Willa Paskin wonders why it’s not enough simply to like something anymore:
[A]dults used to obsess about things in a more steadfast manner, by having long-term interests known as hobbies. (Whatever happened to those?) Or they obsessed with downright stately occasionalness, when something out there really gripped the nation. Now we are engaged in a near-constant cycle of being “totally obsessed” with a cultural object (“obsessed” is the term of art on social media) and perpetually on the lookout for that next binge-experience. Why are we getting hysterically excited about very good but not hugely original cultural products seemingly every other month? Why have we turned into compulsive obsession-seekers?
As with nearly every aspect of contemporary life, the Internet has a lot to do with it. The Internet’s default mode is obsession. Nothing worth thinking or talking or writing about—nothing not worth thinking or talking or writing about, for that matter – gets thought or talked or written about in moderation. At the start, products like Serial or True Detective feel as though they are made inescapable not by their obvious and overwhelming clickiness – like, say, pictures of Kim Kardashian’s derriere – but by the force of good taste. There are things on the Internet that happen to us, but these are things that, initially, feel as though we made “happen.” And yet, at a certain point, the frenzy surrounding these beloved objects achieves the same level of inescapability as those naked pictures. Someone out there surely feels as annoyed by all the Serial coverage as someone else feels about Kim Kardashian’s tush. They have both become the latest obsession of “the Internet,” and you can either get on board yourself or get put on board, eyes rolling.
Long before Michael Woodley theorized it, the link between asexuality and genius was covered on Seinfeld, when George Costanza’s girlfriend had mononucleosis and couldn’t have sex with him for six weeks. The result, as you may recall, was that George dedicated all of that time and energy once used to think about women and sex to thinking about other things and became … a genius!
Another goes on a bit of a rant:
I’m going to call BS on the evolutionary psychology idea that asexuals devote more of their brain away from sex. That is an incredibly self-serving idea; it simultaneously flatters the person who says they are too smart for sex and absolves them from having to engage with the cognitive complexities (and potential failures) of an intimate relationship or coupling.
I am certain there are asexuals, but I don’t think they are asexual because their brains are eugenically superior by dent of conscious intervention on the part of the asexual in question. There are definitely a few geniuses who are asexual, but the idea that most geniuses are asexual is absurd. There are probably an equal number of dumb asexuals and smart asexuals. Humans simply do not have that granular level of control over their own hormones – and if you think you do, that’s just a sad cognitive illusion and you are deluding yourself.
Geniuses are just the extreme end example of this. Their brain is so great and everyone else’s brains are so puny their ineptness in relationships must be because their brain is so great, omg, in fact, their ineptness is actually EVIDENCE their brain is greater! It’s a beautiful unbreakable feedback loop of self-serving delusion. Like Fox News.
I dated a very brilliant woman in college whom as best I can tell from Facebook now identifies as asexual. She had her own set of background and baggage she prefers to believe she is above, and she would love the theory that she was just so smart her body wasn’t interested in sex. Her body was interested in sex, but as she would often assert she would eventually mentally clamp down hard on any sexual response she felt when we were making out because she didn’t want to lose control (and she would get scared at her own non-conscious responses to physical intimacy, in my opinion).
I respected her boundaries, and while we explored each other moderately, we never went very far – which was fine, considering we were eighteen and it was a first relationship for both of us. I think our relationship was a positive growing experience for both of us, but she never got comfortable with the idea that her body had a mind of its own.
Personally, I think this whole evo-psyche explanation is an extension of Smart Kid Syndrome. Smart Kids have everything relating to school come so easily to them that they never learn how to struggle through something that is new and initially incomprehensible and requires a long time investment of repeatedly failing before its no longer impossible. On top of that, Smart Kids are subjected to an unending geyser of addictive exclamatory over-the-top praise about how SMART and brilliant they are. Every time they make a minor achievement, they’re given a hit of that addictive praise for something that required a minimal input of effort; this has a huge downside, when something is not effortless their output is not amazing and they don’t get praised and they don’t get the endorphin rush they’re used to getting every time they complete something. And when they try hard and put in tons of effort the praise they get is not commensurate to their immense effort, it’s the same praise they get for doing something that took minimal effort.
