Thanks, Tereza. (I'm popping out of my self-imposed retreat to comment briefly.)
I agree with your conclusions on the slave system thwarting everyone.
Of course it's not just the insane money system, it's been everything. The divide and conquer - repeated again and again - to keep us arguing with each other so those pulling the strings are always out of sight.
Big sigh.
Yes something has gone terribly wrong. Dissecting the symptoms rarely leads to getting at the cause and a massive reorientation is needed. Rather than trying to figure out how men and women can come together in such a distorted landscape, we need to reject and abandon the landscape, and create something sane again, where we at least we start with the idea that people are equal, everyone is worthy of respect and compassion and that underneath all our drives - including sex and security - is love.
It's all been hijacked, as you know.
It can all be so much simpler, outside all this noise.
I didn't know what a thot is, I sort of wish I didn't now. Commoditizing sex isn't new, of course. But treating the commoditization of humanity as if it's a thing we need to incorporate in how we interact with each other is implicitly agreeing to this imposition, as if it's real and happened naturally. It isn't and didn't and I reject the whole construct.
I imagine a world post the shedding of a lot of this. How long does that take? IDK. Very tough to navigate in the meantime. The superficial differences we've been trained to focus on, where all the division lives, that perpetuates so much noise, can so easily be dropped into something deeper, that just naturally unites.
We were never intended to work so hard, for what is so natural.
Thanks for adding your brightness, clarity and humor, Tereza; for using your 'pretty little head' to such good use.
Beautifully said, Kathleen. "We were never intended to work so hard, for what is so natural." Exactly! Having and raising a family in a loving home should be the most accessible of goals, not something that requires the stars to align and a face that can sink a thousand ships (I found it interesting that was changed from 'launch' to 'sink' in the article.)
How long does it take to shed this construct? Someone quoted about bankruptcy and applied to global collapse, "Slowly and then all at once." But I think the opposite could be true. There's a sci-fi book where a woman comes to a deal with her ex, who happens to head the Fed, to change the economic system. As they watch out the window, the ice that's been slowly thawing on the river breaks and floes all rush downstream. I think good can happen slowly and then manifest all at once.
in the book 'stoneage economics' the investigator concurs. a tough work week might be one that included something like a 3 hour average, one of those days being a 'hard-work' day of more than 4 hours or so to go and find a rare treat such a honey or maybe a difficult hunt. even the horrific life within the dark ages was comprised of a work year filled with about 140 holy-days without work.
chomsky suggests that that time have come to us historically as 'dark' because the oligarchs had lost a lot of their power. jung suggest that they have been called dark because it was a time of huge introspection and a deep, albeit largely projected, shadow work that was required before an enlightenment of self-awareness. which has since then been perverted into egoistic-god syndrome as mind-controlled psy-op!) perhaps the deep introspection was a time when looking for the philosopher's stone took power away from the oligarchs — or was them figuring out how to expand their power? lol! so many questions!
all the best with what is and what is changing, with peace, respect, love and gratitude.
i'll add another odd tendril to it that that neither of you even hinted at: the incel business. many years ago, before political correctness had gained a foothold before morphing into so-called woke-dei stuff, i remember watching a series about the sexes. frequency of sexual intercourse was something that came up and it turns out that the so-called 'ugliness' of a woman had almost no bearing on sexual opportunity and action — for the woman. on the other hand, ugly men had very little chance of sexual intercourse. at the time this was linked with the importance and power that women have in advancing the 'best in kind' into the gene pool.
i would imagine that carter has addressed this? i don't have time to look into that at this time and it doesn't have a high enough standing in my interest scale to displace the other interesting stuff. peterson has addressed this, of course.
humorous aside: rather bizarrely, a self-appointed(?) spokes person for 'beautiful' women, actress olivia wilde in the total absolute confidence of empty-headed ignorance publicly dismissed jordan peterson as the leader of the incels. the context was that she made(?) a movie that modelled an immoral man after her image of jordan peterson — i think that was it. it was interesting to see a woman self-representing herself in this way and in that 'appointment' dismissed casually and brutally a sub-class of human — another example of an undeserving class being created and perpetuated and so easily dismissed as unworthy of being alive.
Thanks for that interesting information, Guy. John reports a sharp decline in the 'fuck rate' and he's not wrong about that. He is, to be fair, as hard on men as he is on women. Getting men off porn and video games and into communities of men who get them going to the gym is a worthy endeavor.
For John and Jordan Peterson, I find what they're doing for men to be laudable. However Jordan has said, 'Before you criticize the system, get your own house in order.' I don't think it's either/or. But I do think we should blame the system before blaming other people.
i've come to the yogic place of 'no blame no complain'. fundamentally blaming and complaining is a process of personal disempowerment and enervation. more recently i see it more perniciouosly as aligning with the energy of the grand blamers and complainers, who look to fix their problem by killing it (us). it is the same energy. now that the initial confusion is passing from the immediate experience of the convid critiques and the 'real' culprit(s) are now more and more clearly seen exactly who/what to be blamed (v-nv, 5g, germs, dew, who, satan, km, babylonians, aliens, cone-heads) i see more and more active 'blame and complain' energies within the mfm which is fragmenting it(us) — which is the 'real' evidence of the disempowering and enervating energy of 'blame and complain.'
the 'action' that is sustainable and grows personal empowerment is to clean our own houses and take action to fix what is broken around us. for some that might be their immediate family, for others it will be a bigger picture. and that won't happen before 'vidya', seeing what is broken. and that takes us to the 2nd very debilitating effect of 'blame and complain' - blindness often locked with single vision and newton's sleep. signs of that blindness is the increasingly shrill requirement within the so-called mfm to align with singularity of cause, thought, blame, belief, ideology, thinking, echoing, blah-blahing. it is the same energy as the ptb! why? their shadow work is being put onto us, and our shadow work is being put out there too.
my ranty kind of thinking. (note: i'm not in agreement with everything peterson says for sure: i do agree with the importance of stop telling others how to clean up their homes when our own are fucked.)
Really well said, Guy. Blaming and complaining is an alignment of energy with the global blamers and complainers, I haven't heard it put that way before.
I don't know that Jordan says to put your own house in order before telling others how to clean up theirs. It seems like he does a lot of telling other people what they should do. He says put your own house in order before critiquing the system, and I think both should be done simultaneously, but not blaming others.
That is what he says and is frequently castigated for that. I've seen him a few times in a university setting being told that it is stupid to not fix the world first. How dare he pretend that that isn't important. Often those are kind of train wreck funny because the complainers think they are smart and get sliced and diced trying to trip him up.
If by 'critiquing' you mean seeing with acuity and writing what we see, yes. With caution because our vision isn't very reliable with it being masked behind our own shadowed ideology, brainwashing and false-truths. Kind of a moving target.
Tereza, I love your brilliance and courage here. I just see you walking into big convos with no holds barred, your intelligence at the forefront, and trusting yourself to wade into thick waters. Thank you for role modeling your calm and courage in divisive topics.
I didn't read John Carter or zinnia's essay - but the thing that stands out to me, and which you address as well, is that women can't win in his world view. What is his solution for healthier masculine/feminine - male/female relationships? I like your solution - children at the center, women tending, plus the men and others who choose to tend, and men supporting and protecting this sacred circle.
I love that my man has chosen to tend and learned how to be more tender in his parenting, but he defers to me. Mostly because I'm willing to cull through the bullshit ways of parenting these days, and not go by normal standards. I had to learn that the hard way - starting off with giving him equal consideration and his choices hurt my son early in life. The mama bear came out and set boundaries and it took a long time for us to figure out our balance. I'm open to rebalancing towards more health for our family, when the ideas are compelling enough!
And I don't know how to reconcile this circle of life with my wants and needs at this time. My son is 8, and I want to be both a very involved parent, and also have a small business. My business always gets put to the side when my son isn't in school, such as these two weeks of spring break. How do I reconcile my needs for showing up in the world with being as connected to my son as I am?
Thank you for that compliment, marta, it speaks exactly to what I hoped to do.
I really appreciate you picking up on that in John's worldview. I have no criticism of his choices or anyone else's. But he IS criticizing women's choices pretty harshly. So, to me, you need to be modeling or presenting a solution that's available to women generally.
Divorce, I think, favors neither men nor women but the lawyers and banks. It puts the house up for sale so it can be split evenly, so the kids lose their home, their school, their neighborhood, their friends. When I think about my system, I think about how to get around that.
First, I lower the cost of housing and give locals double the buying or renting power of outsiders. So in a divorce, it wouldn't be hard to find an affordable house nearby.
Second, I'm considering the radical position that children belong to their mother, and any court or father or even adoption that takes them away is committing child abuse.
Third, so many abusive situations are because dads are trying to get out of child support. I don't think I'd have child support at all. My system distributes targeted dividends equally to all members of the commonwealth. I think the mother should receive those for the child.
I've never known a mother who didn't want a loving father to spend as much time as he wanted with the child. It seems like there are ways of empowering this instead of forcing it.
Anyway, back to you and your sweet, tender man ;-) I'm always so happy to hear good news on the marriage front. It's encouraging that you're both learning and making it work. I do think there's a different instinct that mothers have, a sixth sense. I have some close-call stories that still give me chills from when my husband was watching the kids but nothing bad ever happened and you can't live without taking risks--at least I couldn't. Easy to say when nothing bad happened.
I actually worked until my kids were all in school. I had a daycare I loved and the schedule was easy. The school schedule is not made for working parents! It's a patchwork quilt of odd times they're off that you have to work around. It actually gives you a lot of time off, but you have to be available when they need you. A small business sounds like a good way to show up in the world, and none of those schedules are forever. It seemed like they were when I was in them, in retrospect, I feel like the time they needed or even wanted me around went by in the blink of an eye!
Appreciating your thoughts. I notice the "what abouts..." that come up with your potential "radical" position of children belong with their mother. But those what-abouts are because of our sick society - my friend who adopted his nephew because his sister is a drug addict for example. But she's a drug addict because of deep sickness in our society. And if there was more health on all levels, it would be the norm for kids to be with their moms. Not sure what to do about moms who legitimately don't want their kids, even given more personal and societal health. It's sticky to figure all this out!
Also I heard someone recently talk about divorce as a way to keep people poor and that really hit a nerve for me. Something about her presentation and way of talking - not "right wing women should stay with their husbands" but more about what are the forces that encourage divorce and who does it benefit? It keeps people off center and scrambling. And as a person who has tended towards the glass half empty view, I'm susceptible to that thinking that my husband is deficient and maybe I should just throw the towel in and start over.
