pragmatic grounds, but it was certainly determined by the second impeachment trial.

There was a point, somewhere between year one and two of the Gaza responce where I saw a news story saying that basically Netanyahu refused to negotiate for the release of Israeli hostages, that was a determined point for me, where I essentially felt validated in my lack of confidence that Netanyahu could do anything but further damage Israel's standing in the world and region. I suspect Netanyahu is the kind of political character that actually basically now needs regional warfare to continue forever, though I've heard other analysts say that Israel has a long history of basically stirring up shit to kill any two-state solution or even regional peace-talks in the cradle.

I can support cynicism that the Netanyahu strategy was to bomb Hamas into releasing the hostages, but in a realpolitik sense, I accept the license of pretext up to the point that someone says "okay okay we'll release the hostages" and you say "nah, I think we'll keep bombing and embargoing and advancing ground troops" for me, once your bluff is called there is no longer any ambiguity as to whether Netanyahu is playing the transactional-analysis model game "now I've got you you son of a bitch" which is basically where you abandon all consideration of proportionality.

And I was open to for example, Rory Stewarts position he expressed prior to the release of an interview on 10 November, 2023 that Israel's response to October 7th with x number of rockets launch had already exceeded proportionality. 

Certainly his interviewer, or interlocutor Coleman Hugh's lost my interest by his own coverage of the conflict and his repeated assertion of a vacuous idiom 'good fences make good neighbours' which I fucking bet is the kind of common nonsense we discover to be entirely opposite in practice, like comparing I don't know - North and South Korea, East and West Berlin, the "Iron Curtain" of the USSR and Western Europe, in comparison to the virtually non-existent "fences" of the European Union and the United States - yes at one point the 'states' were individual colonies, that then united, and post union, they had this fence called the "Mason-Dixon" line that seperated free states from slave states and did that make good neighbours? Or did it make for a bloody civil war? 

And consider the relative strength of fences between the Canada-US border, and the Mexico-US border, which neighbours would Coleman Hughes consider gooder? Sorry to rant, but it was painful to see Coleman Hugh's be so fucking dumb and repeatedly mouthing this dumb platitude like it was some kind of argument.

As of recent writing, Netanyahu has now made some statement in open defiance of Israel's highest judicial branch, whatever they call it. Israel may be the only country on earth, going backwards faster than the United States, and the modern state of Israel, I don't think gets to claim any continuity with the Kingdom of Judah or its northern neighbour the Kingdom of Israel as though and certainly not the Jewish Bible's claims of settlement by exiles out of Egypt lead by Moses to the promised land over 40 years. So the Lindy effect would predict that the Israel experiment will dissolve before the US experiment, and if not that, in less time than it takes the US to cease existing as the nation we recognize.

I was always opposed to Hamas' October 7th attack, which is not the same as being opposed to a two state solution, or the de-occupation and embargo of the Palestinian territories. I oppose it because it seemed an obvious way to give grist to the mill to make everything worse. 

What I'm also open to, and have not been able to determine, is the extent that October 7th has to be contextualised in terms of what I'd call an Israeli whack-a-mole policy, which is to give a banal example, an employer doesn't like negative feedback so they take away the suggestion box, then staff email complaints to managers so they start issuing people with written warnings about complaints, and then staff post on a 3rd party website like Glassdoor their complaints, so the employer hires hackers to find out who is posting to glassdoor until sooner than fix anything people just quit their jobs.

In the same way, it is extremely plausible to me that under Netanyahu and other administrations, Palestinian's peaceful means of opposition were quashed, it's leaders seeking diplomacy jailed etc. such that all that is left are the violent extremists and violent means.

It seems very plausible, that the security wall needs to be revised as from what I can find the suicide bombing casualties it stopped seemed to number around 40 casualties, and then since 1996 it stopped all those suiced bombings, and then Oct 7th 1300 casualties 2023 which seems to maybe be an example of the concept of 'risk homeostasis' so the safer you make things, the more catastrophic the failures.

So I don't feel like I'm doing any revising here. I guess the real question is, do I feel any temptation to tell the grandkids that I was there at the protests chanting from the river to the sea? No. I was also opposed to the popular protest movements execution. I actually still strongly feel it has been by-and-large symbiotic to the Netanyahu regime, in the same sinister way that in 2008 when people protested the CCPs human rights abuses, the CCP was able to point to the Chinese people and say 'look the world hates you' and I feel confident it is a matter of fact that Benjamin Netanyahu used the global protests to entrench himself and his response to Oct 7th, deny due process of his own criminal charges within Israel.

On the converse, there's the indirect effect that the global protests in their ability to embolden Netanyahu have given him enough rope to vastly diminish Israel's standing in the world, with it now being in many places a campaign strength for a candidate to boast about their refusal of financial support from AIPAC. But the bill has likely been paid by Palestinian civilian martyrs, and I feel I would have rathered seen protesters taking to the streets and chanting 'Netanyahu resign' than 'From the River to the Sea' or Genocide or anything else. 

An Interesting Discussion featuring Allyship

 2026 I feel has been a year to demonstrate the unifying power of sport. The rise of the beta-male in the form of silicon valley cult-of-personality founders, is probably a painful and uncomfortable disillusionment process whereby the world discovers that the sentiment behind 'Revenge of the Nerds' lied to us. The nerds turn out to have the same capacity to be moral reprobates as the jocks. 

On top of that, it turns out making a useful software application, or at least owning a useful software application, once, that is now shit but scalable to the point that you have hundreds of billions of dollars on paper and can tweet about how maybe Hitler had some good ideas, is much much worse than the worst athlete who can compete in one event at one place at any one time and then endorses sportsbetting or whatever.

The world cup is great, the offside rule is great. FIFA as one of the most corrupt institutions in the world and all the problems and protests and despicable grift that comes with the world cup is bad, but the world cup itself is great.

And it kicked off while we were still awaiting the outcome of the NBA finals with Knicks v Spurs, and that was great, with just the atmosphere in New York broadcast around the world of a long suffering fandom that would even turn against Elmo for making some equivocating inclusive pap.

Then like yesterday give or take 16 timezones, Trump opened his big old mouth to brag about how he'd gotten on the phone and pressured FIFA to lift the one match suspension on the USMTs leading tornament scorer for the red-card he got last game. 

This interference meant that Belgium finally found itself playing one of the most important games in football history, where they literally had to eliminate the US team to save the integrity of football. Which they did in style, eliminating them 4-1 and football is saved for now.

I was perusing this climate this morning when I stumbled upon a Novara News story about how it had taken David Baddiel 25 years to sit down with UK footballer Jason Lee to apologise for sketches Baddiel did where he dressed up as Jason Lee in blackface with a pineapple on his head and mocked his abilities as a player.

That sent me down a youtube-hole going to grab context, and Fantasy Football League hasn't aged well for Skinner and Baddiel. Now the "25 years to apologise" headline actually took place 4 years ago, with Baddiel appearing on Jason Lee's podcast to apologise and then discuss issues of race, stereotyping and discrimination in football and life in general. That's the video I will embed:

Novara are dredging it up because Baddiel is about to star in a BBC documentary based on his book "Jews Don't Count" where he explores his experience or perception that Antisemitism is treated differently/in a discounted way by otherwise politically progressive people.

The whole conversation is one of the more interesting ones, with Baddiel in essence having a long-overdue bill he can't pay, but also he and Jason have much common ground.

At the 30 minute mark, the two start discussing 'allyship' a term I first heard from a contributer to the "it gets better" Dan Savage of Savage Love fame initiative way back when. Now to be clear I had heard of the concept 'alliance' and 'ally' before but not in the modern pre-packaged-off-the-shelf way.

