Progs Meeting Reality?

In the aftermath of Trump's election, the most surprising thing isn't the flipping of the Rust Belt, the Republican incursion into black and Latino voters, or the protests. It's the completely flabbergasted look on the faces of both commentators and John Q. Shitlib.

It's become clear that nearly every Hillary Clinton supporter lived in a world that existed only in their minds. What a world it is, with one candidate a pure-as-snow, vagina-equipped hero who faced blistering (if trivial) attacks from the guerrilla right-wing in her crusade to save the world from itself; the other, an arrogant lecher who hypnotized everyday Americans into acting as shock troops against the media and liberals, who advocated rape and murder and stopped just short of announcing, "I'm sick of niggers!"

Once all this, "Stay safe, my sodomite and mixed-meat friends," nonsense ends, they'll have a moment to meet reality or double-down on their delusions. I'm betting that most normies will end up closer to the real world. They are likely to be the ones who will be the most angry at the media.

More on Lena Dunham

I'm finding the Lena Dunham controversy much more interesting than I would have thought.

The dust is settling and the opinions are forming; the majority are not in Dunham's favor.

Only a small part of the majority echo Williamson's contention that Dunham is more alien than artist. Most are satisfied to say that Dunham's ongoing manipulation and sexual play with her sister was abusive and leave it at that.

Certainly, this is more grist for the culture war mill. It shouldn't be a surprise that the women-of-color faction of feminism were quick to disown Dunham but another rift in the solidarity rose to the surface. Many feminists, it appears, found their ideology because it's the loudest voice against sexual abuse; Dunham's confessions struck a chord with them.

As for myself, I've kept an eye on Dunham over the last few years because I always pay attention when a new "genius" is introduced to the culture. As I've written about many times before, the arts and entertainment field--particularly the journalism covering it--has been dominated by progressives for years. Dunham, in particular, came to us anointed as, at least, a potential "voice of a generation." But what had she done to deserve it?

A Redditor linked this article, "Falling Down the Rabbit Hole of NYC’s Lena Dunham Obsession," published last January, before her book was published. It's a compendium of Dunham mentions in the NYC press.

Here's the thing:  It goes back to 1998. Dunham was born in 1986. Not even a teenager, here she is in Vogue (!):

Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham's eleven-year-old daughter, Lena, has a street edge that could leave even Miss Schnabel feeling momentarily inadequate. 'I tried to model this after Helmut Lang,' says Lena, showing off a shift she sewed herself. Her fashion pronouncements are something you'd expect from a woman (at least) three times her age: 'I tend not to go for trends. You can only wear them for two weeks . . . . I really like Jil Sander, but it's so expensive.... I find Calvin Klein really hard to respect because he's everywhere. I view him as a clothesmonger . . . . Manolo is really classy.'

This particular excerpt has stuck with me because it shows a real disconnect between the real world and the insulated NYC elite. Dunham here smacks of the most irritating type of precociousness, the kind in which she affects a sophistication which she couldn't possibly claim. She finds Calvin Klein "really hard to respect" because he's a "clothesmonger?"

Most adults would recognize this as creative mimicry. The child has heard this type of discussion and is more or less pretending to be an adult discussing adult things in an adult way. Kind people will listen with gentle tolerance but take very little stock in what the child is saying.

Apparently, if one is a member of the artistic-literary-publishing NYC elite, one hears a precocious heiress and decides that she must be a brilliant young thing, worthy of quoting in an international publication. Truly we must be a special breed, the thinking seems to be here, otherwise, how else would we have such remarkable children?

At fifteen, the NYT quotes her discussing a hangout that her fellow classmates frequent:  " I have a friend who's 36 who went to St. Ann's, and she used to go to U.T.B." She goes on to wax poetic about the spot, but two things are more important. One, a fifteen-year-old has a friend who is 36? Second, a fifteen-year-old making her second appearance in the international press?

When she was sixteen, the NYT sent a reporter to cover her vegan dinner party. The article points out that only she and a friend are actually vegans, though Dunham proudly decides to enforce her gustatory ideology by making everyone remove their shoes on the premise that they are probably leather. They denounce/listen-ironically to Justin Timberlake and Dunham tells the reporter, "I go to one party every five months. I watch everyone get drunk and I'm really freaked out. I enjoy it, but then I don't want to see it again for five months."