I'm glad I haven't done that, I'm glad he and I keep working at it. Yes we're both deficient, but we're also learning so much by keeping on trying. And also I have to say, I'm learning some awesome energy healing methods that help so much. I've been an IFS (Internal Family Systems) practitioner for 7 years, and IFS is awesome, but this energy healing - Emotion Code and Aura Transformation - is so much faster. Knowing this, there is so much potential for people to stay together. I like to think that more and more awesome and fast healing modalities are becoming possible and we're just at the tip of the iceberg with what is possible with fast healing/growth.
I think about those 'what-abouts' too. It's hard to fix anything in the middle, without going back to the cause. Under my system, would it create an incentive for women to have children they don't want and can't care for, by giving them twice the subsidized benefit? I think it would hardly be worth it, since it would be earmarked for food, education, wellcare and home improvement. Without a child, a woman would have all those ways to earn the cost of living in an easier way, that she can then spend anyway she wants.
I'm also not at all against early-term abortion. Having a child certainly shouldn't be as hard as it is today, but the alternative should also be easy to obtain and free. Every child should be a choice and wanted.
That talk about divorce sounds really interesting. Do you have a link handy? Yes, there's little support to keep marriages together. Counselors are extremely expensive and stigmatizing. The churches and priests, when good, used to fill that role but are overwhelmed.
I can't count the women I know who lost everything in a divorce, who gave up their retirement savings to keep the house so it didn't change everything for the kids. A friend just told me about her friend, a female fire chief, who married a cop. She bought their house and had a baby. He got fired as a cop (which tells you a lot about him) and divorced her, taking half of the house value, getting alimony and even some child support.
Wait til you read my divorce story, Tereza. I don't know how I found this post comment and reply but I was reviewing the liked and commenting to this essay/rant and somehow stumble upon this interesting convos here. Sorry for butting in.🤩🥰.
Running out the door in a minute, but thought I would drop the link. Actually I don;t know if it's the right link, but this lady is the person I heard talking about divorce and about how important it is to build our wealth. She has loads of videos
Daaaamn, girl. I couldn't not read, then not watch this episode. And I'm still working my way up from your earlier works. Good thing you throw some in with your current ones too.
Now you don't be messing with my boy, JC? lol kidding. But looking at both sides and obvious generation gaps within the Substack community's pool of enlightenment, we can see the full effects of misguided regulatory backscratchers. The evolution of what ancient Egyptian's have mastered over the millennia.
Ho's and Bro's, the Kardashians, hip-hop and Ballers. And they used to say rock & roll was the problem before that. I agree the problem is and has been, post 1776 and the US made it's progress historical after the Revolution whilst not engaging in foreign affairs: Isolation.
Much like the days in the story of Moses the lawmaker. The Rush albums like 2112, songs written by Neil Pert: Temple of Syrinx. It's practically foretelling what's going on.
Back to JC, he's correct because of the fact that we'd have to literally go back in time to fix what the deciders have done, or freeze time and smash the fuckers to pieces. The agenda is written, they have the game fixed. What we're witnessing is the residually planned side effects of thousands of years of world domination, same process, different time. Money is their ultimate weapon. Everything is money because that's how it all works. If not money it's food, if not food it's family, if not family, it's whatever you possess, if not possessions it's your life and if not your life it's your spouse's, if not the spouse it's your child, if not the children it's your pet. Get it? Pure evil.
Technology cannot be put into the hands of people that want to capitalize from it in any way, shape or form, only for the benefit to all humanity so that our environment can be one with God or Nature, as many people prefer to believe. I say to the establishment, Go the Fuck Back To Egypt and stay there. Get back in the fuckin pyramids and take the fuck off, back to where you came, never return to our blessed planet. Fuckin aliens.
Haha, it's usually another JC people don't want me to mess with ;-) I never criticize people, only words and actions. John is a damn fine writer, is always a pleasure to read and gives me ample fodder to rant about.
You put that really well, Orion: " the residually planned side effects of thousands of years of world domination, same process, different time. Money is their ultimate weapon. Everything is money because that's how it all works."
I've thought about an internet and media in which no commercialization was allowed. Wouldn't that be cool? But it would have to plan for the surreptitious control that comes along with 'nonprofits' and foundation grants. But it could be done in my system, and I have thoughts on that.
Is it the Egyptians? I'm leaning towards Hyksos as the invaders there. Still working on my episode, "Elohim, Aliens and Archons, oh my!" Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
I'm not going to jump into this quagmire as it's a no-win situation. Battle of the sexes I'm certain predates Adam & Eve. I bet God has his own 'Man-Cave' to retreat to.
I"m not going to read it............................simply because I really don't care.
My relationship with my opposite is between the two of us and the 'Rules' are a constantly moving target. Principled in trust, respect, need for some personal space (and avoiding topics where we simply agree to disagree) helps keep the 'Dance' fun, and without endpoint.
Just to put the 'Rules' in perspective I signed us up for a 'sewing class' (knock yourself over with a feather, I know) today.
Imagine Tereza if your significant let you know that the two of you are signed up for a 'Worldanz' & Blue Martinis' Class. Manly? Anti-Manly? Tonic-Relations? Would I be stripped of my 'Man Card'?
Two thoughts about relationships:
Some women were discussing their relationships when one of them declares:
"For me, it's really quite simple, a woman needs a man that is fiercely strong and a protecter of the family.
And I need the man to be an excellent lover, meeting all my needs for passion.
And I need this man to be an excellent father to the children, caring and understanding.
And lastly I need the man to be sensitive to me, my idiosyncrasies and still love and accept me.
And truly, the MOST IMPORTANT thing of all.............................................these 4 men should never meet.
And on the more serious side of the relationship 'Dance':
During and after the massive Tsunami that hit Thailand a number of years ago, washing away entire shoreline living inhabitants, the warning was sounded ahead of time and people fled as soon as they could.
Running as fast as they could, men carried the babies and small children while women did their best with the youngsters at unfortunately a lesser speed.
Some survived, but many perished as the Tsunami was registered as as high as 60 feet.
Within days after the devastation receded back into the Indian Ocean survivors returned to their shoreline.
What was most interesting was that the men returned with their surviving offspring, not to celebrate their victory against sure death, but they came looking for ANY surviving FEMALE members of the community. Their hope was to find a female mother to TAKE the children and raise them because the man/father was simply physically/emotionally unable to do so all by themselves.
Conclusion: Women clearly define "COMMUNITY" and hold it together.
Women are the 'Center' that glues the fabric of existence together.
Yes men have clear functions as well.
Without both, we would have all perished long ago.
And therefore we should NEVER disvalue the importance of both.
My opinion of one of course.
Now I need to get back to figuring out how to thread a needle and load a bobbin with my manly fat fingers and thumbs.....................whatever a bobbin is.
Haha, love the idea of God's man cave and happy to get a comment I needed to expand from someone not willing to jump into the quagmire. Imagine if you had!
I just got William's article but haven't read it yet. He mentioned in the comments he was going to write about alchemical marriage.
When Nef told me he practically spewed his beer on my last line, I reminded him that the two of you had encouraged me to rant and stop being so nice. So I blame it all on you!
Now here you go girl, blaming dudes for encouraging. Poor Nef, I bet that was good beer too that you almost forced him to spew. You totally would have messed up his nice corinthian leather recliner, his Cabela's cup holder and probably got some 'spew' on the dart board across the room right next to the 65" big screen. And you wonder why guys like us 'stick together' and never go near the ladies, for the 'blame' for some reason becomes us.
PS: Talk to your exercise class instructor about setting up a once a month dance and drinks class. So many themes as Danzworld has no limits, nor would therefore be drink options (I'm thinking Jamaican music with some rum drinks just to start, and away whirls my brain).
Indeed, that was his homemade brew from the brewery he's converted his garage into. I think he probably wears his Viking hat while drinking it from a horn.
Oh you have no idea how much trouble my dance teacher gets in with the woke police. Right before a class with a Rasta theme, one woman accused her of cultural appropriation because, you know, Rasta is a religion. And there was the Jamaican party at the university--before my time--where they got banned over the afro wigs ... talk about having no limits!
You covered a lot of great points here in the male and female dynamic. There are many excellent comments here too.
On Beauty of the Feminine; there's an unspoken deep seated acknowledgement, there exists in the male gaze. While quite often it may convey desirability and attractiveness, a simple and sweet smile will give a sense of warm acceptance. In an esoteric way, what do we see when we notice someone beautiful? We are experiencing the inner Self. Beauty is it's reflection, not to detract from the other person; but the other person, is also experiencing the inner Self. The attractiveness is not just biological, it's Energetic. We are all experiencing the biological aspect in varying ways, with psychological self acceptance and sometimes social self worth tied to appearance based judgment. I've had to help my daughter to realize that her sense of self worth is not tied to the approval she thinks she gets socially. She has adjusted quite well, with a great sense of humor and excellent sense of balance and personal confidence.
Glad to have your thoughts on this, Nef, both as a man and a father of a daughter. My ex was trapped in the high tech sales world, something that never suited his disposition, and would get pushed into going to strip clubs by the other guys on sales trips. He never got it, and always felt, "Hey, that's someone's daughter debasing herself for these idiots."
I'm sure some would say, "Oh, that's what he'd tell you" but I know he was speaking the truth. Once you're a loving dad of daughters, you see the other side, whether you want to or not.
There's a different male gaze that's appreciative without wanting than the one that's wanting without appreciation. Men who are indiscriminate flirts are a joy to be around: by indiscriminate, I mean making girls from 9 mos. old to 90 glad to have been born female. Not creepy, not selective for 'marketable' looks, but appreciative and admiring of a general quality of femaleness. We need more of that in the world.
Is there a relationship between the word leer and leery? The leer conveys, not just wanting, but entitlement. It turns on a dime from desire and flattery to anger and hatred when rejected. It does nothing for the woman, unless she's selling her looks or sex as a commodity. And even then, it will turn on her, the way johns kill prostitutes out of their own humiliation.
I worry that zinnia is rejecting the female gaze that says, "You're beautiful just the way you are. Now can we get to work?" and is being lured to seek the approval of 11,000 predominately male subs on John Carter's site, where he is very judgmental about women based on appearance. As he says, 'Fat-shaming and slut-shaming are looked down on by left liberal women because they're effective.' IMO, that male gaze is a leer about a woman's value as sex object, and has nothing to do with the appreciation you speak so eloquently about.