I wouldn't say 'ally' was appropriated, but it was definitely skunked in left-wing identity politics to basically not mean a strategic alliance, but a unilateral form of fealty to an "optimised" morality. As in my experience of 'Allyship' that as a term differs significantly from how it would be historically employed.

So, perhaps the most well known branding of "Allies" was the 'Allied forces' in WW2 that generally at its core is England-US-USSR and of course, that 'England' is not just the UK but also the commonwealth so Canada, ANZACs, India etc. plus French resistance and even German saboteurs, Italian partisans etc. all made sacrifices in the name of that alliance. And we can see that there's a massive ideological divide between the USSR and the other Allied parties, forming an alliance based on mutual interest, a negotiation namely a kind of 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' basis with absolutely no actual commitment to friendship as was the case with the NATO and the USSR.

Vs. 'Allyship' which comes up in this conversation with Lee and Baddiel, and another phrase put to Baddiel by Lee as a question in terms of 'are you doing the work?' a question I feel that Baddiel performs poorly on, in his answer, namely by stating (and I'm going off recent recollection here) that he is mostly focused on Antisemitism at the moment and then expresses some solidarity, with the conversation lead by Lee into a further interesting space about supporting women's football, which again Baddiel comes across poorly by Lee essentially asking him when he last went to the women's football game - so Baddiel is walking into a bunchola of coffee tables in this interview.

This sentiment though is what I would point to as the skunking of 'alliance' implied in the neologism of 'allyship' which is, if you want to address racism in sports fandom and media, Allyship promotes an idea that you can only do so by 'purchasing' a package or bundle, that you are obliged to also address sexism in sports, homophobia in sports, racism in literature etc. etc.

Now this makes an intuitive sense, and when I was an RMIT student in Melbourne that constantly took me past the state library which is the regular gathering point of protest movements, I recall noticing in particular a protest flying Lebonese flags, almost certainly protesting some action taken by the IDF on their southern boarder (this was over a decade ago, so not the current occupation that has been tanking the peace efforts in the Iran conflict) and it was the war on terror and I remember just on the eye test, feeling like I was seeing an almost wholly Lebanese community protest, roughly the same size as protests against other conflicts at the time like protests against Chinese occupations of Tibet or suppression of citizen rights in Hong Kong SAZ etc. And just noticing the lack of solidarity as an intuitive weakness of such protests - that it is basically no good to turn a blind eye to contraventions of international law and/or human rights abuses when it is happening to disenfranchised citizens of Burma/Myanmar and only turning up when it is happening to you when the local government won't let you go to an Air-BnB on the surf coast for mothers day because apparantly there's a global pandemic going on and case numbers are still rising.

So yes, hypocrisy or egocentrism does make a kind of intuitive sense, but when Allyship went hyper in the wake of George Floyd's death in 2020, it was more apparent that it (intersectionality) quickly transforms into an incredible strategic weakness. It places a burden upon 'progressives' operationally and tactically to distribute their resources equitably across everything necessary to attain a kind of Utopia, an ideal society where there simply is no marginalisation, instead of being able to allocate resources to mere progress, Barack Obama's reminder that 'better is good' a variation on the idiom 'Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.'

But beyond that, it is simply the sheer cost of Allyship is incredibly onerous, and even more incredible when compared to the costs of being 'conservative' with the additional suicidal layer, that Allyship assigned people of goodwill to 'the right.' This line of criticism being typically described as 'purity tests' but few point out, that you are taking (for example) straight white men who are pro-marriage equality, pro-freedom of expression, pro-civil liberties, pro-democracy, pro-wealth equality, pro-rule of law, pro-representation etc. and then if they are not the complete package for example, have a divergent view on affirmative action on college admissions then they are simply assigned to the enemy. A literal 'you are not welcome here' with an implicit 'go and join the right-wing populists'

Now, I don't want to overstate the problem of Allyship, its adverse effect of its operational pitfalls, is that the far-left simply did not have the popularity to hold this position with any real leverage, it was a false dichotomy that you are either an 'ally' or an enemy. Mostly the far-left could be safely ignored, people could simply opt out of allyship and instead just try and do what they can. But in some small number almost certainly there were people who bought into the false dichotomy presented and wound up in the manosphere or something when they needn't have before.

What is often forgotten is that it's hard to get people to do anything. One of the easiest ways to get people to do stuff is to pay them to do it, especially when they are under some sort of economic duress. News may cover the sensational, clashes of political factions in our polarized times in both real and virtual spaces, but most people just kind of go to work and most of about half of them will talk football or some other local dominant sporting code.

By comparison, what proportion of women yoga practitioners actually become anti-vaxers that feed their children through 'birding' or other such weird alternate medicine quackery? My wager is few enough that those that do are still able to be 'characters' in your social circles.

And of course, bringing us to bio-psycho-social factors, that is a complicated way I understand to say, that who your friends are isn't an accident. It isn't random. Because it's possible that the weirdest person you know, knows heaps of like minded people because they've gravitated together.

Bringing us back to Lee and Baddiel's conversation. I feel you can witness David Baddiel's self-consciousness constantly fighting this temptation to explain - 'at the time...' and Jason Lee does bring up his issue that he doesn't just hold Baddiel responsible for wearing the makeup and playing the role, but realising there's all these other people around saying 'this is fine' and Lee asks if anyone spoke up in the production. 

Frank Skinner is on record, expressing his own incredulity that Baddiel came out of the dressing room and they looked at eachother and nobody thought 'what the fuck are we doing?' and I find this impulse by David and Lee to want to contextualise what happened - Lee to understand how bad mid90s racism was and Baddiel to understand himself.

I'm not British, I played football as a kid but in Australia it was called 'soccer' I went to an international student residency for Uni and so was drawn into the 2002 Japan-Korea World Cup perhaps earlier than all but the most gregarious sports fans of my generation - SBS australia's best terrestrial TV channel with the lowest ratings heavily promoted a book that was the history of football in Australia titled "Sheilas, Wogs and Pooftas" by Johnny Warren that was published in 2006 at the cusp of the Socceroos qualifying for the world cup just before the regions were redefined to almost guarantee us a birth in the group stage, while Italy and Paraguay and Bolivia can now routinely miss out.

As such, I have to retrospect my own context for Fantasy Football League on BBC2 from 1996-1998 and I feel there is plenty of interest there. There is also this beguiling challenge, of how can you explain the mid90s to a young person, or for that matter like the 70s to me or the 50s to me or the middle-ages to me.

So like, I can think of two Australian potential analogues to Skinner and Baddiel's show, the first is very likely unflattering to Fantasy Football League - 'The Footy Show' which ran through the 90s on Australia's worst and most watched TV station 'Channel 9' and into the 2000s, and it existed as this strange kind of pocket dimension. You could be surfing channels as people used to do until the advent of streaming, and stumble across 'The Footy Show' and think you were suddenly watching a show broadcast from the 1960s. Athletes and media personalities of the day struggling with concepts like homosexuality and race decades after most of media had caught up to the Golden Girls.

A phenomena like 'The Footy Show' serve as perfect rebuttals to sentiments like 'It's 2016' or 'it's 2022' or 'it's 2026' where in a global perspective we have people no doubt forming a polycule with 8 genderless language model based agents in some kind of cybersexloop, and a child bride is marrying her first cousin somewhere in a hunter gatherer tribe and when she isn't presence will spend her menses in a cloistered red-hut and they coexist at the same point in human history. Within these extremes, you will likely be impressed by somebody who can run a regression analysis that cuts down your inventory holding costs in shitty Microsoft Excel software, and you will likely be impressed by somebody who can handmake artisanal soaps. 

