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.

In Memorium: Lebreaving Los Lakers

 As at writing, it seems pretty much confirmed that Lebron James has no place on the Los Angeles Lakers roster. Also at writing it appears clear that Lebron intends to play even yet more seasons of basketball in the NBA, but does not have a destination. 

I want to take a moment to reflect on this departure though, as one of those moments where a cloud stops obstructing a sun and you hadn't even realised just how chill it had become. Lebron and the Lakers were not a dangerous pairing in any competitive sense, they were a dangerous pairing in an anti-competitive sense.

Tune into Angry Old Hoops youtube channel any day of the week for the past three years, and you'll see the receipts of not only a sustained anger in an elder basketball fan, but an old billionaire lumbering around a court, blowing on his hands who need the laws of basketball suspended to play in the actual game and is most animated when complaining to a referee.

Lebron is not like any other name that gets tossed into the largely academic 'greatest of all time' debates, virtually all the other candidates suited up for one team, the exceptions being Kareem Abdul Jabbar who played for the Milwaukee Bucks and won a championship with them before going to the Lakers and winning four more, and Michael Jordan who after his second retirement where he became part-owner and manager of basketball operations for the Washington Wizards suited up for them before retiring permanently. But Bill Russell, Tim Duncan and Kobe Bryant played their whole careers for the Celtics, Spurs and the Lakers respectively.

Lebron played 7 years for the Cleveland Cavaliers before going to play for the Miami Heat for like 4 years, then went back to Cleveland for 4 years before heading to the Lakers for 8 years, his longest consecutive stint at any one club.

And the merging of Lebron and the Lakers I think was a particular disaster. I'm sure the Lakers organisation had excuses, they needed a marquee name to restore their relevance after struggling to rebuild post Kobe Bryant etc. but at the point at which they acquired Lebron, Lebron was a known quantity, a guy that basically needed a US mens Olympic calibre team to compensate for his propensity to choke away fourth quarters. 

He'd had a great fourth quarter, once, which I watched live against the remnants of the Detroit Pistons' Bad Boys II dynasty that had already lost their defensive lynchpin in Ben Wallace, a victory that sent Lebron to his first ever NBA finals where he was swept by the Spurs in 4 games, choking away the opportunity. Then Kobe's Lakers would acquire Pau Gasol and go to three straight finals and win two back to back, Kobe acquiring one more championship than Shaq and falling one shy of Michael Jordan. This milestone of Kobe threatening to become Jordan's true heir was the supposed impetus for Lebron to make 'the decision' an unprecedented level of anti-competitive player collusion to amass talent on a single 'superteam' not of veterans as was the case with the mega-trade that put Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen together on the Celtics right as their championship windows were closing, but three elite talents from the same draft year joining forces in their prime.

Lebron would ride that super team back to the finals, where he would famously choke harder than anyone had ever choked in the finals ever, definitively elevating the previous generation above his own into the superior position when the offcuts of an era - Dirk Nowitzki, Jason Kidd, Shawn Marion and Jason Terry, a team of post season bridesmaids in the Kobe-Duncan decades congealed on the Dallas Mavericks and beat the Miami Heat super team thanks to Lebron James, arguably a candidate for finals MVP then as without his ability to disappear completely in the fourth quarter, Dallas could not have won.

Lebron did then win two championships back-to-back with the Heat, before Tim Duncan as the old guard and Kawhi Leonard as the new guard curb stomped Lebron's one and only chance to three peat like Kobe, Jordan and Russell had. 

So Lebron cut and ran from the superteam of his own construction, back to Cleveland because in possibly his greatest basketball move ever, his abandonment of Cleveland for Miami had resulted in the Cavs drafting Kyrie Irving one of the most skilled point guards ever. Lebron would also have elite rebounder Kevin Love join the Cavs for his second super team, and would lose a bunch of NBA finals to the Golden State Warriors, winning one in the midst there. Irving would desert Lebron before Lebron would leave Cleveland for the Lakers, but that's the potted history of the known quantity Lebron was.