I'm glad your daughter and my three have gotten the message that self-worth isn't tied to social approval. I'm sure it will serve your daughter well throughout her life.
"The Strong are Strongest while they stand alone, a God given Force is their Might." --- Sri Aurobindo.
Self Reliance is something that must be learned and practiced daily.
By the way, when I was watching your video, that last line you gave, just about caused me to spray my beer across to table, took me by pleasant surprise--- Lol ;-)
Hahaha! I recorded that segment, then recorded it again without the last line so I could decide in editing whether to use it. But I took to heart you and Gary encouraging me to be less 'nice.'
At least I have my entire collection of Nordic Horned Helmets to cling to (one for each Hockey Team). And yes, the horns are removable allowing one to imbibe. At least Nef has a home-brewery right there in the converted garage. No need to 'hold' (let it spew/spray) your alcohol when it's free...........or almost anyway. LOL
For the record, Gary here also raised a daughter, and yes, she too is thriving. Raising a successful, strong, confident individual does take parental support and family infrastructure, something many never receive (both genders can suffer without).
Being also in 'sales' the evening useless entertainment was surely available, but mostly those that chose to go had 'leer issues' (if I may).
Not been to JC's site. Plenty of healthy learning, dialogue and 'Longhouse' feeling of inclusion.
Greg!!!! So sorry. As soon as you wrote that I knew. But I didn't misgender you so you can't sue, in case you're a boy named ... There's a song that hasn't aged well.
Hey, we learn more every day. Librarian turned out to be a guy, even with the silly pic right out there in front. Who's hiding behind what these days, we'll likely never completely know.
Best
Gary, aka: The Nordic Helmet Guy (kind of like Tim the Tool Guy). LOL
PS: Helmets and drinking and all takes one back to college days (over-rated for sure). I was "GAR" the "Dude". Thought I was a big drinker until I woke up in my underwear one morning laying on cement I didn't recognize.
Shows you what half a beer can do to you when you don't eat.
Explains as well why I have no idea what a blue martini even is.
Thank you for a most riveting analysis Tereza. This I a subject I could write volumes on and interests me immensely because I believe the source of our malaise today is the imbalance of the masculine and the feminine. Everything we do is solely male-oriented. Truly everything. So it is like looking at the world with one eye only and does a huge disservice to all of humanity and nature. Trust between women and men is priceless and we need to restore this again, which is easy if we understand what is going on.
Firstly, we need to look at circumcision. This barbaric practice needs to end and it is up to mothers to make sure it does. What this does I would imagine is make a boy grow up with an inbuilt distrust of mother which he then internalizes subconsciously and carries around with him unknowingly. He blames women because deep down inside, mother wasn’t “there” for him, mother didn’t protect him and he knows this with every cell of his being.
It is true of course. Imagine who thought that up – slicing off the sexual glans of a baby in order to be “cleaner”. You just can’t make this stuff up. It’s like we have been directed by the most twisted minds and we are just waking up to this now after eons of horror and misery. But I think that’s it, that’s what incites men to look at women as though we are worthless. We need to recognize well that women are now almost totally entrenched in patriarchal thinking because we have been taught by the patriarchy, worked in the patriarchy and live by it.
Men have everything to say about abortion. Men kept women out of business affairs, education and public life. Who would want to do that? There is something in men that is envious, I think that’s where it stems from because woman have a huge intellect, it comes easy, we figure things out and are ten steps ahead of men. That is because women think in terms of long-terms because women get pregnant and nurture children. Men ejaculate and are more immediate. Men are the builders, women are the designers. Women see the big picture while men see details. That’s what builders do. Architects design because they have a big view. We have to work together – one without the other leads us to impotence for both (as we can see)
It is not a competition but our entire civilization is based on competition and self-gain. These are very poor things to build a civilization on. They exist because on their own, predatory men brought them in. Warring men who favored invasion and colonization, who held no ethics in personal sovereignty.
Patriarchy usurped matriarchy where women didn’t rule, they owned everything and let people work out their own problems unless there was an impasse in which case, the women’s counsel would be sought. They didn’t sit every day, for eight hours waiting for problems to come to them! Patriarchy thinks like that. Patriarchy wants to control and so to control it requires certainty and thus everything must be scheduled and arranged beforehand.
This is a little about how I think it came about to what we have today. It hinges on circumcision and war. Women must be opposed mightily to anything that harms the body or kills. We need to even get the word “anti-biotic” out of our lingo. Our language is so filled with killing terms that we barely blink when we talk about war. War and weaponry are the purview of men. The exceptions only prove the rule. We must look at ratios rather than instances.
While many men see women as worthless sluts, it’s funny that they never see themselves as warmongering psychopaths. A woman having an abortion receives more vitriol than a man dropping bombs on people he doesn’t even know. This is how warped our views are and it all comes about because women’s wisdom is never sought or even recognized. We live in a totally male-designed patrix. But now women at least are able to change that pattern and initiate something new. We are the designers remember! Men who care about empowering everyone could notice when an imbalance of women occurs and invite women to chime in and get her perspective. There is a whole universe of intelligence we are not tapping and it impoverishes everyone including men.
denise, you're making me eat my words for when I snubbed you on the economics. I could listen to volumes of you on this subject, you make so much sense and bring up such clear points. I'm glad you didn't give up on me.
I think the circumcision point is brilliant. Isn't that exactly what the anti-Matri male is--a son who wants to dominate his mother, in another form, as punishment for her having not been there for him when he was dependent on her? Jasun Horsley talks about birth trauma and wanting the mother's attention in Big Mother, but doesn't make the circumcision connection.
It makes so much sense that this traumatic event would be seen as the mother's betrayal, never to be fully trusted again. Anneke Lucus talks about the pedo-predator cults like Illuminati as passing down intergenerational trauma, horrible things that were done to upper-class and royal children that they inflict again.
It's so interesting too that circumcision was instituted by the most patriarchal religion, Judaism, and passed on to Christianity. Like it's symbolic of some kind of child blood sacrifice or castration.
And anti-biotic = against life. More good word deciphering, breaking these word-spells.
I remember reading that to be consistently pro-life, you'd need to be against war, abortion and the death penalty and almost no one was against all three.
And I like the idea that women are the architects because we think long-term. Thanks for this thought-provoking comment.
That is very kind of you. I'm glad you can see this because it seems to explain a lot. Women and especially mothers have so much sway. If women were against wars they wouldn't encourage their sons to join the military or celebrate it when they did, they wouldn't have sex with husbands who fight in wars. But they wouldn't need to go that far if women simply objected to war. The patriarchy has so traumatized women for eons that now women have lost their womanhood. Womanhood is currently defined by the patriarchy but womenhood is many more things than we even understand. Women are stalwart defenders of life and the vulnerable. However womanhood has been almost totally lost. I found it again only because I dipped out of the political and money system and I learned to see it all as an outsider and also what it does to people's thinking. These two arms of enslavement (the money system and representative politics) are designed to allow pedophiles to be at the top of the food chain. They have it so well arranged that mostly nobody can even see what it is really designed for. It is staggering how the money system and the political system gets us to do things for pedophiles that we would never do without those two vehicles. I think they cooked it up because everyone wants to hang pedophiles and so they had to be super smart and cunning to be able to live and also keep their predilections. Without this system, they would never be able to get the number of children that they do. The money system rewards those who steal children for them and they are all around us, and we just don't know it. It is very well covered up. Money can do that. Money can buy anyone nearly. But I must qualify, it is this money system, a system based on centralization and debt that enables all of the horrors of the world to persist. This is a most important subject - the relationship between the masculine and the feminine - and it is actually what is at the root of our ailments. It can easily be remedied though - by seeking the wisdom of women and resurrecting this incredible source that we have almost left to die.
I will once again say, to this comment and your reply to Decoy, you're brilliant denise. There's so much resonance in me to what you say. Yes, the world is run by pedo-predators. That's what all their power is for, the sacrifice of children. It's at the top of governments, banks, celebrity, courts.
We should talk. I'll give you my best pitch that living in a house someone else built does incur a debt--to past generations and to pass the gift on in a better form to future. I know that our goal is the same, whether or not our logistics differ.
Really interesting, denise. I'm running out to a dance class but will respond in full later. Thanks for this and the intriguing connection to circumcision.
Among so many other things going old world-wide, I am also trying to come to grips with my own impending mortality. So male-female relationships and my failure to start my own family have recently been on my mind. I am still collecting data and trying to integrate it with my experience and intuition. Maybe terminally so.
But one guy I've found to bring me new insights is psychologist Orion Taraban. Even after a couple of listens, about my only hedges are the differences in social contexts between Japan and the U.S. I have not yet read his book, but here are Soft White Underbelly's interviews with him.
After finishing the first one, if you're feeling your mortality, I can see the attraction to it. It sure made me want to stop the planet and jump off. I think it should be subtitled, "How to be a Romantic Sociopath for Men and Women."
You could have saved 3 hrs with this summary--The wallet is the male breast. Make a lot of money and be an asshole. If she asks where you've been, just sneer. Women like that.
LOL ... when you frame it like that, yeah ... it was a downer. I should have read more books about the process. On the other hand, I think I was born low in animal instincts for striving and competition for resources (physical or social). Rather than having a low self-esteem, I tended to think more highly of others ... maybe taken in by the way they were taught to compete and market themselves? Here in Japan, I even tended to treat my former elementary school students as 'equals', much more so regarding college students ... and that did not set well with the more authoritarian-edged colleagues. Ha, even now, I hear the chickadees complaining that I did not put enough dried cat-food on the veranda for them.
Last night I watched a podcast by a YouTuber I am increasingly fond of "Diary of a CEO", and his interview of Dr. Ramani regarding narcissism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTkKXDvSJvo. Though social-psychology is a 'soft science' (low in predictability) she pointed out the current scientific literature suggests that as many as 1 in 6 of the general population, and most of those who strive to become 'famous', suffer from one of several potentially sociopathic forms of narcissism. But one point that stood out for me and reinforced my prior assumptions, is that this is a temperament that can probably not be changed, and not emerging from trauma. I want to continue this with the thread that you, Guy, and I were talking about last week ... but for now just mentioning it because she also mentioned narcissism (and/or specific narcissistic behavior) fall on a spectrum within which we all fit. Perhaps the opposite of narcissism is not altruism, but rather a pull towards self-destruction? Many a psychologist seems to think so, but I have pursued educational ideals as if alstruism is the opposite. In retrospect, self-destruction as well as altruism may describe the arc of my life.