But Skinner and Baddiel's show could exist in the mid90s but be in many ways representative of a football culture that was not in synch with the broader media culture, in some cultural cul-de-sac where dependent on the observer, learning of this blackface bullying campaign for the first time might see the players OR the time period as anachronistic.

The second potential local analogue is likely unflattering to the analogue - Recovery, a low budget youth television show that ran on ABC in Australia that as far as I know never had any racism controversies. It's controversies where Greenday swearing on live television at 10am on a Saturday morning and shit in the early-to-mid90s. But when I watch clips of Fantasy Football League a particular 90s ethos comes through that is detached from race, rather it's what I would call the Nirvana effect.

My understanding is that while Nirvana in reality were this Seattle based band the incrementally evolved out of the punk scene and then adopted the real calling card of 90s sound from late 80s band The Pixies - the quiet-loud-quiet-loud pattern exemplified by Nirvana and early Radiohead before Kurt Cobain committed suicide and Radiohead having exhausted the Pixies catalogue shifted to Aphex Twin - to the record industry Nirvana just came out of nowhere and blew everything up.

Youtuber Todd in the Shadows has this series called 'Train Wreckords' where he looks at albums put out by formally popular acts that are so damaging the act never quite recovers their reputation, and sometimes even perish, and within this he has a whole category called 'Nirvana ruined my career' or something, where he describes Nirvana as 'the hardest left turn in music history' 

The impact being that the industry record labels just kind of signed artists for a while, scrambling, sprawling in the way hacks always do, but instead of seeing the success of Elton John and then scouting for someone else who can sit at a piano and sing ballads producing an 80s wave of middle aged men in suits having hits like Phil Collins, Steve Wynwood, Lou Gramm of Foreigner etc. and these ballads ushered in younger long haired power ballardeers like Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Warrant and Guns'n'Roses who were the biggest band in the world right up until Nirvana.

A&R executives at record labels felt they understood the world of Michael Jackson, Madonna and even Guns'n'Roses and Metallica. There was a formula, Nirvana's surge to music supremacy shocked them, disoriented them. Then you get all these weird things going on in the mid90s, rap keeps evolving into hip-hop, but also alternate rock, college radio becomes a thing, you have indy rock like the Smashing Pumpkins, heralds of Nu-metal like Faith No More, The Red Hot Chilli Peppers through Rage Against the Machine (the heralds are awesome, the Nu-Metal, in hindsight quite an enjoyable joke), Industrial acts in Nine Inch Nails and Ministry adjacent to them you have an emergent prog-metal in Tool and also the Butthole Surfers, you have these gimmick acts that are actually good musically, kind of artrock like Ween (the Beatles if there were no Beatles), Primus, Wheezer, Crash Test Dummies and King Missile. 

You had the daughters of Siouxie and the Banshees coming through - Hole, Garbage, The Cranberries, The Breeders, Veruca Salt, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, PJ Harvey. Now obviously indy music still exists, some get big like Arcade Fire, The Flaming Lips all that crap, what's hard to describe about the 3-4 year period between 1993 and 1997 between Nevermind and The Spice Girls, is that in that window if there was a Taylor Swift then nobody would have given a fuck about Taylor Swift. 

Nobody in youth culture, really gave a flying fuck about straight up pop for a few years and that permeated everything.

And Britain made its contributions to this moment, it produced the aforementioned Radiohead and Garbage (actually they might be Irish) also Oasis, Blur and The Verve though this was both the tail end of "The Second British Invasion" of the 1980s and I feel the UK while making significant contributions to the 90s that cannot be denied, were also I think the nostalgia-pump that killed the 90s because they just fucking love pop, and there were hints of this in Oasis I feel, probably Blur too who accidently blew up with "Song 2" but it was the Spice Girls that restored a status quo of manufactured pop and served a femininity that was not tomboy femme like the Gen X frontwomen of 90s music that had been starved since Janet Jackson's last single or something.

Recovery was a 90s show, I believe iconic host Dylan Lewis was literally a street performer and gigging musician plucked off the streets a la Robin Williams for Mork, but given a saturday morning music show with a set made up like a sharehouse kitchen and suits from a thrift store awkwardly interviewing international guests and grew from a tiny little low budget show into this phenomena before collapsing because they couldn't hold the core talent together because the budget was $20.

When I glimpse Fantasy League Football getting the clips for context, I see Skinner and Baddiel sitting on a crappy couch that looks like it is straight out of a public housing estate on a set and David Baddiel with an open beer on set and I think - this is two guys who were given a low budget show and it blew up. The kind of experimental programming that almost grabbed people off the streets, but the reality was they grabbed people from live music venues and comedy clubs in the 90s, much as industry grabbed women and other underrepresented groups and preferably both from live music venues and comedy clubs in the mid-2010s to redress a lack of diversity in front of camera, but without having the patience to resolve the pipeline issues, giving us UK panel shows featuring the talented Holly Walsh or the talented Jo Brand and three other (comedically) untalented women.

In the 90s there was a similar thing happening but it didn't have the pitfalls of identity politics which is namely the pipeline issue where they just went to a comedy club, in comedy scenes dominated but not monopolised by white men, they gave out development deals to the dominant. 

Now I want to stress I don't know what the actual context of Fantasy Football League was. I understand the gimmick, having celebrities play fantasy football on a show, and I take at his word that Baddiel says they thought of it as a fan show - from this I infer that similar to Kevin Smith's Clerks, and later Lena Dunham's Girls there was again this very grunge principle of suspending what would come to be known as the 'image crafting' of media, or to use Australian ratings standards the PG-13 illusion that kids don't say 'fuck' and 'shit' and 'retard' and 'cunt' and look at pornography and smoke cigarettes and do horrible things by age 12 - to an extent media has this tendency to try and benchmark the world as more presentable than it is, be it the finance segment on nightly news right before the fluff piece about Chippy the waterskiing squirrel or Joey the occassionally employed actor and Phoebe the unemployed daft hippy affording luxurious apartments in Manhatten on Friends, or SJP affording her own apartment and extensive wardrobe and shoe collection and martinis writing a sex column once a week in Sex & The City.

What I'd say contrasts particularly between then and now, was in the 1990s fascism was entirely inert in populist movements, between the fall of the Berlin wall and the fall of the World Trade Center so 1989 to 2001 it was the end of history. Politically the UK and US had left wing parties in that had pretty much identical economic policy to the right wing parties of the 1980s, referred to as 'The Third Way' in Australia everything was reversed, we had a left wing party in the 80s, and right wingers from the early 90s through 2007, and virtually identical economic policy.

Furthermore, you had no fucking chance in hell at reviving Fascism or Communism in the 90s there were too many people alive to remember what a disastrous fucking idea they are, September 11 really gave permission globally to bring bad ideas back.