By this time we can see that Dunham's precociousness has not only gone unchallenged but encouraged. We can also see what kind of person she is becoming, using intellectual positioning and "enlightened" self-absorption as a way to assert status.

The beginning of Dunham's public profile as a creator came at 21 in the NYT for a series for Nerve Video (Remember Nerve?) in which she films herself in Spanx, has unappetizing sex and then has her partner insult her. Sound familiar?

From then on, everything Dunham did got attention from the NYC press and, thus, international exposure. She followed the Nerve series with another web series that featured well-known NYC art and fashion figures, then the film Tiny Furniture, followed by full-bloom national status and Girls.

Three things:

First, is there a better example of how the entertainment market is broken? Dunham's talent isn't even an issue here--she could be twice as talented or half as talented and have the exact same career. More importantly, her work could be entertaining, but how can one believe that her tiny and insular experience could give her anything important to say? Looking at her history, it appears that she was groomed to be a media darling.

Second, like I discussed the other day, a serious, disinterested look at Dunham's public persona reveals not depth but narcissism. Her "courage" for displaying her average naked body and her willingness to look pathetic, her inability to create vehicles that don't star herself, all point to a desperate need for attention. She would have taken Paris Hilton's path if she had the looks for it. Since she didn't, she took the role of the smartest person in the room. Since the room was full of the children of editors and artists and fashion designers, they thought she was very smart, indeed--smart enough to better the world.

Finally, Kevin D. Williamson's original intention in his review of Dunham's book was buried under the "molestation or not?" controversy, but I think that he's introduced a valuable technique to our arsenal. The Dunham who comes across, in her own words, is alien. Her priorities, her experience with the difficulties of life and her coddling by the national press are all light-years away from the lives of her audience. We should be doing more of this.

Three Thoughts on Lena Dunham and Kevin D. Williamson

I

To say Kevin D. Williamson's article about Lena Dunham last week was about exposing her as a child molester--which has been the takeaway--is to miss the myriad subtleties in the piece.

I recommend reading it, if only to show how much craft can be put into something so short. Williamson takes Dunham's month-old memoirs and eviscerates her public persona. It's a worthy task because Dunham is well-versed in the Millennial tricks of making her points without having to stand her ground.

For example, he discusses how she has her character on Girls announce to her parents that she is the "voice of her generation," which she qualifies 1) by having her fictional character say it, 2) by having that character be intoxicated as she says it, and 3) by undercutting it with a joke afterwards. Yet Dunham herself is more than happy to allow others to call her that.

Dunham's artistic cowardice isn't as important as what it says about her real-life statements. She's willing to have everyone believe something she's not brave enough to say unequivocally. Williamson takes great offense to her discussion of a "rape" she experienced while at Oberlin College. Thankfully, he doesn't take the bait that the media in general did when the book was published--he doesn't fall into the argument of whether the murky incident was consensual or not.

Instead, he takes issue to Dunham's abuse of her stature in the context of her refusal to take a definable stand. As for the latter, she doesn't call the experience "rape"--she has others say that for her. As for the abuse of prominence, he points out that it took him two minutes to track down a "Barry" who was a campus Republican at Oberlin during her time there. Since Dunham tells us that this Barry also raped a woman so viciously that blood spattered the walls, she paints a very ugly picture of an identifiable man who has no comparable platform to defend himself and who was only accused indirectly.

As for the allegations of Dunham "molesting" her younger sister, framing her as an abuser doesn't seem to be Williamson's intent:

If there is such a thing as actually abusing a child through excessive generosity and overindulgence, then Lena Dunham’s parents are child abusers. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter noted for his primitive brand of highbrow pornography, his canvases anchored by puffy neon-pink labia; her photographer mother filled the family home with nude pictures of herself, “legs spread defiantly.” Self-styled radicals from old money, they were not the sort of people inclined to enforce even the most lax of boundaries.

What Williamson makes a case for is that Dunham's parents, with their post-tradition liberality, created an excessively sexualized environment for their children and that the sexual interaction between Dunham and her sister comes from that. This point has been obscured as the right has pounced on the fact that Dunham's self-reported behavior could be labelled as abusive and her supporters (and Dunham herself) label it childish experimentation. Williamson's article shows that Dunham is a very disordered person, which should force us to question the value of her work.