The natural response to this is anything that does not come as easily as schooling is derided and diminished as “stupid”. This is exacerbated when the “stupid” thing is widespread or popular and the Smart Kid feels that they are missing out on something or being deliberately excluded. But the fault cannot be the self, no, it must be the “other” exterior to the self that is at fault.
Do you see how seductive this line of thinking is? “I’m smarter than everybody else therefore I’m better than everybody else, how come they can get dates or play sports when I am so much better and smarter? It’s because X are so stupid or X are so shallow” etc.
No it is not. It is because X made the effort, X tried to have a relationship, X invested years in learning sports skills. It isn’t that asking a girl out is hard, or taking that long anxiety ridden path towards a first kiss is difficult, nope, according to the smart kid it is the entirety of society being stupid. How dare they achieve success in something and win praise for something the smart kid is scared of confronting and failing at? There’s nothing worse than failing, you don’t get your hit of endorphins from a geyser of praise when you fail, so the best strategy is to avoid at all costs situations where failure is likely to recur.
Previous Dish on asexuality here. Update from a reader:
Asexual here (I’ve written into the Dish about it before), and I’m calling bullshit on “asexual people are smarter because they don’t think about sex.” I actually had someone say this to me on OKCupid (I’m open about being asexual, as well as trans), and was totally caught off guard by it, it was a bizarre idea and not something I would have ever thought up on my own. I shared it with other asexual friends and they found it similarly laughable. No, I don’t think about sex, but just because I think about different things than different people doesn’t mean I’m thinking about smarter things. I’m sure I fill that brain space with plenty of frivolous things, as do my friends. Not to say that I don’t think about smart things, but I don’t even remotely feel like I do that more than other people, and I’m certainly not a genius.
In countries including Uganda, South Africa, Mexico, Thailand, Nigeria and Indonesia, more people pay a bribe to a policeman every year than to any other government service provider including health professionals, teachers, utility workers, the judiciary or tax and land records officers. Police are the most common or second most common bribe recipients in 38 out of 107 countries that Transparency International surveys.
And, according the same organization, “seven percent of Americans who say they had contact with police over the last year report paying a bribe.” What can be done?
When it comes to straightforward corruption in rich and poor countries alike, paying a bribe to a police officer should be decriminalized (to encourage reporting) while receiving a bribe should be automatic grounds for being sacked and incarcerated. And in the many countries where large numbers report paying bribes to policeman, the solution may be to reduce the number of police officers. Even in the U.S., where corrupt cops are the exception, the police in cities like Ferguson would be far more effective without the officers that are financed by fines, because that would reduce the pressure to put predatory officers on the beat. A cop’s job is to serve and protect. We shouldn’t pressure them to fleece and intimidate.
We don’t seem to have finished discussing Ferguson, so one more thought. I agree with those who argue that the police’s interaction with young black men is, in too many cases, riddled with bias and far too quick to use lethal force. But I agree with others that the Michael Brown case is not the case with which to make that argument. And the liberal reflex to turn it into a synecdoche is a troubling one for reasons John Judis lays out:
Liberals took the decision by the grand jury to symbolize, or stand in for, the greater injustice of the Ferguson and of the American criminal justice department. But in fact the reverse occurred. They projected the larger injustice of the system onto the grand jury’s ruling.
I’m reminded of the case of Matthew Shepard, where the need to project the injustice of violence against gay men onto one complicated case blinded people to a more interesting and complex reality. Michael Brown did not deserve to die, any more than Matthew Shepard did. But that doesn’t mean both are perfect victims, unalloyed by all the flaws that flesh is heir to; or that their deaths illustrated pure random homophobia or pure racism. And this need for perfect victims is of a piece with a church of liberalism in which there is only one way to be good – a member of a minority – and only one sin – prejudice. All churches need saints and martyrs. But liberalism – no more than conservatism – should never be a church. It’s as dangerous to civil politics as Christianism.
A reader notes how this church’s doctrines are increasingly enforced – and sinners punished – on social media:
Many of us mocked the Tea Party in its seemingly religious quest to root out “RINOs” and its dedication to finding ever more fringe and lunatic conservative causes, but something similar seems to be happening to liberals. Looking at the weekly outraged Facebook posts and blog articles of friends, colleagues, and commentators, I see the purpose of the liberal conversation as increasingly being the enforcement of a shared set of ideals and the rooting out of those among us who might disagree with them. We’re building an echo chamber in which dissenting voices are first drowned out and then excluded. This isn’t about building forums for debate with like-minded souls – it’s about dividing the world into The Righteous and The Wicked.
Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 19 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here and our new coffee mugs here. One happy customer:
Just got mine! It’s big, solid. I can feel the quality!
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My ten-year-old rescue mutt (border collie/Labrador?) is enjoying our new beagle mug.
The monthly report card is due. Revenue remained pretty solid last month at $30.5k:
The monthly pattern for revenue seems to echo 2013, with a decline in the summer months and an upsurge in the fall, leading to $26.5k in November 2013:
So we’re up a bit year-on-year. The comparison, as of yesterday, is $814k for the first eleven months of 2013, versus $934k for the first eleven months of 2014, a 15 percent year-on-year increase. Traffic is also relatively steady: at 714,000 unique readers this month, for 5.2 million pageviews, about average for the last six months, but lower than when we had just initiated the pay-meter.
The number of subscribers edged up a bit this month to 30,264 but remains in the 30,000 range we reached at the end of the summer. All in all, a very gradual growth on a very solid base. We’d like to be growing more, and we’ve been brainstorming how and what that would entail – probably an upgrade from our current very amateur but viable business model. But I’m cognizant of what David Carr told Lucia Moses today:
This was a big year for new media startups. How sustainable are they?
What would happen if you took away all the exits and people had to make a living off existing CPMs? It would be pretty bloody.
We’re currently making a living off no CPMs. Know hope.
A dangerously ill HIV patient waits to be taken to the hospital for treatment on November 29, 2014 in Yangon, Burma. The center, which has be been in operation since 2002, is owned and has been operated by the opposition party, the National League for Democracy, after the failure of the Myanmar government to take action and NGO’s being prevented from intervening. By Lauren DeCicca/Getty Images.
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Julia Ioffe posted a reflection on how her Russian-Jewish family came to the US that zooms out into a history lesson on our immigration laws – a history replete with political calculations, arbitrary rules, exceptions, and yes, presidential fiats. Far from offering a clear-cut distinction between legal and illegal immigrants, she concludes, “American immigration law is perhaps one of the most mercurial sets of laws we have”:
It is not set in stone, nor has it ever been. Historically, it has depended on racism, trade priorities, and geopolitical considerations, just as it does today. And as Senator Ted Cruz, son of a Cuban immigrant, rails against Hondurans and Mexicans for coming to America illegally, keep in mind just how lucky his family is to come from a country that got the kind of special status that allowed, and still allows, Cubans to come to U.S. in ways that would be considered illegal for other populations and to get a green card in a year. Consider that this is not because of a law passed in the U.S. Congress, but because some guy we didn’t like seized power in 1959 and a few American presidents decided to help the Cuban bourgeoisie—and to stick it to Nikita Khrushchev. It’s why I and my 60 relatives are here, too. And it is quite likely that one of your ancestors got in through some giant, executive loophole ages and ages ago. Or got here when there were no loopholes because there were simply no laws pertaining to immigration.
The Dish previously covered the “cutting the line” argument against amnesty for illegal immigrants here.
The study, recently published in the journal Demography, does not dispute the tendency to move for a husband’s career. Rather, the new study takes issue with the reasons behind the move. The big take-away: Women enter professions that make it easy to work anywhere, and move for any reason, including for a spouse. Men choose careers in fields that are geographically-constrained. In other words, men have to move in order to move up.
“The tendency for men to move more often than women is completely explained by the types of jobs they enter, not that they are men or women,” [study author Alan] Benson said in an interview. “Men who enter female-dominated jobs don’t tend to move as much for work. If you look at women who enter male-dominated jobs, they tend to move a lot.”
And if you look at women who are not married, they relocate for a job less often than men do.
This segregation, Benson finds, is particularly pronounced among people with college degrees.
There are a lot of things this could mean. One of those is that women happen to like more flexible jobs. Another is that women feel a lot of pressure, from a young age, to sort themselves into flexible jobs.
At the end of the day, this goes back to a common conclusion from research concerning gender and careers: women often trade a lot of earning potential for flexibility, for better or for worse.
The Dish 