Don't get me wrong, things were very unequal, and in particular Neoliberalism was fucked, in Australia Pauline Hanson - our Trumpian figure emerged, and Berlesconi the pre-Trump was probably already active in Italy in the 90s, the bad idea that could not die and described to me by a local in 2007 already as a zombie, Trump I think was already doing his bullshit 'I'm going to run for president' and then abandoning it, like all the foundations for the worst shit in the world right now was there in the 90s, not even mentioning Gates and Jobs and Silicone Valley. Chomsky was already writing that the New World Order was in fact multi-national corporations, and that there was only one party 'the business party' you can watch Christopher Hitchens on Charlie Rose debate a panel of feminists including Naomi Wolf having a discussion where you have your answer to 'I wonder what Christopher Hitchens would have said about third wave feminism?' kids shows like Captain Planet and many others were already teaching kids about climate change then called 'The Greenhouse effect' leading to Sarah Pascoe's appearance on Frankie Boyle's New World Order where she responds to Gretta Thunberg with 'we were all taught about climate change in school too and then we grew up and got busy' and the Israel-Palestine conflict was a shit show and on the news, and the US did some unpopular war in Iraq that caused a Bush president to lose the Republicans the White House and then a Clinton became a presidential candidate. Artists were worried about their job security because of this thing called 'digital art' and was it art or was it garbage? Seinfeld aired an episode in 1993 called 'The Outing' that reflected the progressive actual attitude toward homosexuality of the time which was that it was okay to be gay, unless you were straight because you want to date women, and again Seinfeld was still less progressive than the much older sitcom Golden Girls and yet two decades ahead of "The Footy Show" on Channel 9 Australia 

The point being, I think it is very hard for people who didn't live the 90s to understand what a strange and myopic time 'the end of history' was. Relating to my speculative context of Skinner and Baddiel's Fantasy Football League sketches, I'm inclined to think of the South Park Episode "Chef goes Nanners" which aired in 2000 but is still pre-9-11-2001, so still end-of-history:

After this, she is able to continue her argument, on the basis that it's sometimes necessary to change symbols of a society as it naturally evolves to adopt new values and priorities. When the turn of Stan's team comes, Kyle gives their side of the issue by saying that killing is just a natural part of life and should not be a big deal. Shortly afterwards, Chef stands up and demands they address the racist aspect of the flag, only for him and the rest of the adults to discover that the children had not even perceived the flag as racist; Instead, they saw the flag depicting a man being hanged without registering his color, and they had just thought that the cause of the wedge issue was homicide.

Part of the end-of-history zeitgeist was color-blindness, kids were raised to understand as a priority, that all people were equal in dignity and multiculturalism was a big paradigm, what was on the DL was the LBJ great societies speech paradigm recognizing the cumulative effects of marginalization, but the end of history was this 'progress is a matter of time' Communism was defeated emphatically as an ideology and only Liberal democracy was left.

The rug-pull of the 80s of course, was the Neoliberalism had not defeated Communism, it was actually the post-war period that had vastly outperformed Stalinist-Russia and Maoist-China. Most of Hayek's 'Road to Serfdom' predictions are neither as far reaching nor impressive, or even remotely accurate compared to Marx's writing in the prior century. Hayek's 'Road to Serfdom' is proving to actually be a roadmap on how to get back to serfdom, rather than a cautionary profilactic. Keynes wins.

Anyway, that's all likely obtuse, but the point being, if you are stuck in the fishbowl of the end of history, and TV producers are doing these Nirvanesque experiments with just taking a bet on nobodies in the pursuit of authenticity, a complete lack of polish and artifice, then I think you get the situation where Baddiel comes out of a dressing room in blackface with a pineapple on his head and Skinner sees him and they look at eachother and they say 'alright.'

None of this, is to endorse the joke - because the one thing I can't get away from, and I experienced it in the 90s and 2000s myself, was that I think the incredible - as in hard to believe thing, is that Skinner and Baddiel didn't think there were masses of scary racist football fans.

For my experience, what came up more in my St Whites Coed school for White Children, Whitehaven was more embodied in Southpark's Mr Garrison, which was the closeted gay man as comedy, Seinfeld had said 'not that there is anything wrong with that' and I thought of this bit I could do, where I was going to 'come out' as 'homophobic' because there was this 'how is it "brave" to come out? Nobody cares' and in my cohort people were more confused and offended by effeminate men trying to act misogynestic and chauvinistic than they ever would be by a man being gay, and the first guy I tried my new bit on surprised me with 'oh good, the thought of men using their god given penises on eachother is just wrong' and I hadn't realised just how country that bording student was, and I told him I was doing a bit and gave him shit then, and then he went to another country boarding student and said 'hey he thinks it's okay to be gay' and that guy said 'yeah gays are good.' and my friend had this sudden and shocking revelation that he had been raised inside a snow globe upside down, and I haven't seen him in a while but we gave him so much shit then and we would give him shit about being homophobic at age 17 in the late 90s and a member of scouts still today.

For me though, that might be my first experience that moral progress is not uniformly distributed, that cul-de-sacs exist, and later I would arrive at being generally sceptical that moral progress is a communal thing at all. Which means that Skinner and Baddiel were wrong, and behind the curve in the mid90s but progressed far more in 25 years than John "Sam" Newman of The Footy Show and his fanbase that resonated with his anachronistic blackface that was widely condemned in the media in 1999 that not only related to a black people, but a devastated and grossly unequal indigenous people who excel in the AFL code as many of the finest athletes in the world.

But presentism is also wrong, to understand how the fuck that happened and why it took so fucking long to result in a personal apology - something very strange was happening.

Baptism vs Sobriety

It's a bit late in the piece for a subheading, but this is the last interesting thing I want to conclude on. It is my impression that most people don't understand forgiveness. Their intuition is something like that a grudge is power you hold over someone and forgiveness is a relinquishing of power, a forfeiting of a fortified position. Forgiveness is something you give yourself, and I feel Jason Lee is amazing, I'd never heard of him until two days ago, and he has put up with a lot of shit.

The 25 year avoidance by David Baddiel I think shows in the interview as preserving a rawness to the wound, and I think again Baddiel as a product of our times goes straight in with the unequivocal unreserved apology, and Jason Lee's impact statement comes later.

I feel it is impressive that Baddiel most likely is just sitting with his shame when he listens to Jason, and he is experiencing the emotions he spent 25 years avoiding and repressing through rationalization.

One of the best things I think Baddiel does say in his apology, is that he is going to keep apologizing for it and never stop apologizing for it.

I am calling this aspect 'sobriety' and differentiating it from 'baptism' baptism is the idea that one can be redeemed, to have your 'sins' washed away, an alchemical transformation from base lead into gold. 

Sobriety I'm appropriating as the recognition that in this case, you are a racist and always will be, and the racism just has to stop. In the exact same way that for example, It's not that I had a drinking problem, I have a drinking problem and so 14 years ago I stopped. 

Like I don't want to sound like Ibram X Kendi that guy is a fucking moron, and 2022 is not 2025. No that's not a typo, I think though that the zeitgeist has even moved on from this discussion. With each passing day it will grow harder and harder to explain to younger and younger people the context of 'Allyship' and 'doing the work' and why two men discussing a very personal racist bullying act from 25 years prior wind up discussing how to promote women's football.

What will endure is the constructiveness of the conversation Jason Lee skillfully has with Baddiel, where both are in a heightened state of emotion, and where it is actually between someone truly heroic who was made to feel small by someone who was cowardly hiding behind parochialism done in public when the shit went down. What will endure is that Baddiel is sober, not born again, and so instead of washing his hands you can just see him taking responsibility, but what happened was un-undoable damage, that reality of life that is the metaphysical amputations, irreparable damage, and god hates amputees

 

I Don't Want to *Talk* About It 2/2: The Fatale, The Vitale and the Banale

 The Most Depressing Revelation I Ever Had

"D" is explaining to the table of gathered peers, that he suspects there's a taboo in our society about a very specific phenomena - that phenomena is the offence a guy feels, when it is revealed that someone is attracted to you who you feel should know that you are not in their league.

Now, there's probably a lot to unpack, including the privilege of physical safety that means you don't have to contend with the pros and cons of having someone you aren't attracted to, attracted to you.

But I could attest, then and now, that the phenomena is real as well as the obvious knowledge that when this happens to you it is a dick move to ever speak about it.

And while this was "D"s articulation of a taboo, and I was very young and a late starter to my love life, I had already experienced this phenomena a number of times when he said it.