I wonder if the controversy will have a lasting effect on Dunham's career. Even her supporters have to reckon with the emotional snapshots she's given them. Her sister is six years younger than her--the power dynamics of an older sister bribing her with candy in exchange for long kisses and employing "anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl" certainly force one to look at her as something of a manipulative bully. Williamson points out that in an episode of Girls, Dunham's character tells an employer that she will punish him for his harassment by writing an essay about him and using his real name. Rumors about her on-set behavior problems have circulated from the very beginning, mostly centering on her utter self-absorption at the expense of everyone else.

The mystique of irony and ambiguity is difficult to pull off in the long term; eventually most people figure out what is being obscured. She's beginning to come across as a woman who feels she's always justified in doing whatever she's done, no matter what others' feelings may be. Viewers might come to see that, underneath the labels of "irony" and "satire," Dunham's characters are really accurate depictions of their creator.

II

Ace of Spades asks the right question about the Dunham uproar:  "So Did the Media Miss Lena Dunham's Hair-Raising Stories About Her Sister, Or Did They Bury It?"

Ace supports the theory that the press intentionally suppressed Dunham's childhood revelations, rather than the theories that the press either didn't actually read her book or found the stories unremarkable.

Of course, it's probably a bit of all three but Ace doesn't consider that her book was published by a pillar of the media, Random House. If the media thought that what she had to say was something to be suppressed, how did it get published in the first place?

What I think is that this is a matter of Dunham's mystique working in her favor. The artist's reputation precedes her, so any work that's produced is pre-qualified as Art. The problems of the work can be deemed "challenging" and mistakes are examined as if they are intentional.

Dunham came to Girls with a couple of well-received indie works but, more importantly, an of-the-moment personal package. In the incestuous world of New York media, she fit right in as a wealthy scion of a Mayflower-Jewish marriage, educated at progressive schools, with an artistic family. She spoke the same language as the media elite--how hard do you think it was for her to raise funding, cast actors and recruit a talented crew? Consider, as well, that Girls had a great deal of attention even before it premiered, despite Dunham's negligible profile.

Add to this Dunham's apparent narcissism. One trope one reads in critiques of our culture is that narcissism is, to some extent, an advantage. The self-confidence and assertiveness of a narcissist initially seems to be a positive in a competitive environment. In my own life, I've been amazed at how easily people accept others' self-aggrandizement. It's easy to imagine that Dunham's belief in her own exquisite taste convinced her more-submissive colleagues.

Dunham is also of-the-moment in the public sphere:

A great deal has been made of Lena Dunham’s weight, not least by Lena Dunham. She may be Hollywood fat, or Manhattan–below–125th Street fat, but she is in fact an utterly ordinary specimen of American womanhood, and she would not be thought of as fat in Magnolia, Ark., or Craig, Colo., or even in the less rarefied sections of Brooklyn.

Dunham's physical appearance is, in reality, an advantage. She can be pointed at as an example of a "real woman," while still having enough beauty and youth to carry off a layer or two of makeup in a fashion magazine.

For an example of how her unconventionally-conventional body has benefited her, look at last spring's attack on a low-level entertainment reporter. At a panel, he asked her to explain her frequent nudity on the show. Girls producer Judd Apatow immediately berated the man as if he had told her she wasn't attractive enough to be naked on HBO; the think-pieces published for the next week took the same tactic. However, nothing the reporter said indicated that his question was about how unattractive he thought she was; his question was about her artistic choice--specifically, one scene in which she was playing ping-pong topless for no apparent reason. (However, this was dangerous territory. Asking why she was naked on screen for no good reason might make one think that she is a narcissist who wants all the attention, any way she can get it.)

Dunham also gets a lot of mileage out of the current feminist moment. She is the actor/writer/producer of her own show. She's not a Hollywood beauty. She brags about the wide variety of sexual encounters she's had. She's willing to pontificate about whatever the female/progressive issue of the day is and always comes to a vague pro-SJW opinion about it.

All that is to say that Dunham--through inheritance and inclination--has the right package to warrant the attention of the media. She is an Important Artist.