One point that Taraban brought up, which revulsed me, is how and why men fall in love with strippers, whores, and mentally ill women to which he answered, because such women fuck their (the men's) brains out.
Warning ... the following may be too personal to be appropriate in comments for any and all to read. If you think so, let me know, and I will copy-paste to a personal message to you.
That comment by Taraban did not sit well with me because of that one time I mentioned about asking a young lady to marry me. She was so sick (and so brilliant — tested out as 3rd highest in Tokyo on a standardized math test), that after long hours of philosophical conversation in the car or over a light meal at a restaurant, and it became late, and time to drop her off near her house — she would ask me to close my eyes. I complied, and then she would kiss me on the cheek. I was delighted and neither asked nor expected anything more from her.
During one of our many never-ending conversations, she brought up the fact that her family ... otherwise well-off enough to send her to an elite Women's college in the the U.S. and then hire Steven Levenkron (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Levenkron) as her personal doctor when she relapsed ... was on the urge of bankruptcy because of the medical bills for treating organ damage from severe anorexia.
Surprising myself, without hesitation, I immediately suggested we marry, and let my insurance take care of it. As I said earlier, she declined because "it was too soon". But I did not feel hurt or rejected at all. I simply saw myself as offering a practical solution to someone out of unconditional love ... and I knew that I was in the dark regarding all she was going through. Shortly after surprising myself as much as her by popping the question ... she ghosted me for a few months. It was only after I bought a book I thought she might enjoy and had it shipped from Amazon to her place that I received a message from her mother. A rather matter-of-fact message of Asako's passing away, including a grisly detailed account of her autopsy. I met her mother a couple of times after that, she showed me where the grave was, and I never heard from her again.
Maybe it was just the 'white knight' in me, made all the purer because I had often been marginalization for the crime of being a foreign resident in Japan (certainly worse in some other countries). But I cringed at Taraban's analysis that I would have asked Asako (just typing her name hurts) to marry me just because she 'fucked my brains out'.
I realize that Taraban (a former actor) has been a successful player ... and that is why he can afford to see it all as a largely subconscious game. But if life is all a game to most people, regarding my relationship with Asako ... if it had come down to it, I would have unconditionally given my life to save hers, just as many a mother or father would have done for a new-born.
Just a couple of days ago ... I visited her grave, and took a photo, as I have done every week for about 10 years now. Strange. Though from a relatively upper-middle class family (her father in upper management, probably with their family having Samurai roots) ... her gravestone is in a common pauper's graveyard ... not the family plot.
The following inscription is written on her gravestone ... "You can't erase the times. But you can change the future. I know it won't be easy. But you can. Believe yourself. Don't be sad, you will never be alone. I am always with you. I love you."
This is not a translation of the inscription. Oddly, it is written in English. To who? To someone like myself who speaks Japanese, but is functionally illiterate? To her mother? Or is it her mother's message to me — implying I forget her and move on? I suspect I will never know how either Asako or her mother felt about me. I only know how I felt. And it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. And I do resent Taraban's implication that my once and only marriage proposal is the equivalence of someone trying to save an abandoned puppy ... or because her brief pecks on my cheek were the equivalence of 'fucking my brains out'. In this respect, maybe he and I are both outliers, but on on opposite sides of a bell curve.
Occasionally, I entertain the idea that this was all an elaborate ruse to reject a foreigner from an upper middle-class family with an otherwise "international" mind-set ... and that she is now living comfortably as the wife of well paid Japanese professional, probably a doctor. If so, they are playing the long game ... as is common with Dune's metaphorical "Bene Gesserit", and a gravestone in a pauper's grave was a small price to pay to say "stay away".
My acknowledgement of Taraban is that he appears to be accurate and insightful for a large number of relationships in the U.S. context ... maybe the majority. Again, from a young age ... I could feel some vital animal instincts was lower in myself than others ... ambition, and maybe the ability to find self-worth only in of what service I can be to others? If I had never moved to Japan over 40 years ago, maybe a similar scenario would have played out here in the U.S.
My own parents' marriage was a brief (6 year) shot-gun affair, and they both eventually settled to re-marry others, in what appears to be more out of practical comfort and convenience than anything else. But I may be mistaken there too. Now both deceased, all I have is photos of 'happier?" days.
Lots of mistakes in my life. It will be finished soon enough. I am beginning to take some consolation in that.
Thank you for honoring me with this personal story, Steve. I'm very happy it exists on this page, as a testimony to exactly what I've termed tonic masculinity, the desire to protect without ego and self-interest. You've never made a mistake, my friend. The world simply hasn't been ready to have someone like you in it. You being in it, however, is making it more ready.
You and the other worthy men on this site (by which I mean all) are the contradiction to Taraban's theory. For the women, imagine how it feels to know that you peaked at 18 and your value in the sexual marketplace will only decline as men's increase. For men, imagine how it feels to know that no one will ever love you, only want your money. That's the reality Taraban presents and I wouldn't envy either side.
Let me confirm what you know deep inside--Asako wrote her last message to you. Her inscription is the most beautiful thing I've ever read, and it's clearly intended for you. No one else in her life could have written that. And how perfect for you: "you can't change the times" the times you were born into, "but you can change the future." That's what you've been doing with every relationship you're in, in person or online.
Now I see why you haven't married. Your fate is intertwined with Asako. I don't know why her grave would be separate from the family plot. Have you checked to make sure it's not a duplicate? But I would say that her wishes were to have a place that was for you. The details on the organ failure and expert doctor indicate this wasn't a ruse. The family had to be desperate to keep her alive.
That Ramani video on narcissism is the one that comes up most often in my feed, with others from Diary of a CEO, and one on What is Gender? This is through no encouragement from me. There's something they want us to believe, and propaganda they're feeding us. I don't like labels. They stop us from understanding each other and asking, 'why? Why is this person acting this way? What's the story they believe that they're reacting to?" Narcissists, if they exist, are made, not born. What's making them?
I appreciate you, Steve. Thanks for being who you are.
Just heading to bed, but wanted to thank you for such high praise. It was difficult to put that much of my past out there. I assure you though, I am a thoroughly flawed man, don't know if I could have been any better as a husband or a father, and guess I never will know.
On reading your take on Taraban, I am now more inclined to agree with you than with my first impression of him. I think I explained a bit why in my previous comment ... one of the blind spots in my experience. But his explanation did offer an explanation for something a former student brought up with me in an on-line chat about a semi-functional marriage.
Regarding narcissism ... I agree that it is a trendy catch-all term nowadays, and depending on how one defines the term, I guess nature or nurture could both account for it. I've been following Dr. Ramani for a few years now, so I am not surprised she popped up in my feed, though I do not follow all her podcasts. She can sometimes come across as a bit shrill and over confident, if not downright scary. But I've come to see trust her in hinting at the social dynamics of the toxic workplace in Japan, particularly in my applying "collective narcissism" and its relationship to the token foreigner, and a couple of experiences with pathologically malignant narcissists. My experience was worse than marginalization. It was dehumanizing.
I agree with Ramani about those malignant types. Their behavior was consistent over time, and they are just clever enough at post-hoc rationalization so that no amount of counseling will ever change their behavior. Her breakdown of their psychology pretty much matches my experience here in Japan, and is pretty close to the analysis by a couple of other professionals in that field who I follow.
On the bright side, looking at the kind of Japanese I've befriended here in Japan, I quickly realized they were the same 'kind' of people I had been friends with back in the states ... and I think that kind tends to be predetermined before socialization or early childhood education.
"Temperament" appears to be the word used to classify patterns of behavior that extend over time and beyond particular situations ... and are probably more genetically influenced, while "character" is closer to temperament plus experience under pressure. I am about as far from a scientific-mechanical reductionist as you can get, but I suspect that just like pups from the same litter are born with different temperaments, so are people.
I am guessing we all go through some kind of trauma in growing towards social maturity, but as a recent guest in Tess Lawrie's March 30 substack reminded me (https://drtesslawrie.substack.com/p/mind-control-who-makes-your-decisions) while Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome is more in the headlines, meaningful growth might also require stress. I think it was the novelist Kawabata Yasunari who said that a good artist must die a thousand deaths, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. said something like "We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” If I approach closer to tonic than toxic (Ah but a man's reach ... 😂 ) you've just read one of the more stressful experiences in my life leading me to that goal. I have another, a near death experience, I'll share with you another time if appropriate for the topic.
Following that Anna Karenina Principle of everyone being unique in their stresses and problems, even if we could 'standardize' stress, and put everyone under the same stress, what would distinguish differing outcomes? Nature or nurture? I think it was in that Diary of a CEO interview with Ramani that I was reminded of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment of delayed gratification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment) There is some support for nurture in that the more successful children come from high enough of a social caste to have learned to expect to be rewarded for good behavior. Those who were raised with scarce resources tended to "fail" the test. I still need to look deeper into the study to find if there was a pattern indicating temperamental differences ... and think about the fit between the Marshmallow test and some patterns of narcissistic behavior.
But I do hear you about the danger of labeling people. When I used to teach freshman writing, I always spent a couple of classes on logical fallacies ... and the fundamental attribution fallacy is one of 'em. Still, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it might indeed be Fauci. 😂
Regarding Asako, (sighing ... not wanting her to be on my mind as I fall asleep), I've thought a lot about that epitaph ... especially that "You can't erase the times". Who is "you". Me? Maybe. But certainly not the FDA, mainstream media, digital social platforms, wikipedia, or even public school boards. They are constantly erasing and rewriting narratives to fit their ideologies or their boss's whims. I suspect much of what we call history is the narrative left by master manipulators.
And her grave? I can not verify if the grave is a duplicate because her mother dropped contact with me after a couple of post burial face-to-face chats. But now close to 10 years, and someone besides me still visits the grave about once every 2 or 3 months, and places flowers or an ornament on it. I presume it is her mother. But why would a grieving mother have her daughter buried in a community graveyard, apart from the family plot, with an inscription to me, yet drop all personal contact with me? If things are as they appear, the cognitive dissonance in her must be as overwhelming as my own.