I have also written about how "nice girls" are underdiscussed and as such will likely persist as a fact of life for many men and lesbians.

But I'm beating around the bush, time to unpunctually ejaculate the most depressing revelation - my experience of this phenomena was not one I could wash my hands of, I had in many ways brought it on myself by treating female peers with dignity and respect, almost like they were people, and this gave them the impression, that I *liked* them.

In the first episode of AMC Comedy-procedural 'Psych' I ever saw, season 2, episode 15: "Black and Tan: A Crime of Fashion" protagonist Sean Spencer tells his father the dating advice "treat a woman like a person, then a princess, then a goddess and then a person again." from which you can probably get a sense of Sean's character and maybe an idea for a video about how some old show is problematic.

It has echoes of the blatantly sociopathic 'D.E.N.N.I.S' system from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia practiced by Dennis Reynolds, and those were also likely the times with "How I Met Your Mother" somehow a more dated sitcom than Seinfeld, that took the 'Friends' formula and edge lorded it by inserting the character of Barney based on 'The Game' a book by Neil Strauss about pick-up artists.

But if we just throw away most of the advice and keep only "treat a woman like a person" is this good advice to give a guy nervous about a date and should it be?

I read maybe two of the many articles that arose explaining the "Nice guys of OKCupid" and have recently relitigated it on my blog. One of the most memorable bits of explanation was that women have a right to have friends. 

Now I infer the authorial intent being an admonishment for straight men, or any men or boys interested in women to approach sexual politics as transactional, a dance of quid-pro-quos. Btw I don't think we are there yet, as I do think, for example, that if a woman won't let a guy pay for anything on a date it is a good indicator that she is of two minds about you, it is a defence against a quid pro, even if there's no discussion of quo yet.

I'll 'yes-and' this right though and say another indicator that women are free to have male friends, is the disbanding of the 'friend-zone' and here I am drawing on the sentiment proffered by Miyuki Konno, aunt of Makoto Konno main character of 'The Girl Who Leapt Through Time' re:her best friend Chiaki's love confession which I'll paraphrase because I don't have time to find the exact quote: 'I think if you were to date and it didn't work out, you are both mature enough to go back to being friends'

More Depressing

Okay, say you like someone in that way, but you can't for whatever reason, just ask them out on a date. Maybe there's some risk involved like you are co-workers and there's policy that could get you in real career trouble if it didn't pan out. Maybe you have just spent so long enjoying imagining how great your relationship would be if it happened, that resolving it risks rejection and then you would lose the ability to enjoy imagining your relationship anymore and you just can't make that leap.

So you are going to opt for the age-old routine of flirting and hoping that something will happen.

What is the worst possible way to prosecute this strategy?

See I would have guessed, that the single worst way to go about it, would be to talk about being interested in someone else. 

Now, what I'd concede, is if you were playing a longer game in flirtation, say you were hopelessly crushing on someone who was already in a relationship, and maybe their partner was jealous and insecure, there may be some utility in trying to deliberately retard the tension and cool off the situation by throwing up a smokescreen as a security blanket.

I'm not saying, that jealousy makes no sense. I was a mid-90s kid, I remember George Costanza remarking that 'everbody knows you like the person you talk to about your dates more than the person you are dating.' I just see it as stupid on the risk front.

Like yeah, send someone you like the message that you don't like them and in fact like someone else.

Seemingly obvious enough, that this was my operational assumption basically until I saw an evolutionary psychologist talk about polyamory which is what? Like ten years ago now. 

I do not lament the relationships I didn't have because I didn't talk to them enough about other girls I liked, what I lament and find depressing is the hurt and rejection I caused, because I thought a girl and I were so obviously and thoroughly friends. 

I thought this because they were friends I confided in, appreciating the insight they could bring into female perspectives, about the women who were bending my mind like a pretzel. 

Vaguely aware that there are people who might try and drive a woman they don't respect into a fit of envy that has them throw themselves at them, I also put a lot of trust in the ability of my female friends to read in me, that the angst I was experiencing over someone else was real, or possibly idealized but still having a very real effect on me.

I was not half-arseing these conversations, I was whole-arseing them, and as such thinking that they were safe conversations that could not possibly be misconstrued as my interest in them as a romantic partner.

And on at least three occasions, I was wrong. That takes me beyond 'shame on me'.

The Even Worsening Depressiveness

One of the worst things to happen to me, was to fruitlessly court a woman from whom I was perceiving mixed messages, that bent my mind up into a full Nelson, but more damagingly lead me to lose confidence in my ability to read subtext.

Again, I'm sure I've written before, that my road to recovery was paved in a study of body language, that built my confidence up again, even if largely a placebo.

Now I conceited myself to be fairly direct and unmixed and undiluted in my own messaging all my life. So I had this consolation that I had never made anyone suffer like I had suffered.

Recently though, I was talking to one of my Sarah friends, about having to reconsider this source of consolation. See thrice in my life, in my direct way, I've told a woman that I would rather be alone than be with them. One was a breakup, the other two rejections.

I need to be extra clear, that I never communicated this in those exact words that can be read as adding insult to injury. The facts were there to be observed, when I declined the relationship or encounter on offer, these people were going to see that I had nothing going on in my love life anyway, so they were just going to learn that I would rather be with nobody than them.

Sarah felt safe to flag this for reconsideration, because Sarah had rejected me, albeit she said she'd rather be with someone else than me, not nobody, and not even grief. I wanted Sarah's opinion on whether my honesty was not the best policy.

I don't think anybody relishes rejection, not anyone with a functioning consciousness. 

But I also don't relish lying. There's this line in Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang":

[Verse 3]

Music played, and people sang
Just for me the church bells rang
Now he's gone, I don't know why
And 'til this day sometimes I cry
He didn't even say "Goodbye"
He didn't take the time to lie

 Like I think I've been through what that last line in verse 3 might be getting at, as a lamentation, when a girl rejects you and tells you 'sorry but there's somebody else' and in wanting to know what you lack, you look for that someone else, try to figure out that somebody else's identity, and then eventually realize that there wasn't somebody else, it was just a polite lie or maybe a functional lie from a fear of safety and maybe on some level you count the thought and not the lie.

In my early 20s though, I was fortunate to get trained out of excuses, when I realized that excuses often met with rebuttal requiring more excuses and it is simply more efficient, when you feel safe, to just say 'no' and no is what I have said, when I've been feeling it, and I've slept like a baby.

Not Worse, But Not Safe

So facebook had some lawsuit where in discovery memos turned up where medical professionals had warned them that giving users beauty filters for instagram could cause girls to develop dysmorphia and facebook just plowed ahead in the name of Mammon or whatever.

I'm aware of the effect 'beauty ideals' have on women and girls, and its probably never been worse than now. What was tricky for me, is that I'm into pinup art, and pinup art has never been real, particularly the more stylized cartoony art I prefer rather than your WWII oil painting pinups, that often merely infantalise women rather than promote literally impossible waist-to-hip ratios and what not.

A mitigating strategy I thought of, was to try and depict the women in my life, as to how I would interpret them into a pin-up. To understand before they make unrealistic comparisons of themselves to cartoon characters "this is how I see you." Please don't compare yourself to a cartoon, but compare you as a cartoon to my other cartoons and see that basically you are also idealized by my eyes. Like if Matt Greoning's partner got concerned that they didn't have an underbite, and had too many fingers, and Matt Greoning drew them and was like 'see I draw everybody with an underbite, it's how I do faces.' This is what attraction is.

Unfortunately, nothing can close the door on someone else's mind rejecting this proposition and replacing it with 'this is how tohm wished I looked, not how he sees me now with love and attraction vision' and like the beauty filters, my own art regardless of my intent, contributed to or in some way exacerbated dysmorphia and dysphoria.