Being an Important Artist, we are to automatically accept her expressions even if they are off-putting to our tiny minds. She is the one with the fine-tuned sensibility, not us, so we can assume that her "cute" stories about sexual shenanigans with her much younger sister are as morally-insignificant as she says they are.

I think that those critics that read her book weren't sure what to make of those confessions. Chances are, they thought their own reactions were "problematic," that they'd internalized society's sex-negativity. Dunham is anointed and no one wanted to look out of step by appearing to be confused by her statements.

There's something even more sad about the lack of coverage. Was there no single journalist in the media who at least thought he could make a name for himself by denouncing her? Is the media now so monolithic that we can't even rely on their self-interest? Say what you want about the viciousness of reporters--at least their lust for exposing people can keep you honest.

III

Finally, when Dunham is occasionally discussed on a right-leaning website, one can play an overdose-inducing drinking game by reading the comments. Take a shot for every comment in which a reader brags about not knowing who Dunham is or asks why the site is covering someone so worthless.

This tiresome pose is the reason why the right has been completely left behind culturally.

In the ongoing politicization of everything, the loss of the culture was the watershed. The right started acting as if arts and entertainment wasn't good enough to pay attention to and lost generations.

Culture, pop and otherwise, is the communal representation of what we value. By turning our backs on this fundamental part of the human experience, conservatives have lost their ability to contribute to this representation.

I've mentioned this before:  One of the struggles of the Catholic Church in modern times is that it answers questions we can no longer articulate. How can it explain the value of suffering in a world that defines people as monkeys hitting dopamine-release buttons? The reason that these questions and answers are lost is because conservatives have given up all interest in the means of understanding--our artistic culture.

Our culture has told us that Dunham is an Important Artist--at the very least, conservatives should be interested in whether she is or not. To think otherwise is to put one's head in the sand.

The Atlantic Report: The Renegade Nurse

I wonder what progressives would say if Kaci Hickox, the quarantine-defying nurse, told the press that she refused to be isolated because:  1) It violated her civil liberties and 2) There were too many Mexicans among her medical staff.

If the progressive reaction to ebola confuses you, it's helpful to think of the differences between where conservatives and liberals believe our threats lie. Conservatives are cautious about external threats while progressives keep their focus on their internal rivalries.

Most zombie movies eventually rely on one trope:  The individual who is less concerned with the ravenous horde outside than sticking it to his compatriots. (One of the reasons Night of the Living Dead is lasting is that it complexifies this trope by making the dissenter's plan the right one.) Even though this character is always depicted as a villain, progressives seem to think he's the hero.

Russell Berman has the report here.

At the heart of [Hickox's] protest is a belief that authorities in the two states were confining her out of fear–both political and irrational–rather than medicine. She has no fever and feels fine, and as public health officials have stressed repeatedly in recent weeks, Ebola can't be transmitted unless a person is symptomatic.

So far, the media has restrained themselves. They haven't come out and said that they support her, but they're willing to keep a spotlight on her.

It appears they're being wise, but I doubt it. The progressive foot soldiers that have been raiding the comments sections all have a similar refrain:  Science has proved that we're safe.

Has it? There's a lot of speculation but surely the powers that be don't have an interest in making it look safer than it is.

Anyway, ebola is a good example of what I call the Nuclear Energy problem. Nuclear fission, as far as I can tell, is our best source of energy. It's even safe--except for one thing:  when it isn't safe it's really, really bad.

You are faced with a big prize wheel. You have a 45% chance of winning $10 a day for the rest of your life and a .5% chance of having your home burn down to nothing with all your family inside. Do you play?

That's what ebola is. What's the latest death rate? 70%? I've heard 90% in the past. It's a horrible way to go, as well. As for how easy it is to catch, well, the information has been so politicized who knows who to trust? Not to mention the fact that diseases can mutate without warning. The wisest decision is control what we can because the alternative is horrifying.

Hickox's defiance toward the quarantines and the progressive support for her are exceptionally short-sighted. Sure, she's within her rights, but what happens if she turns out to have it and transmits it to someone? Those rights will be gone for everyone else because she will have proved their danger. Conspiracy theorists would argue that this is all part of the plan--"prove" how civil liberties endanger the public in order to strip them.