As I mentioned earlier, I met Asako's mother for the first time only some months after Asako's death. But before meeting her, I could not help but to see in her mother's first e-mail informing me of her daughter's death, included such finely described details of an autopsy — a little too much detail for someone who should be grieving, perhaps ornately contrived. After all, Asako's dream was to become a writer. Maybe both the letter and her epitaph were trial runs? If so, clever girl.
Still, I would much rather be a deceived fool, and she happy with someone else and doing what she loves to do, than to imagine her dead. Yet if I were rejected, would that not be more evidence that I am too flawed to be worthy of that epitaph? Catch 22. Trapped in my own post-hoc, second guessing of evidence.
On that, I will thank you Tereza, for giving me an opportunity to spill my guts on something that will probably torment me until the day I die. I just hope I grow enough so that it becomes little more than an itch I can never scratch.
I only skimmed other reader's comments and your responses ... and am amazed at the heart, body, and soul you put into those responses. When I get caught up over the next couple of days, I will read those comments and your response more closely. You are drawing a lot of good stuff out of people Tereza. I wish you only good things with your good work.
My best before-the-eyes-close answer ... maybe it is in overcoming our few traumas circling around death rather than enjoying the ephemera of every day delights which most define us. Maybe.
Good night Tereza
Caw-Caw-Cacophany ... a serenade to come in another couple of hours. 🤣
He is not a particularly philosophical person, but is well-read, and I like his second interview better than the first ... (I had never even heard of the word "limerence' before hearing it). But one reason I found him compelling is his descriptions of many of the "is's" of personal relationships rather than the "shoulds", and particularly of America. But to show why I found much of what he said is refreshing by Japanese standards, I have to talk a bit about the Japan most tourists do not see. And myself.
I have been an idealist all my life ... whether pursuing Platonic ideals for educational goals, "true love", whatever ... whereas most Japanese seem to regard me as maybe useful or amusing, sometimes funny, but also quaint and naive in my idealism ... and inevitably disposable.
I am not sure if I mentioned this to you before, but although I have had my share of relationships (was a shy, late-starter), I only asked one young lady to marry me. She refused saying it was too soon. Within 6 months, she had passed away due to long-term complications of anorexia. Will not go into the gory details here.
The corporate nation-state of Japan is a cut-throat business world which includes replaces trust and a man's word with contracts. For example, affordable housing ... I am still paying bubble-era prices while newer apartments around me are cheaper — but moving expenses in Japan are notoriously expensive, thus keeping most of the working class locked into place. I could theoretically move to the deep country-side where there is a lower cost of living, but there are also fewer opportunities, and I would have to start from scratch in building new relationships. No easy feat for a foreigner in Japan trying to mix with a rural community. (Think Amish). It is as if every nook and cranny that can be financially exploited over here ... is.
Getting back to marriage and family. While there are a few high-profile entertainers who marry out of romance, (and just as often fall out), most Japanese marry as a kind of business arrangement with clearly defined, specialized roles. The man is the bread winner, the woman is the master of the house and children. End of story. Sometimes, a true fondness, and even deep love can grow from even the still arranged marriages over here. Sometimes. 'Caste' is a dirty little secret in Japan, and is every bit as present as in America, but kept behind family doors. But that is another story for another time.
They rarely talk about their spouse or married life to others except their very closest of friends, and even then they do not tend to praise their spouse ... presumably because it is perceived as boastful. This is connected with a strong in-group mind-set ... which again, te corporate nation-state is trying to replace with itself as the nanny-state.
Ever since the Meiji-era of large scale industrialization, families and communities have been targeted to be replaced by dormitories for workers, families as a minimal support system for the workers, and most urban communities as temporary for families, but useful for quaint tourist magnets to be romanticized for tourists (Shinjuku, Ginza, Shibuya, etc. - the equivalence of mini-Manhattans ... Kabuki-cho, Shimokitazawa, Shinyurigoaka - a mix between the suburbs and Greenwhich Village).
But when most Japanese do mention their spouse in conversation, it is usually in neutral to negative terms ... otherwise they will appear to be boasting. Reading books by Iowa Professor and Japanologist Stephen Vlastos (have exchanged e-mails with him), since the industrial revolution, there has been a domestic (though one-sided) war pitting families and rural communities against concentrations of wealth and power which thrive off of disposable workers ... and it still rages on with rural areas having a similarly slipshod infrastructure as developing countries, and falling / aging populations. Just yesterday, I was hearing news about how slow the rebuilding of the Nodo Peninsula is after the New Year Day earthquake. Thousands are still living in emergency shelters.
(ooos. As I am writing this, just felt some tremors. Turning on NHK news, a magnitude 6 quake just hit near where the Fukushima nuclear plant went down)
With very few exceptions, there are no house parties in Japan ... for business or neighbors. Almost all social and business interactions are held at coffee shops, kids playgrounds, pubs. etc ... which was particularly revealing when the plandemic targeted those social zones as 'dangerous', and even had signs forbidding talking on the train platforms. Most Japanese are well-trained for obedience. The shock-doctrine emergency 'health' policies did exactly what it was designed to do ... prevent opportunities for people to gather to discuss the validity and danger of further concentrations of 'emergency' powers, much less hold public demonstrations against it. The corporate nation-state created a wide-spread sense of anomie by targeting those who depended on families and small communities for identity, thus allowing the corporate nation-state to step in as the nanny-state proxy for their identity. But as people are 'social primates' not 'herding primates', that can go only so far before the fabric of society unwinds very quickly.
As I mentioned, the typical Japanese marriage is like a business partnership. Traditionally, the husband is the property of the company, and the financial well-being of his wife and children are held hostage by compliance and a yes-man conformity to the corporate structure. And typically, the monthly salary was handled by the wife who did the allotment of funds for living expenses, including a monthly allowance which the wife gives back to the husband for lunches and discretionary expenses. Sadly, many subconsciously see children as an insurance policy for their parents, and as many children reciprocate that relationship. I think that would work if small, rurual communities were still viable. But not in large scale institutions.
For all the problems I have described about the Japanese nation-corporate state ... South Korea is being hit even harder.
The family relationship is somewhat of a subconsciously, ritualized tradition that I could gradually observe from the outside ... but I stuck to my own largely subconscious ideals of looking for that one 'unconditional love' ... which may be a fool's errand in Japan Inc.
Other than toddlers, kids are usually not brought up in conversations either — but the dynamics of 'keeping up with Joneses' is very much alive with mothers. The husband is considered enough "property of the company" that they are expected to jump at the order to move away from family and live alone for years at a time. This is called "tanshin funin", and this is still enough of a ritual for advancement, that most fathers have little to do with raising their kids. It is slowing changing (maybe just temporary ebbs and flows) and the temperament of the individuals have something to do with it, but the corporate nation-state gives only lip-service to placing a priority on the nuclear family as the bedrock of society.
All of this about the dysfunctional aspect of trying to marry and raise a family in Japan, is of course through my eyes. But there does seem to be some objective data supporting my view.
And kids ... up until the end of elementary school, are like kids everywhere. From Jr. High onward for all but the richest, the youngsters are treated to a rigid military-like public education based on the Prussian system, copy-pasted from the Victorian era to produce compliance to authority as its highest ideal, and brute memory for competitive standardization as its preferred heuristics. Most kids are forced to wear their hair and uniforms according to standards which are rigidly measured to the centimeter by the school, and students are expected to obey school rules even when not at school. There have even been high profile cases of families suing a school for forcing a policy of jet-black hair, even on a student who might have a naturally lighter colored brown hair.
Will end this rambling essay for now by saying I have survived thanks to the generous help of only a couple of very close friends. If I had married in Japan, with my stubborn idealism, I would have probably been more of a hindrance than a help to typical expectations of a Japanese family ... and conformity to expectations is a big thing here.
As a former professor but foreigner, outside of those few friends and maybe three quasi-volunteer groups of friends, have little to no identity. I am thankful to be in a process of tryin to start up a Monetessori-like school here in the local community with a younger similar minded Japanese guy, though at first glance, he appears to be more focussed on the business model at the moment.
I think what most impressed me about the podcasts is the focus on human relationships from what appears to be a more primatology / evolutionary biology -grounded perspective compared to the institutionalized traditions of Japan. I can't say that I agree with everything he says, and he does appear to have a slightly different temperament than I do — and in framing life as a 'game', I can see different reasons for why I lost. As an idealist, I didn't even some of the more biologically-grounded rules.
I appreciate that detailed background of marriage and family in Japan. It's so hard to imagine for me as a born-rebel. But maybe rebels aren't born but made, and I wouldn't have gotten that chance.
I did agree with the podcast that women do better as hunters than choosing among the ones that come along. Two of my daughters may end up only ever being with one man in their lives. My oldest is married now to someone she made her feeling known to 12 yrs ago--and was rejected. She said, 'okay' and went off to college. When she came back that summer, he (and two other guys) had changed his mind. To her credit, she made him work for it, but then they did long-distance during college and lived together after that.
The youngest had a crush on her co-worker, who is Mexican, and I was her wing-man on their first date, which was an invitation to a baptism! This involves a lot of drinking and dancing, apparently. Then they had a picnic on the beach and she asked him later if that had been a date. He said, "No, that was just chilling. When I do a date, I do wine and dinner." She was crushed and thought he wasn't interested. I had to convince her that maybe he was just shy and awkward and didn't want her to think he couldn't do better. She finally texted back and said, "Well if it was a date, that would have been okay with me" and the rest is history. Last I heard, they're thinking about moving in together.
So for all the scheming in the podcast, I think there's a lot of old-fashioned love still going on. That guy gives me the creeps. His cold blue eyes when he says, "Just let her cry. Don't give in. She'll know she can manipulate you and won't respect you." Basic training for sociopaths. Maybe he schools Guantanamo guards in torture techniques as a side-hustle.
Another LOL. Though I would not classify that as sociopathic in the strictly "societal breakdown" meaning, I would say it is a very narcissistic and machiavellian tactic, which unfortunately matches the norms for big business, politics, academia, and most modern institutions ... East and West. I can see why that "Just let her cry ... " quote can be chilling. It is an ugly fractal of society at large.
From what I've observed of many relationships, as dysfunctional as they may be, that appears to be a commonly used strategy in Japan. Though surveys will never reveal "the" truth, many Japanese women are just as manipulative as men, and I suspect the same is true world wide ... just in different ways. This was a bit eye-opening for me because other than early childhood memories of extended family, I have never been privy to the group dynamics and psychology of women regarding the dating-love-marriage scene ... and not perceptive enough to see it.