I also can't close the door on someone taking how I see them in cartoon form, and comparing it to other drawings and deciding because they prefer a drawing I did of someone else, that I must prefer that someone else too.

I don't really have a segue, but the point being, just as I naively assumed it was safe to discuss women I like with female friends, without them reading into it some subtext that actually I don't like the woman I say I like, but in fact I like them; I also can no longer assume naively that it is obvious to the woman I am with, that I like the woman I am with on account of my being with them, being in a relationship with them, sharing intimacy with them.

I won't lie, I enjoyed discussing my sexuality with Ale, and everything I'd learned about it through my art and experiences. I felt safe doing so, because in terms of my preferences, Ale had won. She had me, I was there. We would talk about her sexuality, and Ale was safe to do so, because I experience, I feel, low levels of jealousy. 

What I don't want to literally talk about anymore

Is what I am attracted to, in women, to women. And this one burns me up in a totally different way of being unable to talk to my friends about their fragile egocentricity.

In this case, it is because given my understanding of the topic, I interpret my responsibility to discuss my own sexuality, my preferences, my visual nature and personality and attachment style, as pure text. No subtext.

But I cannot control for subtext. In western traditions, close-reading appears to have been created by Philo of Alexandria, who may have been the earliest example of somebody reinterpreting scripture to harmonize it with contemporary mores, in his case to reconcile the stone age barbarism of Mosaic texts with the works of Aristotle and Plato, sophisticated bronze age texts, maybe even iron age.

Close reading in contemporary times is now more akin to, what's the latest example I saw, making a video essay about how 'Harry Potter' is secretly about social class. 

If you haven't been following this post so far, here is a slight recap of the depressing revelations I have had - I can't talk to female friends as people without risking this being construed as romantic interest, and I can't talk to female friends about romantic interests without risking this being construed as subtext stating I am romantically interested in them, and I can't talk to female friends about my sexuality without risking this being construed as me being a sexual authority on the relationship they have with their own self-image.

I want to talk to you about something, not to you about you, and where it is about you it is not about you specifically but generally, like I value your insight into the general experience of being a woman.

Revisiting my social media dog-pile

I might be a bit vague here because I plan to write about this as an example in a post about what's wrong with me, suffice to say that what I experienced here is kind of the antithesis of this post, it's something I'm happy to literally talk about with women, but have learned not to shout it into the respective abysses of web 2.0, here's hoping web 1.0 is okay.

Basically, my problem is, my attachment style, it isn't a recipe for sustainable relationships and flourishing mental health. In my 20s I ran headlong into these dysfunctions, and the thing about an attachment style, is it kind of dictates who you are attracted to, arguably as powerfully as sexuality. 

In my late 20s/early 30s I had enough experience to start unpacking the problem, and understand the work for me was to imagine a counterfactual self and start empathising with him, and making choices like he does to find a partner that would feel healthy rather than familiar.

I wanted to begin recalibrating, and I began to suspect that there might be a sex difference I was projecting causing me to mistake someone for someone else.

In brief, I did an audit of all the women I had dated, was attracted to, became infatuated with. I recalled my earliest profound impressions of them, and started noticing a pattern. I noticed that they didn't just stand out figuratively, a face in the crowd that caught my eye, but literally: they were standing alone. 

They didn't have friends clustered around them, when I met them, they sat in kitchens alone, stood alone, danced alone, arrived alone, left alone etc. even in crowds full of people. I did not regard them as sickly strays from a pack, but independent, strong.

But my experience of the subsequent relationships I had, were often not of someone confident and self-assured, but someone crippled by anxieties and riddled with self-doubt and insecurity.

So I was wondering maybe if there was a sex-difference between men and women, and if a solitary nature was indicative of dysfunction in women, more so than status.

I wrote up a scenario and asked for female insight, aware of groupthink, I requested female friends slide into my DMs. People were active on facebook back then, so within seconds a female friend commented publicly on my post something simultaneously righteous and vacuous, which I interpreted as basically saying it is not legitimate to draw inferences from behaviour when it comes to women, an absurd piece of special pleading.

Annoyed I bit back, in what I'd describe as a douchey way. That lead to a pile-on, that quickly grew out of specifically my control. On that front, I opted to do nothing, and I got answers from female friends in my DMs so it accomplished what I'd hoped, albeit with side effects.

That incident was pretty early in the timeline of the ongoing project to figure out how to navigate my own sexuality and sexual preferences. 

I would honestly do it again, except the world's moved on from facebook as a public square and you know the women that catch my eye historically haven't changed, so there's nothing more for me to explore, but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, let alone most people as I think other people would care and as such may not survive such a dogpile. 

Modern Times

Something I literally can't talk about with women anymore, is the construct of 'femme fatale's which might be understood as women of a certain appeal that promise a low risk that they will ruin your life. And to be clear, low risk is bad, meaning it is a fairly safe bet that they will ruin your life. They are almost certain to ruin your life. 

Women who promise excitement, but that excitement is going to be in the form of drama rather than transcendent experiences. 

In the most pronounced cases, you may find yourself having to speak to an emergency operator about keeping them alive when they overdose, in less extreme cases, you may find yourself sharing a rather stable domesticated life with someone who is eternally restless, half-in-half-out slowly torturing you to death.

For me, I know I am drawn to the challenge, and as I've written recently, that is largely based in an unconscious desire to vicariously rescue my mother, and by doing so vicariously rescue myself.

Now the thing is, I would prefer not to work through this project in real life, skipping all the vicarious rescue and just rescuing myself through therapy, for which I've been largely successful. A therapuetic process though, is to work through these issues via creative fiction, to use the power of imagination to heal myself.

As such, decades ago I created a board on pinterest that I labelled 'people photo reference' and quickly I pinned so many images to the board it became functionally useless. I'd estimate that once a board hits 4,000 pins on pinterest, it can take a full hour to scroll through it looking for the reference image I want.

So at some point, I created a new board called 'femme fatale' and knowing me I probably mispelled it 'femme fatalle' because I don't speak Franch. And then set about reorganising it, pulling images off my generically named 'people photo reference' that to this day probably has 14 photos of like Indigenous peoples from National Geographic, Male Athletes and is mostly photos of beautiful women.

So here's the kind of thing I don't want to literally talk to women anymore (which isn't quite true, I'd be dying to discuss it if I felt it was safe to do so, I don't want to experience the fallout of discussing my sexual preferences with women and the close reading they might do so to feel worse about themselves...) I noticed quickly that an instant way for a woman to all-but-disqualify herself from being re-pinned to my 'femme fatale' board, was if she was holding her smart phone in the picture, taking a photo of her reflection.

Like the beginning of this process where I noticed I was interested in women who could attend a party without female friends to hold their hands, I noticed I wasn't interested or rather, captivated, by women who were photographed in the act of taking a selfie.

I wasn't filtering consciously at first, so here's the processing I did to try and make something conscious of my own filtering behaviour, and what I speculated up was this:

Women who are photographed have already convinced someone they are a worthy subject, women who photograph themselves are appealing to others for validation. One was contextually in-control, the other contextually out-of-control.

The above is speculation, as such, it would be wonderful to discuss, the thing is, there probably is going to be subtext, like the degree of admiration I feel for the subjects of femme fatale imagery, someone might come to the preposterous conclusion that because I value something it is therefore of value. When I consciously feel, that admiration is a pathology on my part.

With a mature, secure woman we could discuss this, and we could discuss my base hypocrisy in observing that while unnamed and largely unfeatured in media, there is the masculine counterpart to the femme fatale in the homme fatale, and I would tell women and girls to avoid them like the plague. 