Lebron was capable of winning your team a championship, if he was surrounded by the top tier talent to insure against his crumbling when you need him. You need someone to make that big play in the final moments, whether it was a Ray Allen, a Chris Bosh, a Kyrie Irving or Kevin Love.

And so the disaster happened. 

Here I am going to assert two premises:

1. The NBA has a vested interest in saying that the greatest person to ever play basketball is currently playing in the NBA.

2. The NBA has a vested interest in the Los Angeles Lakers having at least a post-season, and hopefully a deep post-season run.

Combining Lebron James with the Lakers gave Lebron incredible leverage, incredible influence over the modern NBA. For basketball fans, it was quite literally the worst possible combination ever. The conclusion that follows from my premises is a bizarre double negative - the Lakers cannot fail and it cannot be Lebron James' fault.

Lebron was perfectly positioned to drive the NBA from pure sport towards pure theatre, forcing the NBA to make the Lakers a babyface and any team they played a heel. 

The Lakers impressive lead in free throw attempt discrepancy is not a matter of opinion, just counting, often hundreds of times greater than the next team. It produced the epic 'complete crap' rant from a coach of the Toronto Raptors who was so incensed by the refs exclusive use of whistles for the Lakers that he said if it was already decided that the Lakers were winning tonight, they could have told him and they wouldn't have bothered to show up.

And documentarians like Angry Old Hoops have collated the receipts and uploaded them night after night to youtube. Lebron is allowed to travel, Lebron doesn't have to play defence, if Lebron uses his forearm to completely dislodge a defender, that's a defensive foul on the defender, if anyone touches Lebron on the drive, that's a defensive foul, if Lebron travels then it doesn't count, if Lebron carries then it doesn't count, if Lebron passes the ball to Austin Reeves and Reeves dribbles down the court charges the lane and scores then Lebron gets an assist on his statline and so on and so on.

The entire NBA institution suddenly exists to prop up a tired old billionaire as a viable all star. Again it isn't opinion, just counting. Lebron often will get 12 of his points in 'garbage time' for some reason he is still on the court when the game is clearly lost or clearly won having every offensive play run through him even though nobody else cares anymore.

When the Lakers make it to the post season and suddenly any team they play is being really serious, and the refs are behaving like professionals because people are watching the game and your team having to play 4-on-5 defense because Lebron is too unfit to run back and help, and if he does make it back he isn't any help because he can't move his feet or raise his arms anymore, and the Lakers get swept or gentleman-swept in the first round, year after year, by the Denver Nuggets or the Minnesota Timberwolves or pretty much anyone bar the Houston Rockets, then it can't be because the Lakers have an old billionaire who needs the minutes, and he needs the play to pad his stats out, but is a defensive liability and can no longer play offense unless the refs suspend the rules of basketball for him, it cannot be his fault which means Darvon Ham needs to be fired, Russel Westbrook needs to be traded, D'Angelo Russell needs to be traded, Anthony Davis needs to be traded.

The Narcissistic project that is prosecuting Lebron's "goat" case, has been enabled to a terrifying extent by his being embedded in the Lakers, the largest media market in the NBA by far. The defacto control Lebron appeared to have over the organization up until the Buss family sold their control of the franchise to a more sober billionaire, I think had a profoundly negative effect on the NBA which in turn has had a profoundly crazy-making effect on people who want to watch the game and see good basketball.

There is a clip of Charles Barkley on inside the NBA from a few years back, complaining about why they have to talk about the Lakers, pointing out that the Lakers were currently 10th in the Western conference and talking about them made as much sense as talking about the 10th place Washington Wizards (or something) in the Eastern conference, a team I can't recall, because nobody has to talk about them.