Most of my life, I have been so simplistic in more or less placing women on a pedestal as recipients of more brutish tactics by men ... so some of his insights, more or less leveled the playing field for me ... and supported some of my observations of how the game is played in Japan.
But you are both insightful and successful in nurturing positive relationships. From what I hear about how nasty identity politics can be in the states, that takes particular skill in the case of the Mexican-American connection.
I've never been in the position of a matchmaker here in Japan, aside from communicative "humanistics and values clarification" approaches in the classroom. Two books that have had a big influence on me as an educator ...
Ooops. Gotta get a move on. Advising the guy who wants to start a Montessori type school by giving a communication lesson through the use of soft frisbees! Love to play with the kids.
Thanks for that recommendation, Steve, I'll listen with interest. I wouldn't characterize anything you've done as a failure. You've been put in life circumstances with choices that you made, based on what was presented. Life led you to an unusual place of figuring out another culture from the position of an outsider, and looking at your own culture as someone immersed in another. That awareness, I believe, goes throughout the collective consciousness from your point of light. You are exactly the person the world needed, in the right place at the right time making the right decisions.
Your consciousness never disappears. Maybe this next generation will be born to you in a different body (to keep it simple, I think the reality is we're everyone at once). And the ability to raise a child with ease and security will be available because of how you spent your time in this life. We just don't know. Just some thoughts.
Yes. Ashes to collective ashes. On a fundamentally philosophical and physical level, you are right, and I should find consolation in that.
But from that immediate "Dunbar's number" social-primate thingy? Last year when I visited Arizona to say goodbye to my fading mom, I was not particularly impressed by the well-paid professionals her socio-economic status could afford. But here in Japan, this permanent outsider — aging without family, will be lucky to avoid even more drastic, premature dehumanization at the hands of minimum wage professionals in a health system that has every financial incentive for me to hurry up and shuffle off this mortal coil.
I thought the podcast had a lot of wisdom, and had I met a mentor in Japan earlier, things might have turned out differently, probably for the better. Can't see much of a personal future, so forgive my crying over spilled milk.
The cherry blossoms came in bloom yesterday. Soon enough, they will also be dust in the wind. It might have been in Kawabata Yasunari's Nobel Award speech where I first came upon the traditional, but rarified Japanese sentiment of "mono no aware" — beauty in the passing of things.
(Doesn't read very cohesively, so "Lecture" might be a better term than "Speech".
But maybe I am feeling a bit down because of another podcast I saw recently ... unforgettably heart breaking ... the wisdom of resignation in her eyes and voice was almost unbearable.
Substack writer Aussie17 has been covering the rapid rise of cancer deaths in Singapore. I am enraged at the thought that her death might have been predetermined by the ledger sheets of Phizer.
Hahaha, it was Gary (Walking the Dog) and Nefahotep who were encouraging me to stop being so nice and rant. Watch what you wish for! And I had to throw that hyphen in there to emphasize both the She and the Bang. Glad you caught it!
Another great post, thanks for writing this. (I haven't watched the video.)
My experience in the last dozen years has given me a slightly different view of your statement that "Taking care of places is where masculinity comes into its own. Men like to build, to make things, to tinker with a machine until it works." I certainly did a lot of that in my two marriages, but in my second marriage we both did a lot of the building. We built a house together, doing most of the work ourselves (with the exception of the foundation). My ex-wife was, in fact, more of a brute than I was, doing more of the heavy lifting and physical labor. She did nearly all of the roofing, flooring, and interior sheathing, and the kitchen construction later. I was more the brains of the team, reading and understanding the instructions, cutting all of the wood, figuring out how to do the plumbing and electrical, designing the interior walls, etc.
I've also known a woman who could do things like rebuild car engines, and a man who stayed at home with the kids while his wife worked as computer programmer.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's possible for men and women to break out of their stereotypes in real ways.
I'm so glad to see the competition for who is more constructive enter into the conversation! And to have a man graciously give that to a woman. As you'll see on my next post, I've been having a lot of arguments with men who are claiming that the core of masculinity is 'domination, superiority, aggression and violence' but insist that it's women who are toxic.
You're saying, if I'm getting it right, women are also competent builders and makers and growers and fixers. And I agree! My oldest daughter's life was revolutionized by the discovery of power tools and she's spread the gospel to her sisters and me.
And this is particularly interesting because, like others on my thread, you've come out of an abusive relationship. I'm curious, was that the same woman? Sorry if that's more personal than I should be posting in a public forum. But I know you've posted about it on yours, so I thought it might be okay.
"You're saying, if I'm getting it right, women are also competent builders and makers and growers and fixers."
Absolutely. My ex-wife was a great example: huge energy, hard worker on that house project (often wanting to continue working when I was near exhaustion at 7 PM), ambitious farmer (we had three greenhouses and an acre of veggie crops). Just not good at keeping machines running; that's where I stepped in.
And yes, she was the one I had to escape from, due to the abuse. The thing is, I still feel very grateful for the experience of being with her those ten years. I learned a huge amount, and the house building was the best work project I ever did, way better than anything I did writing code in Silicon Valley.
Congratulations! I hope it's a healing transition that gives you a community more in alignment. It's hard to go back to feeling the same way about people after the ConvidCon, as seeing how quickly they can turn.
I really hope you're right about community. I feel pretty alone right now, and don't know anybody in this little town I'm moving to, but I'm remaining optimistic.
About 20 years ago I had directed a play by German playwright Frank Wedekind who is known for prodding stilted German society into talking frankly about sex. His version of the femme fatale is one who climbs the class ladder, leaving dead bodies in her wake, figuratively and literally, but in the end she gets her wish - to fall prey to one who is a better hunter than she is.
I don’t know if women follow social norms because they have to or because they want to. When I ask myself that question and I’m being honest, I wish I had met someone who was a provider and a protector but because I didn’t, I became one myself. I’ve enjoyed the role because I’ve played it well and it’s easy to enjoy that which you’re good at.
Masculinity and femininity both hold magic. They’re both sacred. I appreciate you looking at the subject. Even if it’s fraught with unsavoury opinions.
Thank you for this and all your brilliant work. I’m deep into your impressive and important book and highly recommend. Decoy 9/11 beat me to the ‘punch’ here (sorry so male) and articulated much better than I could have.
It’s clear if you’re alert that the “battle of the sexes” is part of Power’s divide and conquer rule. When I used to read the New York Times, I really wanted to track all the articles that were being written telling women how society, or the patriarchy or something is screwing them over.
'sorry so male,' that's so funny! Yes on the divide and conquer aspect of the Battle of the Sexes. Very interesting on the NYT. I could see there being a direct correlation between women who read it and their sense of victimization. Not that they're wrong, just that, like the Virginia Slims feminism, it's another way to herd them into a stepped-up exploitation.
I'm thrilled that you're reading my book and liking it, Charles! Thank you for that and the kind compliments.
"zinnia’s partial explanation of zoomer girl derangement does a sensitive job of detailing the ways in which girls deal with their innate desire for the male gaze: commodify it, resist it through anorexia or transgenderism, or embrace it to fall in love and become a mother. Nowhere is there a breath of criticism of men. Is this also what men want?"
It was not the purview of her article to comment about men and their disfunction, it was about giving voice to what young women are going through, in this society that has become pathologically confused about sex. I thought it a very thoughtful and beautiful article, and I encouraged her to write more and expand on the topic.
"Use that pretty little head, zinnia, to change the fucking system. Or the system and men like John Carter will find the cheapest way of fucking you."
This I thought was demanding more of her than what any man might expect. Does Zinnia not capitalize her anon, or is that you condescending? Real men have skills, and criticize ideas, not taking cheap shots at people. It was John who originally cross-posted her article, not you.
I don't know if tonic masculinity really describes what John is up to, but I am going to challenge you to talk less about how certain men are not living up to your idea of tonic masculinity and start describing what you think tonic femininity might be like.
Hi, William. Let me ask you, then, the same question I asked John. Are you looking to provide for a woman so she can stay home and raise your kids? I think this system has failed you, in the same way it failed Steve in another comment, because you both would have been great and loving dads, from what I've seen, and that opportunity has been taken from you.
If you see a way for women like zinnia to get what they want--the ability to raise kids with security--without changing the system or being fully dependent on a man, please explain how.
On Steve's comment he has a link to a psychologist explaining how women can get any man they want by becoming hunters, being their sluttiest and nastiest in bed, making themselves useful, and never criticizing her man. I found it disgusting but it actually made my point. Children are either abandoned by both parents who have to prioritize their jobs, or a woman has to be a cunning she-wolf to ruthlessly trick her prey into marrying her.
I'm not sure what this means: "Does Zinnia not capitalize her anon, or is that you condescending?"
John calls women hoes, sluts, bitches, traps, obese HR goblins, and these are off the top of my head. Clever insults are his stock in trade. You wouldn't call these cheap shots at people? Are you saying that John's not a real man because he takes cheap shots at people rather than ideas? What I'm challenging is John's idea that people, like zoomers, have good choices to make but are making the wrong ones. I don't think we have good choices so it's pointless to criticize other people for how they make it through. We're all, imo, doing the best we can.
Tell me where I'm wrong, William. John believes that women who engage in transactional relationships are hoes, correct? He's critiquing women who commodify their sexuality online or actual sex. Yet John states that marriage is a bad deal for men, and doesn't recommend it. Where does that leave women like zinnia? Is this not a calculation of whether marriage is too expensive for men, when milk is free and maybe you can be a dad without it? Not the stuff of romance novels, is what I'm saying.
It's not merely my 'idea' of tonic masculinity. No one questions that Jay got the term from me, when he replied to my comment with 'stealing that!' If John had invented the term and used it to describe his idea, I would have no right to disagree. Likewise, he has no right to take my term and change how I defined it at the time I coined it. If he doesn't want to live up to how I defined it, he shouldn't use it.
Does "I'm going to challenge you to talk less ..." not seem condescending? Yet I'll answer your challenge that everything I write is about tonic femininity. When I tell zinnia to change the fucking system, it's to heal an economy that places children last. Tonic means healing. A world that places children at the center, surrounded by women, is tonic femininity. I certainly don't think we can leave it up to men, although I am encouraged that many here share the goal.
I honor you for replying to my comment. I have been banned for less.
As for John, I have heard him use such language about women in a general sense, though I have never encountered him disrespecting a woman directly. There is a difference, and I suspect if he is looking for a woman, he is looking to attract one who understands that and yet can temper that impulse while making him stronger.