The value of such discussions, is immense to me. Life changing.

There are possible boundaries I can put on such discussions, the example I have picked, is one I feel particularly safe because I can describe it as pure behaviour, not image. Are you holding a phone in the shot that's camera lens is pointed at a mirror? If yes, in most cases I don't get a femme fatale vibe, just as if Humphrey 'Bogey' Bogart walked into his office and Mary Astor was picking her nose, might disqualify her as a femme fatale. 

What I don't feel safe to do, is show women images of women that I pinned to femme fatale because of all the aforementioned depressing revelations. In the Robin Williams movie "What Dreams May Come" he meets his own daughter in the afterlife and she has taken the form of like a Thai Airways Air Hostess based on a comment he made that impressed his daughter that some rando Air Hostess was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen.

That kind of unsafe that would arise from a fact that frustrates me - that images of women are disproportionately representative of models, as in the extreme rather than the average. I won't deny that I'm not some superficial pig but instead someone who finds the average woman attractive. But certainly I don't need anyone to be an extreme before I notice them, merely above average. Furthermore, models tend to be disproportionately young, and I am definitively not attracted to youth as in the common demographic definition of 'youth' being 18-25. I can find young people physically attractive, but generally can't stomach the idea of having to converse with them for any extended period of time, just because that age is predictive of regurgitating trite received wisdom.

So no, much as I'd love to compare images from my femme fatale board with the one I'll move to next, I don't think I can because I think the danger is too great that someone else will fixate on the prevalence of like waist to hip ratios, bust size etc. unconsciously internalizing this, when these features are merely predictive of somebody being a model or influencer, not a femme fatale.

Nathan Fielder and the Femme Vitale

A few years ago I reluctantly returned from Mexico to Australia, disoriented. Since then the project of my life has been imagining a future that I can work towards. I've explored a few dead ends, but things are coming together now.

Coming together such that I could dedicate time to imagining a future relationship. Reevaluating where I am at.

There is no specific love interest I have, and there has not been since my last relationship failed. My pervert eyes - the ability to notice women I am attracted to - have not come back fully, though there's glimpses of them here and there. 

There are complicating factors like where I want to live geographically. Long term, and it's a separate post, I see myself back in Mexico. There's an outside possibility that Australia could change structurally, and I might consider staying here, but hope is not a strategy, nor something to aim at.

In between here and Mexico though, I was feeling a desire to stop by Italy, to meet someone in Italy en route somehow to Mexico. Absurd and ridiculous, dating is hard enough, now it's like "okay I need to meet someone in Italy and persuade them to come with me to Mexico."

Why Italy? I think I was just looking at a lot of aquiline noses at the time. I learned about the existence of Eritrea and I feel that Eritrea might have the most beautiful women in the world, but, I have to be honest, Eritrea sounds like maybe one of the worst countries on earth.

What I found myself circling conceptually, beginning with aquiline noses, taking me to Italy, distracting me with neighbours like Eritrea, Ethiopia, Greece, Egypt, Isreal, Morocco, Lebanon...back to Italy, Italian, the language, the hand gestures, the longing I felt.

Vivacity. I was really craving vivacity. I was desiring to be around, in the privileged company of, somebody who felt alive. I felt guilty, confused, because I don't think many people would describe me as 'vivacious' though I did just win a laminated award having been voted 'Life of the Class: Contributes humour and positive energy' which I don't feel I deserve, because my recollection of my energy was that it was more often negative.

I don't feel I've earned a vivacious partner, I'd be afraid of becoming some kind of energy vampire. My creative process I fear, looks a lot like, to the casual observer, clinical depression. Time in my imaginarium creates an outward appearance of low cognitive function, I grind to a standstill when my mind is most active, which is when I feel most alive.

I should explore this, I thought, and created a board titalled 'Femme vitale' still not understanding Franch, I guessed it would just be 'vital' but turned out my stereotyping was grammatically accurate. 

I started filtering images in, of women who seemed vivacious, and noticed this had little overlap with how I filter for femme fatales. That was interesting in itself. I also noticed, that when it came to femme vitale's a selfie was not as reliable a disqualifier - it is if the camera is positioned over the woman's face. That woman is dead to me, by my grasp of french, but not deadly.

I began to notice that I was perhaps being too simplistic, many of my early pics were merely ones in which women were smiling. I thought of Mx columnist Clemintine Ford, author of 'Fight Like A Girl' and how in one of her Mx columns, she'd recounted a friend telling her that feminism was a process by which to 'figure out a way of being a girl that doesn't hurt' and maybe I was just picking genuine smiles from fake ones.

So for a while I looked through my pins trying to find images of women who felt vivrant, vivacious, alive while not necessarily smiling. I found some.

I was likely doing this variation of doomscrolling while watching the second season of Nathan Fielder's 'The Rehearsal' on HBO which my sister had recommended to me. In the second season, Nathan discovers that the first season of HBO had unintentionally resonated with an Autistic fandom. People who claimed that his absurd infinitely nesting rehearsal projects were just what they needed, that they were desirable.

I'm sure Fielder's the kind of genius that tightly planned every single moment and beat of his second season, while still using non-actors and putting them in his surreal situations. But the plot of the second season involves him going to an Autism support centre, where an employee assumes and/or heavily implies that Nathan Fielder is autistic. There is then a scene where she explains the 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes' diagnostic tool, and the show demonstrates fielder struggling with two multiple choice questions. 

I found this curious, guessed that the test would probably be freely available on the internet, and took it. I am going to Fielder my results, following his lead, because that seems more amusing to me just as it was in the show. But it occurred to me that I was likely in distinguishing between images that were of 'femme fatalles' and 'femme vitales' or neither, that I was doing the same exercise, or employing the same mechanism.

Now, like most humans, I wouldn't rate myself as like a human lie detector. I certainly couldn't distinguish between a serious picture and a rhetorical one, which is to say, an image that captures a real moment, and an image that captures a performance. 

In some cases I can be confident, like a sprinter crossing a finish line and having a sudden change of emotional state, is too method for most actors. I think Flo Jo is having a genuine response to winning a gold medal in the 80s.

But in other cases, you know, particularly since Pinterest became compatible with TikTok content, you can get a still image taken from a TikTok video, and in the still image feel like you are seeing one thing like a moment in a story, and then the TikTok video it is taken from, reveals it is a frame from a completely vapid and shitty Macarena style dance while a woman lip syncs along to some song they think is really cool, but is in fact, quite lame.

It's not that, but it's cueing in to things like confidence, self assurance, and even the non-verbal cues as to whether this person taking a selfie is documenting a moment in which they are happy with themselves, or appealing to 'the internet' for validation from women and girls that share their insecurities and dysmorphia.

Just to be clear, the latter inference does not get pinned to my femme vitale board.

But again, I don't want to literally talk about it with women anymore, and particularly not show any images, because I can't control the subtext, and in this case, it becomes even worse than having inferences drawn about female value generally from how I am unconsciously categorizing femme fatales, because the femme vitale adds the pressure of needing to be happy, whereas a femme fatale can wallow in being a hot mess.

Kate the Femme Banale

Lastly, my friend lent me this book, and based on the tital alone 'Wellness' I was like 'sure!' and even 'great!' and grabbed it without even judging its cover. I expected a non-fiction popular science book investigating the wellness space, Gwyneth Paltrow and all that crap.

I got home and as I went to open the cover discovered in a quote, that I was opening up a work of fiction. A novel.