Just multiply that out to pretty much every day of an NBA season up until the Lakers got knocked out of the postseason typically in the first round. You had to hear about Lebron every day, all day, as he racked up bullshit longevity milestones and meaningless events like the first father and son duo to play in the NBA (and on the same team, what are the odds? incredible if literally nobody in their right mind would ever draft Bronny James, officially statistically the worst person to ever play modern basketball - there was a 46 year old who played two games for like the Provedence Profilactics back in the 1960s who is the all time worst player back when a coach could literally decide to play and nobody would demand a refund for their 2c ticket to see Provedence Rhode Island play Palookaville Nova Scotia)

The actual NBA where athletes compete in the game of basketball to win it all got condensed down to a month and a half of the postseason the past three years. It was like "oh look the Denver Nuggets sent the LA Lakers packing in the first round, now we can finally talk about the Nuggets, the Mavericks, the Wolves, the OKC Thunder, the Celtics, the Heat, the Bucks, the Cavs, the Knicks...you know, all the teams actually playing good basketball with a hope of making it to the second round of the NBA playoffs.

And it wasn't even that, because Lebron would also just create drama, so we could still hear about Lebron and the Lakers every day. Like that year he pretended he was considering retirement, only to appear at the ESPYs wearing a pearl necklace and declare he wasn't going to retire, or when he is putting his podcast cohost JJ Reddick forward to replace his coach Darvin Ham and forcing the Lakers to draft his son.

Lebron was a sickening disaster, and the Lakers share a blame for prolonging the deletorious effect he has had on the NBA by his example. I think Lebron knows he fades into irrelevance about 2 weeks after his retirement. An article will be written and published somewhere days after his retirement questioning his legacy, while a fluff piece of bullshit stats nobody cares about will farewell Lebron on both the ESPN, NBA and 'Inspiredbyhoops' Youtube channels. Someone though will be liberated to point out that Lebron achieved less than Kobe with twice the help in twice the time, and from there all the comparisons will diminish in favour. 

There is some residual drama in where he lands, and he may find nowhere suitable, his family now based in LA and chatter about his best prospects being some kind of semi-homecoming to Miami or Cleveland. Cleveland seems unlikely to me, because they are dark-horse contenders. I don't see any contender actually wanting Lebron James believing that people in the know, must know, by now, that Lebron is actually dead weight on a roster. 

That leaves non-contenders that might benefit from selling a bunch of jerseys and merch to Lebron fanboys. Maybe he would consider the symbolism of finishing his career with the Washington Wizards where Jordan did his farewell tour, again a big nostalgic cashgrab, moreso on the Wizards part than Jordan who does not need more cash because he has his shoe sales, something Lebron does not have. The Wizards would also put Lebron close to the person he most resembles in legacy - Donald James Trump. But again, I think now Lebron is down to his last great hope being a kind of geriatic Harlem Globetrotters on the Golden State Warriors, a team he can uber to from his LA residence. 

But I can see that not panning out either, and James having to retire in humiliation this off-season sooner than recognize that he is likely worth less to any team, than what Russell Westbrook has been forced to accept as a result of Lebron's failed superteam 3. Extra humiliating because 2 seasons ago he could have had a final swansong season at the Lakers and everybody would have been happy. He couldn't do that though because he knows if he exits with only 4 rings, his memory will fade faster and farther than Kobe's ever will.

I Don't Want to *Talk* About It 1/2: Fragile Egocentrism

Disclaimer:

So relatively speaking, I've been on a tear on this blog, my most active since like the first I don't know, 7 years of blogging. There were periods of my life where I posted like once a day, I'd say the average dropped to like once a month and the accumulation of unfinished drafts...

Anyway, 'nobody likes a meta-blog' or something to that effect from nemesis John is ringing in my ears, but in my recent exuberance I may have assumed a kind of familiarity that doesn't exist or isn't earned and have been neglecting to properly flag or disclaim my own mental short-hands for concepts I'm grappling with.

Suchly, this post is no exception (nor are their exceptions) that I am some guy in terms of qualifications, and I am most often making shit up with no soundness, validity or rigour. Please keep that in mind, I mean sound and valid concepts like 'bullying' 'gaslighting' and 'narcissism' as determined through processes like research and field testing often get diluted and skunked anyway, and I don't anticipate any of my neologisms taking off, but I just wouldn't want it to start with me, writing confidently and impressing upon someone that I grasp something, when the reality is that I am only ever grasping often desperately for a hypothesis to go out and test myself, or that fits the facts of only the very narrow window of my experience.