As for Zinnia, I think she needs more encouragement than criticism and unrealizable expectations.
As for me, if I am ever in a relationship again it will be an alchemical marriage. As for what that means, after this, I am preparing a post about that. Otherwise I have been practicing the fugees version of "No Woman No Cry."
No cliff-hanger here like a highway 1 in Big Sur except for the fact that this could be a good reading while waiting. I have no time or desire to go deeper into the subject matter like Russain dolls deployment of who said what and when. We may have too much leisure time that we use at not solving anything. It is unreal that it will go on forever.
oh and I've been thinking about that Big Sur slide. Two weeks earlier and my son-in-law would have been right there, if he'd escaped the trail slide he was in. And other roads are caved in around here. Call me a conspiracist but I think it's part of that geo-engineering agenda ...
I hear this a lot from males. But actually the recovery of our human lives and souls is dependent on rebalancing the masculine and the feminine because we live in a totally male-constructed patrix and this does nobody any good and it is even going to make us extinct if we do not address it. But of course we all have different interests. However I wish to make it clear that this subject is the subject of our era and is what will get us out of the hellhole we find ourselves in.
It's only about that article of Tereza. I wrote her that she is a soulmate but I don't have to be in sync with everything she says/writes. I appreciate her mind and bought and read her book with much delight. Only there are more important issues right now and we certainly will soon fail as a species because indeed we live in this excruciating world produced by alpha males with apparently the complicity of too many males and females and everything in-betwwen and beyond. I am interested by the interaction/interface between the material and immaterial world and everything that would produce an equilibrium in this material world from the models from the immaterial world. So far we only managed to not doing so.
May I suggest that I think you're both right? I agree with you, Marc, that it's the immaterial world that provides the model we need for producing an equilibrium in the material world. I pulled a card from my crow tarot deck to help make a decision and it was the Magician representing the alchemy of connecting the physical world to the spiritual realm and bringing the energy of air, water, earth and fire to create a spark that has the power to manifest into a transformative idea. It was exactly what I've meant by socio-spirituality.
Yet my gut feel is that denise is also right that the dys-function between the masculine and feminine is key to our whole dys-connect. To serve the feminine isn't to enable women to work in the market, it's to prioritize the security and self-reliance of the family. My book is, of course, a feminine economy but I think the real work is in the spiritual realm.
I was thinking about the Egyptian mythology when I wrote this article. Osiris, perhaps the constructive masculine, is dismantled by Set, the destructive male god of domination--whose cult is behind everything happening today. It's Isis, the female, who puts him back together and resurrects him, to have Horus, the unified Christ-mind of masculine and feminine. I didn't find a way to work that into this article but I will in a future one. Thanks to both of you for illuminating this discussion with so much respect.
I feel certain that the material and immaterial worlds will be clearer when we remedy the imbalance between the male and the female. The sexes are like the charge that generates electron flow. You can't get a charge when they are not working in unison, when one part of the equation isn't functional. It's also like the two hemispheres of the brain working together. We will see everything clearly when we have both polarities functioning in equilibrium. To me it is fundamental that we get the masculine and the feminine harmonized. It will usher in a new frequency that will energize our "soul" and give everything more clarity.
Lots to respond to here, Decoy! First, great quote.
On men being inherently violent and aggressive, I don't know about that. If it were true, then it would seem societies would have to be run by women who control the men like they're weapons. You're saying that male instincts are destructive and not constructive. I haven't found that true in my own life. I find men instinctively like to build but killing has to be taught. And I'm an animal husbandry gal so I think that's a necessary skill--not one I've found men to be better at than women in a practical sense although with more macho show when they do it, especially with an audience of other men.
On the virginity of the 'cow' so the man knows he hasn't been 'cuckolded' and the child is his, think about that for a moment. It says that the woman is his possession, something he's bought and paid for as a breeder to have his seed. She gets to live as a household servant on the condition that she perpetuates his genetics and no one else's.
I would never want to go backwards to that. As we know, that emphasis on lifelong monogamy never applied to men, only to women. In indigenous societies that were matrilineal and had actual (not digital) longhouses, women were secure as mothers and could raise their children without the 'bastard' problem of them not being claimed by a man.
And the article about women needing three men isn't saying women should trade their husbands in for a younger model. Or that the same man can't fill all three roles. But it's saying that there are different phases in life where women, like men, want different things. Is that different than 'just can't make a thot a wife?' Yes because for men, being the bad boy who gets the sex without the responsibility is a brag and taking something away, in your opinion, from the one who takes responsibility for them. For the woman it's a slur that blames her for being a ho no guy wants to marry. But it all comes back to money and that our right to procreate and raise a family depends on our service to the oligarchs.
That's the transactional relationship where we're all getting fucked.
What an excellent hamster quote! Laughed so hard. I'll be citing that, probably first in a text to my daughters.
Any mother with more than one child is an expert in 'equal but not the same.' If I were to have treated my daughters the same, it would have been disastrous. Finding out how to be fair when you can't split the baby in half is the biggest challenge. And that's why I think mothers are the ones who should be the architects of the economy.
I define 'toxic' as superiority. Patriarchy is the assembly of male archons who owned the land and ruled over others. Is that what you're happy is never going away?
I watched the Joy Luck Club clip but didn't get it. Is a separate accounting of what each person makes and spends equality?
The idea of monogamy is a male-created idea. Before patriarchy, men didn't have as much to do with the offspring, they would go about and have their adventures whenever they wished. The male relatives in the mother's family would help bring up the male boys. Today what good role models do boys have? Close to zero but there may be a few. The idea of the military again is all male-derived - it is the male need to fight and war. I don't understand it myself, I don't know if it's intrinsic like it is in male animals but we are more than animals I tend to think. Our entire society is based solely on catering to males, women don't even rate a mention. I can prove this by citing how ignored child minding is and how breastfeeding is considered obscene and never done in mixed company or shown in the movies. Yet we see violence, wars, weapons, fast cars - all the time!
It is not the males that really care about continuity, it is the mothers and grandmothers. If it were males, we'd see continuity but we don't, families are in an atrocious mess. As for not believing that our entire society is based on catering to males, we must look at the paradigm we exist in. Males wrote the bibles, the constitutions, the laws. Males even coined the language. There isn't even the language for women to speak because women were prohibited from education and public life. So men designed it all. That's why we only hear of male inventors, etc. Often their wives came up with much of the creation but their husbands got the mention - women were chattel. Today women have been trained in the patriarch (as all education is patriarchal except for schools like Montessori, the Kin School, Waldorf schools, etc) Everything is based on hierarchy in normal society which is all around us. Hierarchy, oneupmanship (competition) and making numbers in one's account. Nothing else really matters. Look at violence and especially gun violence or bombs - there are women who use guns but they are a small minority. Women have as much freedom to use guns and form armies as men do but they don't do that shit. They're just not interested. Women's bodies are flaunted everywhere if they are seductive, but to feed their infants - oh no - that's "obscene" and must be hidden. We never see mothers breastfeeding in the movies or anywhere else. This is not good for girls who must grow up without knowing how to ride a bicycle. In the workplace - there is no catering for women menstruation time, barely cater to pregnancy and infant care or child minding. It's just not an issue because this is considered a woman's issue and women are still considered second class although with a patina of politeness. The thing we don't ever realize is that the entire milieu is male-designed for men. The money system, the political system, the education system, all of it was laid down by men and women have simply learned to become competent within that framework. I'm not saying this to elicit sympathy. I think it's time now for women to initiate a currency and it would put rings around this stupid currency. And relieve everyone of their slavery which most aren't even aware of because when you're in the paradigm, it's hard to see it as an observer.
Thanks, Tereza. (I'm popping out of my self-imposed retreat to comment briefly.)
I agree with your conclusions on the slave system thwarting everyone.
Of course it's not just the insane money system, it's been everything. The divide and conquer - repeated again and again - to keep us arguing with each other so those pulling the strings are always out of sight.
Big sigh.
Yes something has gone terribly wrong. Dissecting the symptoms rarely leads to getting at the cause and a massive reorientation is needed. Rather than trying to figure out how men and women can come together in such a distorted landscape, we need to reject and abandon the landscape, and create something sane again, where we at least we start with the idea that people are equal, everyone is worthy of respect and compassion and that underneath all our drives - including sex and security - is love.
It's all been hijacked, as you know.
It can all be so much simpler, outside all this noise.
I didn't know what a thot is, I sort of wish I didn't now. Commoditizing sex isn't new, of course. But treating the commoditization of humanity as if it's a thing we need to incorporate in how we interact with each other is implicitly agreeing to this imposition, as if it's real and happened naturally. It isn't and didn't and I reject the whole construct.
I imagine a world post the shedding of a lot of this. How long does that take? IDK. Very tough to navigate in the meantime. The superficial differences we've been trained to focus on, where all the division lives, that perpetuates so much noise, can so easily be dropped into something deeper, that just naturally unites.
We were never intended to work so hard, for what is so natural.
Thanks for adding your brightness, clarity and humor, Tereza; for using your 'pretty little head' to such good use.
Best.
Beautifully said, Kathleen. "We were never intended to work so hard, for what is so natural." Exactly! Having and raising a family in a loving home should be the most accessible of goals, not something that requires the stars to align and a face that can sink a thousand ships (I found it interesting that was changed from 'launch' to 'sink' in the article.)
How long does it take to shed this construct? Someone quoted about bankruptcy and applied to global collapse, "Slowly and then all at once." But I think the opposite could be true. There's a sci-fi book where a woman comes to a deal with her ex, who happens to head the Fed, to change the economic system. As they watch out the window, the ice that's been slowly thawing on the river breaks and floes all rush downstream. I think good can happen slowly and then manifest all at once.
Always a pleasure to get your thoughts, Kathleen.
in the book 'stoneage economics' the investigator concurs. a tough work week might be one that included something like a 3 hour average, one of those days being a 'hard-work' day of more than 4 hours or so to go and find a rare treat such a honey or maybe a difficult hunt. even the horrific life within the dark ages was comprised of a work year filled with about 140 holy-days without work.
chomsky suggests that that time have come to us historically as 'dark' because the oligarchs had lost a lot of their power. jung suggest that they have been called dark because it was a time of huge introspection and a deep, albeit largely projected, shadow work that was required before an enlightenment of self-awareness. which has since then been perverted into egoistic-god syndrome as mind-controlled psy-op!) perhaps the deep introspection was a time when looking for the philosopher's stone took power away from the oligarchs — or was them figuring out how to expand their power? lol! so many questions!
all the best with what is and what is changing, with peace, respect, love and gratitude.