Now I was confused, and as I wrote to my friend, my favorite thing about having a friend lend me a book, is when they've underlined and annotated it. My Sarah friend who rejected me, lent me a book, a seriously heavy economics text, and I delighted in these underlined passages explaining how we are all fucked with little pencil notes like 'why?' written next to them.

My second favourite thing, is trying to reverse engineer why a friend told me to read a book. Because it is not uncommon for this to be completely obscure.

Having these thoughts, and hitting patches where I was sufficiently alienated from the characters, I began to make notes to amuse myself, reading the narrative as a writer rather than a reader. Trying to predict where the story would go, which I was accurate at, suggesting that I might be best off abandoning the book.

Then I hit this chapter that introduced a new character. Set in 2014, the character Kate, was in the eyes of narrator Elizabeth, a patch of seemingly greener grass and a possible source of antidote for Elizabeth's malaise. 

Now there's a mechanical influence of an author having to thread a needle with characters like Kate, because obviously Kate serves a function in the plot, she is obviously bad news but the author needs to write from Elizabeth's perspective such that she is impressed, and if you want the most dramatic tension to build toward some payoff, you need to somewhat obfuscate that a character is bad news. James Steerforth comes to mind as having this challenge, David Copperfield needs to plausibly view James as a friend, but his later betrayals need to be plausible as well, Dickens threaded that needle by having James spend all David's money as though it were a favour to David and in some ways it is, David bribes his way into good standing at Salem House, but we as the reader can see James profiting. 

Kate engages in graphic public displays of affection in inappropriate places obliviously sexualising children, she passively aggressively refers to the older parents in their circle by 'your generation' wears upcycled clothing, dies her hair grey and is at the forefront wave of stretching-the-plausibility-of-anachronistic adoption of polyamory with her husband.

The author goes on to depict a scene where Elizabeth asks Kate about open relationships, and Kate boldly declares that she loves to convert people, then I as reader, experience this character of Kate as regurgitating a bunch of received wisdom, canned apologia for polyamory while, like a Christian apologetic movie, Elizabeth simply says her lines in the play that enable Kate to work through the scripted argument.

I scribbled in the margin 'an interestingly uninteresting character.' Here, was a kind of terrarium way of observing a character that in real life, I avoid like the plague, fearing death by boredom. A human that fails the Turing test. A zombie.

My mid-90s sensitivities were tingling - Kate was what we called between '94-'97 'a try hard' she is trying to affect the aesthetic of an interesting person, without doing the thing, she is impressing Elizabeth and I as reader have too much insight into Elizabeth's internal monologue to credit her as a reliable identifier of impressive people.

So I find myself writing 'femme banal' which google tells me the french would actually be 'femme banale' and this is so recent I haven't created a pinterest board for it, nor am convinced the exercise is worth my time, because it would involve me having to save images that by definition, are of uninteresting subject matter - overwhelmingly wannabe influencers, LinkedIn posters, successologists, conspicuous consumers, Chinese youths. 

There's a meta-interest in the workings of my own subconscious, but I actually have this really interesting example in the few pages of this novel that features Kate. Enough to work off of.

The concept of the femme banale is so fraught, I'm not sure I'd talk about it even if I wanted to with a human woman. On top of everything I already regret and make me now feel unsafe to pursue insight from actual human woman friends, and I need to articulate a quick recap - women I feel safe to discuss my sexuality with are overwhelmingly 1) women who are not sexual entities to me, and 2) women with whom our sexual tension is resolved either through dating or rejection.

Now to fall in the first category, the vast majority of my ample friendzone, I would say that being a femme banale is a significant factor. Many women I feel neither sexual intimidation nor sexual attraction with, are because I've done the requisite conversating to know I could never spend a whole Saturday of leisure time with them.

And imagine, imagine for a moment that you were somebody who consciously tried to be interesting who asks banal questions like 'what's good?' 'what's everyone reading?' 'what's everyone doing?' 'what's everyone talking about?' and then you had a conversation with me, about how such questions lead to being very basic, very banal, very obvious...to getting out of a car with 10 pre-whacked snakes on snake whacking day, so confident in your abilities to read the room that you were oblivious that an outlier just caused a paradigm shift by pointing out that whacking day was originally invented as an excuse to beat up the Irish, and that Barry White is disgusted by it, and loves the slither of a smooth sexy lady snake.

There will always be demand for some snake-oil that promises an easy answer to social desirability, furthermore that demand is so sufficient that it is possible to buy that snake oil, rub it on your skin and have other members from the same consumer demand group desperately validate that it is working.

Though on some level I believe disillusionment is good, I generally don't go into conversations with the aim of inducing an existential crisis, complete depersonalisation. It is why for all the Kate's I've met in my life, I generally prefer to smile and nod politely and take my first opportunity to never speak to them again, but of course there's levels to this shit. 

Kate may embody the vanguard iteration of the archetypal "Champagne socialist" that Rob K Henderson rebranded "Luxury Beliefs" that likely are just the symptomatic memes that become associated with the group dynamics of status seeking individuals. Wellness also has an obvious train-wreck character in Brandie, who comes from a more conservative political pole but no less banal, a kind of trad-wife influencer who instead of reciting pseudo-scientific notions of polyamory and communal child rearing, recites pseudo-scientific notions of the power of positive thinking.

All of which, I think boil down to banality being a triumph of desire over the discipline of thought. Exemplars of Plato's hypothesis that "the unobserved life is not worth living."

Now, if femme banale's were absolutely of no value, I'd have no problem discussing the concept with real live actual people and gaining tremendous benefit from dredging up what I unconsciously notice into my conscious and get clues as to how to actually navigate my life in the great project of not mistaking anxiety for strength. 

As Gordon Livingston points out in one of my favorite passages of prose - "[fools] are often capable of useful work." People desperately engaged in the project of controlling what others think of them, are often occupied, quite occupied and that can often function as a sense of stability, which allows others around them like partners and children to live stable lives, they might employ people too. I don't want to go around recklessly blowing up hedonic treadmills so that others are caught in the shockwaves.

Many people's lives are tiger-by-the-tail scenarios and I cannot take responsibility for what I might break. Now maybe under deontology ethical systems I have an obligation to blow up what conceits I might stumble into, maybe even consequentially.

But I literally don't want to talk about these things because, ironic given my first post, for me they are egocentric matters. These are only give-and-take conversation subjects because I am seeking information to help with my life to inform my own autonomy, I'm not trying to give anything back, it is not an indirect way of saying 'I have unmet needs, can you fill them?' or even 'you should fill them' and certainly not 'I am representative of my whole sex and sexual orientation, so I speak with authority about general preferences.'

Conclusion

I don't want to literally talk about my sexuality with my female friends no more, because of the human propensity to strawman, because of the human phenomena of Goodhart's law, because of human difficulties with communication in general.

It's a rather bleak notion to be entertaining, but it is based on a loss of confidence in the modal person's ability to identify authority, and to distinguish it from non-authority.

I am the world's leading expert in what I am attracted to, that doesn't necessarily mean I possess the expertise to articulate what is unintelligible and communicate it with a shared understanding of meaning. I am not an authority at all on what is generally attractive, I have no idea. 

Something I know very well about myself, is that while attraction is in some ways necessary, it is attachment that accomplishes both necessity and sufficiency. 

I simply don't like feeling depressed, so let me conclude with a concrete example: not me, certainly not me, but some guy tells a female friend he is 'sapiosexual' a term used by morons who think they mean they are 'attracted to intelligence' while clearly not understanding what 'eschew obscurantism' means, the female friend starts reading books, and not just any books but 'Infinite Jest' and 'Blood Meridian' and James Joyce's 'Ulysses'.

What a bleak fucking scene, two ships, piloted by morons failing to collide with each other in the night. Just a complete failure of subtext.