Onto the meat.

Darwin's Gifted Children

I like Dr. Todd Grande's breakdowns of, most often, true crime cases that involve some psychological dysfunction on multiple parties accounts. This morning on my way to the shops I listened to a particularly grisly case involving the conviction of murder for a 9 year old child. I'm not going to link here, it is pretty bleak.

Its also the extreme example of how helpless we are as a species, even a society. The low hanging fruit of clinical psychology practitioners is to ask about a patient's parents and early childhood experiences. This in turn is a kind of social occupation that exists in a process whereby we allow eggs to fall off a shoot and regularly crack, then we have a job that slaps a band-aid on the cracks.

What I'm getting at, is basically it is unworkable to create something like a parenting-license, where humans are prohibited from having children until they can demonstrate a level of competence. Biology works against us as do our moral intuitions, I believe rightly, that don't want a state that dictates who can have children and when and how many and who with.

We also have access to this counterfactual in the very civilization and societies we live in that show that the impact of inept and incompetent parenting is not an existential threat to society. 

Here then, is not the brilliance of parents, (well maybe some), but the brilliance of children.

This is really the thesis of evergreen book "The Drama of the Gifted Child" that predates "gifted" as it is employed today to describe academic potential. The gift in this context is the way a child can adapt to the circumstances of its family, a process that produces drama in response to drama, a performative empty adult that has survived childhood by becoming who they need to be to survive their own parents, rather than become themselves.

As such, the book skews heavily to the gift of appeasement - a child recognises the conditional nature of their parents love, and the corresponding conditional nature of parental anxiety, and appeases the parents they rely on by becoming who their parents are comfortable with them being. Basic behaviorism or reinforcement.

But (and my memory is not good enough to recall if this is a specific example) there may be another response particularly for children whose parents neglect them that isn't appeasement (or self-neglect to go along with parental needs and thus get rewarded) and that is to become ego-centric, or simply adapt to neglectful (and perhaps even hostile) parenting by becoming parent to themselves.

This is what I'm positing, I'm speculating as a kind of fragile egocentrism. A brilliant, amazing, intuitive response a child can adapt in order to survive their childhood - physically, nutritionally, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, financially etc. any combination of those.

What I am picturing is a child who learns they cannot rely on their parents to fulfill their needs. They have to advocate for themselves, they have to "lean in" and hustle and grind. They have to hunt and gather resources.

This is a fucking amazing thing our biology is capable of. The kid that walks themselves to the library and entertains themselves on a rainy day afternoon. The kid that aportions to themselves a disproportion of teacher's attention because they need it like the other students don't.

It is also, hopefully obviously, a very tragic brilliant thing that we can do. There is a degree of moral-hazard in having this risk-smoothing biology that allows bad couplings to produce beautiful children. It means that what is naturally selected is gifted children, likely because for most of human history there just was no such thing as birth control, and what isn't selected for extinction is attachment theory where we gravitate toward partners who will replicate familiar suffering. That is where IMO we are stupidly, rather than brilliantly adapted.

What Got You Here Won't Get You There

This is the name of another book, I have it sitting around somewhere but not within my eyeline so I can't read the author and I've already expended as much energy typing this as the google search would have taken.

It's almost in that category of books you don't have to read because it is all in the title self-help like "feel the fear and do it anyway" and "He's Just Not that Into You" but not quite, you probably can get 90% of the value from a blurb so here's mine:

The book is about the diminishing returns of our innate strengths, and the Peter Principle which states that everyone will be promoted to their level of incompetence which has been robustly tested and is generally regarded to be real. Your career will stall when the thing that "got you here" begins to work against you preventing you from getting any further it won't "get you there."

So if your career has been based on speaking confidently and commanding attention, eventually you will rise to a level of responsibility where you need to become cautious, conscientious because the stakes are too high to just take big swing after big swing for example. Or if you've risen through the ranks because you produce high quality work thanks to your attention to detail and work ethic, you will eventually be promoted to a role where to scale up your strengths you need to become sociable, patient, understanding.