It reminds me of a slogan I use as a manager:  "If everyone acts reasonably, we won't have a lot of stupid rules." While New Jersey's tent in a parking lot was a really dumb move, if Hickox had compromise between the public's concerns and her feeling of imprisonment, a happy medium could have been reached. By insisting that only her happiness was important, she's added more fuel to the prog-con battle.

Why It Took Nearly Two Decades for Hollywood to Succeed with Superheroes

Thanks to Kevin Smith, the legend of a Nic Cage-starring, Tim Burton-directed Superman movie is always at the edges of contemporary Hollywood history. The project, developed in Burton's heyday in the 90s, came very close to being made but eventually fell through.

Smith was not the only screenwriter who worked on the project. Dan Gilroy, whose Nightcrawler just opened, worked on it, too. Here's his synopsis of the project:

So poor little [Superman], when he winds up on earth, he has no freaking idea where he came from. His biggest fear is that he's an alien. Our Superman was in therapy at the beginning of the film. He's in a relationship with Lois Lane and he can't commit. Or he was maybe in couple's therapy. But he can't commit because he doesn't know who he is or what is going on with him. He's hoping that he has some physiological condition that gives him these powers but that he's still human. It becomes very apparent, though, early in the script, when Lex Luthor uncovers the remnants of the spacecraft, he suddenly realizes – "Oh my god, I'm an alien." It was all about the psychological trauma of it.

This is why Hollywood just couldn't make superheroes work for so many years:  the industry's arrogance. Who would want to watch that Superman movie?

Even though there had been hundreds of stories and story arcs for Superman over the years, and time had proven some to be much better than others, Gilroy, Burton and producer Jon Peters thought, Nah, we'll just make some stuff up.

The Atlantic Report: Why Millennials &%#@! Love Science

I keep talking about Walker Percy's concept of the autonomous self because I keep seeing examples of it in modern culture. Alexandra Ossola's examination of Millenials' love of science is yet another good example.

This is how most Millennials feel about science—curious and awestruck. And they can’t get enough of it. They’re reading about science at their jobs and in their free time, in peer-reviewed journals or on Wikipedia. But what makes Millennials’ interests different from the scientific interests of every previous generation?

Well, for one, other generations didn't get cohort-stroking pieces in The Atlantic. But another is that science is the only avenue of truth allowed in the West.

Even a light presence on the Web will prove that Millenials' championing of science is shallow. Sagan and Tyson hero-worship and "Cool beans!" snapshots. And I don't get the impression that they understand the difference between science and technology--they know the difference when they talk about their iPhones, but not when there's a breakthrough in carbon fiber manufacturing or something.

Most importantly, there's a real lack of understanding of the disconnection between reality as the universe outside ourselves and science as our knowledge of that universe and the method of determining that knowledge. It may make atheists roll their eyes when I say this, but the rah-rah science fans make science a faith. (Here is another term I thought I made up before I encountered it on the alt-right:  scientism.)

When historians--and God help them--dig into the piles of chatter the modern era has produces, they'll have to take a Straussian perspective; everything that the mainstream media discusses is not what they're really discussing. This "love for science" is really the cult of the scientist. To really love science, I think, is to love the rigor of it--the strict rules of what is considered proof, the reluctance to promote definite conclusions, the process of eliminating possibilities rather than proving theories. The modern perspective is that the white-coated sage emerges from his laboratory and pronounces, "I bring you Truth!"

I wonder what will be the event that will shatter the Millenials' faith. As I said above, the spiritual perspective is that science is an abstract description of a reality that is separate from that description--a description that strives for accuracy but a description nonetheless. But the broader right wing also sees that science has become politicized.

Millennials have a greater need for things that transcend old boundaries and ideologies. Science has become a universal language, a form of information that is available almost instantly and can be shared among people who have nothing else in common.
...
"Obviously one issue that Millennials will put their talents toward solving is climate change," [Neil] Howe said.

Sadly, the end of Millenials' love of science probably won't be because of any single event. It will be because the excitement will slowly leak out of it. It's nice to be 22 years old and thrilled about the advances in space exploration or nanotechnology--or that Tarantino is coming out with a new movie or your favorite comic writer is taking over your favorite comic character or they've discovered a lost Salinger novel or Hulk Hogan is returning to the WWE. But time will tell you that these things rarely work out the way you think they will and you're left back in your home, wondering how to handle a Wednesday afternoon.