Okay so that's basically the book, and it has some advice and things you can do to get over this hump in a career, but the first step is to acknowledge the problem.

What I would guess is not unique to the child who has to remain egocentric to survive childhood and their family of origin, is that not just in work but all applications this begins to work against them in adulthood. 

The simple reason being, not everyone is their parents. Now if we take a longer term view of history, going back to the majority of human civilization which is like 6,000 years, so 10 seconds to midnight compared to human history, but when your parents were dirt farmers, and gave birth to you and your sixteen siblings, nine of whom died by age two, you grew up to be a dirt farmer working on your family plot so whatever adaptation you made to survive childhood among your extended family (nuclear families are a very recent thing) it probably largely applied to your adulthood too. So if you needed to be an egocentric child to glom onto a competent aunt or uncle and get some much needed resources off them where your parents came up short, likely nothing much changed by the time you were thirty and the previous generation were 43. 

Hence, its probably not natural to proactively reconfigure in the complex economy we now live in, where people hit 22, have largely not become parents themselves and are moving to a share house for the final 5 of 7 magical years it takes to complete a three year degree before your first warehouse job and moving back in with your parents. (Also very recent, it used to be possible to become an adult by 21 for most people within living memory)

Bringing me to the thing I'd rather shout into forgotten but not defunct web 1.0 than talk about with the people most effected by it - fragile egocentrism.

Why not "Vulnerable Narcissism"?

Because, despite their being a 'healthy narcissism' present in most functioning adults, an ability to see themselves as something of unique value and seek validation by asking for things, applying for things, generally advocating for themselves so they don't just wither and die in endless reflection about their own insignificance - Narcissism is a thing, and specifically that thing is a personality disorder so it has a highly negative valence - basically we think of villany, of abusers etc. these are the images evoked for me at least, when someone uses 'narcissism' 

Secondly, I'm in no position to diagnose or misdiagnose anyone with narcissism. It may well be that what I am talking about is completely overlapping with 'vulnerable narcissism' but I have no expertise with which I could determine that. 

So I want to break down specifically what I don't want to literally talk about:

Egocentrism

Here's how I usually explain it: say you want a romantic partner, or you want to fill a job position. So you create in essence an ad to say I'm available.

The challenge we face, that force us to think or suffer, is that people will swipe-to-match our dating profile that would make good partners, but also people who will make terrible partners. Both broad groups of people "want" to have a relationship with us, but one will punish us in fulfilling their wants, whereas the other will reward us in fulfilling their wants.

The one that punishes us, I assert, will likely be highly egocentric. They want to be seen with us, they want our attention, they want our validation, they want to fuck us. To be lowly egocentric, they will want to connect with us, they will want to learn us, they will want us to enjoy sex with them as they would enjoy sex with us. They want a reciprocal give-take win-win relationship where ideally the line between giving and receiving will be blurred.

Same-same with filling a job opening, you will have applicants that simply want the job because of the benefits it can accrue to themselves, they want the income, they want the title, they want access to a social life, they want to dispose the income on goods and services they also want...but they may have very little interest in doing the actual role and will make for a terrible employee. But there will be other candidates who may want all of the above, but also to do the role, to produce a good or service, to take pride in the work and form a mutually beneficial employment arrangement.

Again I am going to assert, that if investigated a reliable predictor of good and bad job applicants will be the level of their egocentricity.

Now again with John's words echoing in my mind "meta-blogging...meta-blogging...meta-blogging..." take this very post for example - I am thinking about my audience, choosing this medium because it is active, rather than passive, a party that might benefit has to read on and can quit at any time, it's also impersonal I'm not confronting someone with "I think what is holding you back is your egocentricity" I leave that self-evaluation up to the reader, whereas an egocentric approach to this subject would be to not only confront someone with my impression of them, but to do so because their egocentricity bothers me and me alone. 

I don't believe in purely selfless acts, I wouldn't go that far. I just actually see it as win-win if I can give someone a piece of information that can in someway, lessen their suffering and in doing so, my own is.

What I would wish to make painfully clear is that I don't feel it necessary, warranted or constructive to attribute malice to this egocentricity. I am trying to point to an incompetence, the same as having salad in one's teeth, a procedural step is often missing that others possess to the level of an unconscious-competence or 'instinct' or 'intuition' and I believe can be built by anyone with practice.

This brings me to...

Fragility

A vending machine technician is servicing a machine. A resident of the building is telling the technician her opinion of the policy that the machines do not issue change. 

This is a banal egocentric exchange. The complainer is just demonstrating an incompetence of insight - what I call outsight. Their opinion is very much egocentric - sometimes they don't have exact change, its a hassle for them. They either have to buy more than they want or go without, or go to extra effort to break notes into exact change. These are legitimate grievences based on legitimate preferences, but the technician occupies a position where she can politely write it up for the person, but very probably little else. They are not in a position to change the policy, nor may they understand the policy by which to offer explanation and apology to the complaining consumer. 

They likely have no clout.

Now this example I have adapted from a real world scenario, where the complainer also has the first-hand experience of doing cold calling on behalf of the government. A not uncommon scenario for them to face at work, was to have a member of the public relay a message for the then prime-minister. 

Here then enters the fragility. This person had a personal experience with which they could relate to a vending machine vendor. The idea that the leader of the government of a nation had an office in the corner of a call center, where we could go tap on their door and say "some guy asked me to tell you Prime Minister, that he thinks you're a cunt and not to call at dinner time and he isn't going to vote for you because you fucked up the whole country by letting all those immigrants in."

Then I feel, to de-centralise our ego from this experience and generalise it to a fellow human being and be like "oh yeah, as if the technician can walk into the board meeting and say 'some lady thinks your vending machines should be stocked with ample change because it would be more convenient for her and I guess we can just absorb the additional logistical expense, security expense and incidences of vandalism to deliver that level of convenience.' how foolish of me, that's so annoying, just like when random members of the public tell me to tell the Prime Minister or latest minister to appear in the papers with an expense scandal something."

Right it should be an "uh huh" moment, and not an existential threat, which is how I've had others report the effect of any mention of their egocentricity come across. Perhaps one of the most publicly documented examples is in the 2002 documentary "Comedian" (spoiler, the documentaries climax is Jerry Seinfeld meeting with Bill Cosby) the doco follows two comedians, one being Jerry as he retires his material and painstakingly builds up a new set, you know, you remember his new stuff. The other is Orny Adams, who is an up-and-coming comedy prospect. Orny appears in several scenes, notably an appearance in from memory, Toronto, where on stage he reacts (in 2002 Youtube was barely a thing, let alone "reaction" video content) to a bad review of his act in the Toronto Star.

Afterwards, a veteran comedian, I can't recall who, gives Orny the blunt feedback that basically he needs to stop being fixated on himself and make the audience laugh. This exchange upsets Orny, but gives his agent/manager sufficient courage to take a break from enabling Orny and says something like "I don't disagree with anything he said." 

Another go to example for me, is Derren Brown's breakdown of a scene from 'L'illusionist' a 2010 animated feature:

"Magicians I think [need to] make the performance about something else other than just 'look how clever I am look, look at what I can do' which is the mistake this otherwise technically brilliant magician is making in this and the reason why his audience is so small and why the kid is just only interested in how the tricks done because ultimately then that's that's all that's left isn't there"

Like when I consider how fucking valuable this feedback is, it can literally 180 the direction of someone's life from unmitigated disaster to realised self-worth, it is devastating to encounter this brilliant gifted child who in part or wholly raised themselves gatekeeping the adult's ability to function as a free human in society. 

This is the fragility and it's a death-spiral to couple fragility with egocentricity. 

Why I don't want to literally talk about it

In brief: incompetence and impotency. Like I have tried to talk about it in the past, and it came very close to just blowing up a friendship.

There's a saying that doesn't apply here: "If this is what it feels like to be wrong, I don't want to be right."