The Atlantic Report: Rise of the Feminist Tinder-Creep-Busting Web Vigilante

Much of the reason that mainstream media reports are so infuriating is not because they are biased--that's obvious--but the condescending journo-speak that writers believe masks their bias.

Case in point, Olga Khazan's "Rise of the Feminist Tinder-Creep-Busting Web Vigilante." The title is representative of another online trend:  the article is about 5% creep-busting vigilantes and 95% examples of boorish behavior.

“We can't win,” [Alexandra] Tweten told me recently. “If we don't respond, they come back and say, ‘you're a whore.’ If we do respond, we get yelled at and called names. I hate that men think they can talk to women like that. They should be publicly shamed.”

It's time to be honest. The proliferation of online dating is about expanding one's potential dating pool with minimal costs. One of those reduced costs is danger; it's much safer to hang one's shingle on the net and entertain offers than it is to, say, wander streets with a sign around one's neck reading, "Looking for Love."

Because that's what an online dating profile is about, isn't it? It's flipping a pink light above one's front door announcing one's willingness to engage in a romantic relationship. One can even specifically describe the type of relationship one is looking for, from sexual preferences to intensity of feeling.

I don't know what's going to be the watershed, but there's no doubt that flogging the "online harassment" horse is going to end. Like Gertrude Stein's Oakland, there's no "there" there. We hear quite a bit (unconfirmed) that the "FBI is investigating" but we never hear any results.

It's typical semantic trickery, just like the nudging of "rape" over to vagaries of "consent." Any random woman online can claim "death threats" and, at the phrase, we are to respond as if a man in a trenchcoat is standing outside her door with a survival knife. What this article is really talking about is men being rude and angry in a medium that not only allows blocking but can be turned off entirely.

The Internet may not be a "civil" place but it's really not a "dangerous" place unless one is sensitive beyond all proportion. As Seanbaby said many years ago, being offended on the Internet is like seeing "Fuck you" written on a bathroom wall and thinking, "Fuck me? How dare they!"

But even that overblown phenomenon is not what is at issue here. Instead, it's the near-criminalization of being a jackass of the male variety.

Bombarded by all these "admirers," many women feel overwhelmed and leave scores of messages unreturned. One blogger recently ran an OkCupid experiment for which he set up five fake male and five fake female profiles. After a week, all of the women had received at least one message, the most attractive women had received hundreds, but several of the men remained un-contacted. This kind of rejection, day after day, can foment a kind of deep resentment among the male daters. 

“They're trying to make us feel bad about making them feel bad,” Tweten said. “They're just trying to strike at whatever our insecurities are. You were just interested a second ago, and now you're saying, ‘you have a fat ugly nose.’” 

The shift from a "marriage market" to a "sexual marketplace" has altered standards for men a great deal and the new standards are much more stringent. Attractiveness, cockiness and suavity are less achievable than loyalty, reliability and virtuousness. It's no wonder that men online would rather play the numbers game with an overt sexual goal--it's easier to be diligent than artful.

The boorishness is also a result of the phenomenon I discussed here:  Red Pill attitudes--being the leading set of rules that "work" in the sexual marketplace--are creating an arms race between the sexes. Men affect that they are not impressed with women. Because the average man is, well, average, he is clumsy at feigning the mystique the Red Pill promotes. The blase, take-no-crap attitude is supposed to be challenging, but that's very near hostility, and hostility is pretty easy to achieve after sending message after message with no response.

The article represents another cycle in the environment that produced the Red Pill. Men are lectured to be "respectful" but being respectful doesn't get the results they want--it only filters out the "nice guys," who, it should be said, are simply listening to what they've been told. One can make an argument that saying one thing but wanting another is feminine coyness but logical males don't see the difference between this and lying. Being lied to makes most people angry.

Let's be honest:  women want the men to whom they are not attracted to disappear. For every man who is shamed on one of the sites the article discusses, there are probably about twenty who sent a simple, "Hi," and were ignored as if they never existed. A man singled out for being especially crude is at least acknowledged.