From my perspective, limited though it is, what it feels like to be egocentric as an adult, is mostly bad. These people are suffering. 

But what it feels like to be right, is in this case incredibly scary. 

So the above saying doesn't work, because this is something you say with a nose full of cocaine and a prostitute wearing your wife's old high-school uniform while she is in a clinic having her post-partum depression treated. It's not like it's actually ever wise to be wrong, but there's a hedonic payoff in the moment that makes the saying cogent, if fundamentally false.

I would guess, as a lay person with no capacity to know that having unreliable parents is the kind of existential threat that can justify a classification of trauma. In this way perhaps there's some aptitude to identify thinking of others, perspective taking etc. as an existential threat, causing stress, post-trauma; and that it is disordered basically once one becomes legally and financially independent from parents or primary carers.

There may also be an aptitude in phenomena like "scarcity cultures" Melbourne youtuber klaize has a video on the theory behind the "greedy Chinese" stereotype which cites a bunch of memes like Chinese appearing people loading up on single use plastic bags in produce sections of grocery stores for example. He cites research using economic games with children that from memory suggests a kind of intergenerational trauma arising from the famines caused in China by Mao's reckless and irresponsible social experiments that characterised his control of the People's Republic of China. 

Now, to suggest that the infants are experiencing trauma I suspect might be a stretch, though as adults they may develop anxieties learning oral histories, but it seems a culture can also, I'm going to say 'collapse' into egocentricity - a 'fuck you I got mine' arising from actual, or anticipated scarcity (as is likely happening now that every moron is parroting predictions of 50% unemployment in the future and then acting like it isn't completely fucking insane that anyone is enthusiastically charging toward such a destabilisation of human civilization. This is also, simply in addition to all the fucking news coverage for 10-15 years about housing becoming unaffordable, and young people not being able to ever own their own home, and at the same time, journalists on the public broadcaster basically masturbating on live TV over the prospect of rate cuts from the central bank pushing property prices ever closer to the moon.)

I don't want to talk about it, because there's a fundamental difficulty in discussing it intelligibly, let alone intelligently. 

I binge watched House M.D. one time, finding its formulaic episodes following A, B and C plots on the same predictable beats episode after episode, season after season. For those who no longer recall House, or terrestrial television, Dr. House worked in the diagnostics department of Princeton Teaching Hospital in New Jersey, his job was to figure out combinations of weird symptoms and patients resistant to treatment that defied the run-of-the-mill presentations.

A guiding principle for the diagnostics, is that you are always going for one condition to explain all the symptoms. So like if someone presents with yellowed skin, abdominal pain and an ear ache, you don't want to explain all those symptoms with three conditions if there's one that can explain all of them. So I don't have the medical knowledge to come up with a valid example, but let's say "Dave's syndrome" explains all three and is treated with massage, that's better than "jaundice, appendicitis and ear infection."

But this is what I've found, so let me try and noodle it a bit here - egocentricity is an adaptive response to early childhood adversity, the parents, guardians, carers aren't doing their bit so the child steps up; that becomes maladaptive in adulthood where (dysfunctional economy aside) your peers are expected to rely on each other, not their parents. So that's (1) and this egocentricity co-exists with a background level of existential dread, like being cutoff or something so (2) is that someone who is egocentric also doesn't like to hear, let alone be told they are 'egocentric.'

Which means (3) that we can't talk intelligently about this perfectly reasonable, in many ways admirable response to childhood adversity because to acknowledge it is somehow to send someone back there.

My greater problem

Is not only do I not want to literally talk about it anymore, with anyone, I don't want to watch it. I don't want to see it. I don't want to be around when it happens.

It's painful to watch someone say "buy this thing about me" with, and that is a crucial "with", no consideration as to why anyone else should but that thing, and that thing about you, and what they get out of it in return for what me gets out of it.

It's this awful thing where I cannot resolve the pain of caring about someone with fragile egocentricity, so I wind up having to avoid them so I don't have to exist in that place where a dysfunctional adult hurts themselves, and I feel bad for them.