Great comment.
interesting discussion.
i'll add another odd tendril to it that that neither of you even hinted at: the incel business. many years ago, before political correctness had gained a foothold before morphing into so-called woke-dei stuff, i remember watching a series about the sexes. frequency of sexual intercourse was something that came up and it turns out that the so-called 'ugliness' of a woman had almost no bearing on sexual opportunity and action — for the woman. on the other hand, ugly men had very little chance of sexual intercourse. at the time this was linked with the importance and power that women have in advancing the 'best in kind' into the gene pool.
i would imagine that carter has addressed this? i don't have time to look into that at this time and it doesn't have a high enough standing in my interest scale to displace the other interesting stuff. peterson has addressed this, of course.
humorous aside: rather bizarrely, a self-appointed(?) spokes person for 'beautiful' women, actress olivia wilde in the total absolute confidence of empty-headed ignorance publicly dismissed jordan peterson as the leader of the incels. the context was that she made(?) a movie that modelled an immoral man after her image of jordan peterson — i think that was it. it was interesting to see a woman self-representing herself in this way and in that 'appointment' dismissed casually and brutally a sub-class of human — another example of an undeserving class being created and perpetuated and so easily dismissed as unworthy of being alive.
Thanks for that interesting information, Guy. John reports a sharp decline in the 'fuck rate' and he's not wrong about that. He is, to be fair, as hard on men as he is on women. Getting men off porn and video games and into communities of men who get them going to the gym is a worthy endeavor.
For John and Jordan Peterson, I find what they're doing for men to be laudable. However Jordan has said, 'Before you criticize the system, get your own house in order.' I don't think it's either/or. But I do think we should blame the system before blaming other people.
gracias.
i've come to the yogic place of 'no blame no complain'. fundamentally blaming and complaining is a process of personal disempowerment and enervation. more recently i see it more perniciouosly as aligning with the energy of the grand blamers and complainers, who look to fix their problem by killing it (us). it is the same energy. now that the initial confusion is passing from the immediate experience of the convid critiques and the 'real' culprit(s) are now more and more clearly seen exactly who/what to be blamed (v-nv, 5g, germs, dew, who, satan, km, babylonians, aliens, cone-heads) i see more and more active 'blame and complain' energies within the mfm which is fragmenting it(us) — which is the 'real' evidence of the disempowering and enervating energy of 'blame and complain.'
the 'action' that is sustainable and grows personal empowerment is to clean our own houses and take action to fix what is broken around us. for some that might be their immediate family, for others it will be a bigger picture. and that won't happen before 'vidya', seeing what is broken. and that takes us to the 2nd very debilitating effect of 'blame and complain' - blindness often locked with single vision and newton's sleep. signs of that blindness is the increasingly shrill requirement within the so-called mfm to align with singularity of cause, thought, blame, belief, ideology, thinking, echoing, blah-blahing. it is the same energy as the ptb! why? their shadow work is being put onto us, and our shadow work is being put out there too.
my ranty kind of thinking. (note: i'm not in agreement with everything peterson says for sure: i do agree with the importance of stop telling others how to clean up their homes when our own are fucked.)
gracias and all the best.
Really well said, Guy. Blaming and complaining is an alignment of energy with the global blamers and complainers, I haven't heard it put that way before.
I don't know that Jordan says to put your own house in order before telling others how to clean up theirs. It seems like he does a lot of telling other people what they should do. He says put your own house in order before critiquing the system, and I think both should be done simultaneously, but not blaming others.
That is what he says and is frequently castigated for that. I've seen him a few times in a university setting being told that it is stupid to not fix the world first. How dare he pretend that that isn't important. Often those are kind of train wreck funny because the complainers think they are smart and get sliced and diced trying to trip him up.
If by 'critiquing' you mean seeing with acuity and writing what we see, yes. With caution because our vision isn't very reliable with it being masked behind our own shadowed ideology, brainwashing and false-truths. Kind of a moving target.
Gracias. All the best with what is.
Tereza, I love your brilliance and courage here. I just see you walking into big convos with no holds barred, your intelligence at the forefront, and trusting yourself to wade into thick waters. Thank you for role modeling your calm and courage in divisive topics.
I didn't read John Carter or zinnia's essay - but the thing that stands out to me, and which you address as well, is that women can't win in his world view. What is his solution for healthier masculine/feminine - male/female relationships? I like your solution - children at the center, women tending, plus the men and others who choose to tend, and men supporting and protecting this sacred circle.
I love that my man has chosen to tend and learned how to be more tender in his parenting, but he defers to me. Mostly because I'm willing to cull through the bullshit ways of parenting these days, and not go by normal standards. I had to learn that the hard way - starting off with giving him equal consideration and his choices hurt my son early in life. The mama bear came out and set boundaries and it took a long time for us to figure out our balance. I'm open to rebalancing towards more health for our family, when the ideas are compelling enough!
And I don't know how to reconcile this circle of life with my wants and needs at this time. My son is 8, and I want to be both a very involved parent, and also have a small business. My business always gets put to the side when my son isn't in school, such as these two weeks of spring break. How do I reconcile my needs for showing up in the world with being as connected to my son as I am?
Thank you for that compliment, marta, it speaks exactly to what I hoped to do.
I really appreciate you picking up on that in John's worldview. I have no criticism of his choices or anyone else's. But he IS criticizing women's choices pretty harshly. So, to me, you need to be modeling or presenting a solution that's available to women generally.
Divorce, I think, favors neither men nor women but the lawyers and banks. It puts the house up for sale so it can be split evenly, so the kids lose their home, their school, their neighborhood, their friends. When I think about my system, I think about how to get around that.
First, I lower the cost of housing and give locals double the buying or renting power of outsiders. So in a divorce, it wouldn't be hard to find an affordable house nearby.
Second, I'm considering the radical position that children belong to their mother, and any court or father or even adoption that takes them away is committing child abuse.
Third, so many abusive situations are because dads are trying to get out of child support. I don't think I'd have child support at all. My system distributes targeted dividends equally to all members of the commonwealth. I think the mother should receive those for the child.
I've never known a mother who didn't want a loving father to spend as much time as he wanted with the child. It seems like there are ways of empowering this instead of forcing it.
Anyway, back to you and your sweet, tender man ;-) I'm always so happy to hear good news on the marriage front. It's encouraging that you're both learning and making it work. I do think there's a different instinct that mothers have, a sixth sense. I have some close-call stories that still give me chills from when my husband was watching the kids but nothing bad ever happened and you can't live without taking risks--at least I couldn't. Easy to say when nothing bad happened.
I actually worked until my kids were all in school. I had a daycare I loved and the schedule was easy. The school schedule is not made for working parents! It's a patchwork quilt of odd times they're off that you have to work around. It actually gives you a lot of time off, but you have to be available when they need you. A small business sounds like a good way to show up in the world, and none of those schedules are forever. It seemed like they were when I was in them, in retrospect, I feel like the time they needed or even wanted me around went by in the blink of an eye!
Appreciating your thoughts. I notice the "what abouts..." that come up with your potential "radical" position of children belong with their mother. But those what-abouts are because of our sick society - my friend who adopted his nephew because his sister is a drug addict for example. But she's a drug addict because of deep sickness in our society. And if there was more health on all levels, it would be the norm for kids to be with their moms. Not sure what to do about moms who legitimately don't want their kids, even given more personal and societal health. It's sticky to figure all this out!
Also I heard someone recently talk about divorce as a way to keep people poor and that really hit a nerve for me. Something about her presentation and way of talking - not "right wing women should stay with their husbands" but more about what are the forces that encourage divorce and who does it benefit? It keeps people off center and scrambling. And as a person who has tended towards the glass half empty view, I'm susceptible to that thinking that my husband is deficient and maybe I should just throw the towel in and start over.
I'm glad I haven't done that, I'm glad he and I keep working at it. Yes we're both deficient, but we're also learning so much by keeping on trying. And also I have to say, I'm learning some awesome energy healing methods that help so much. I've been an IFS (Internal Family Systems) practitioner for 7 years, and IFS is awesome, but this energy healing - Emotion Code and Aura Transformation - is so much faster. Knowing this, there is so much potential for people to stay together. I like to think that more and more awesome and fast healing modalities are becoming possible and we're just at the tip of the iceberg with what is possible with fast healing/growth.
I think about those 'what-abouts' too. It's hard to fix anything in the middle, without going back to the cause. Under my system, would it create an incentive for women to have children they don't want and can't care for, by giving them twice the subsidized benefit? I think it would hardly be worth it, since it would be earmarked for food, education, wellcare and home improvement. Without a child, a woman would have all those ways to earn the cost of living in an easier way, that she can then spend anyway she wants.
I'm also not at all against early-term abortion. Having a child certainly shouldn't be as hard as it is today, but the alternative should also be easy to obtain and free. Every child should be a choice and wanted.
That talk about divorce sounds really interesting. Do you have a link handy? Yes, there's little support to keep marriages together. Counselors are extremely expensive and stigmatizing. The churches and priests, when good, used to fill that role but are overwhelmed.
I can't count the women I know who lost everything in a divorce, who gave up their retirement savings to keep the house so it didn't change everything for the kids. A friend just told me about her friend, a female fire chief, who married a cop. She bought their house and had a baby. He got fired as a cop (which tells you a lot about him) and divorced her, taking half of the house value, getting alimony and even some child support.
Yes to fast healing/ growth!
Wait til you read my divorce story, Tereza. I don't know how I found this post comment and reply but I was reviewing the liked and commenting to this essay/rant and somehow stumble upon this interesting convos here. Sorry for butting in.🤩🥰.
Running out the door in a minute, but thought I would drop the link. Actually I don;t know if it's the right link, but this lady is the person I heard talking about divorce and about how important it is to build our wealth. She has loads of videos
https://www.youtube.com/live/vQgSgKHt3Ms?si=4FNYpc57ptiYrwGV
She's super woo-woo, but I like her!
Looking at the youtube list of videos I've watched by her, here are two more options that might include the bit about divorce and building wealth:
https://www.youtube.com/live/xlpgFadx1C4?si=TbKZ--hqUrvlv4Po
https://www.youtube.com/live/gxJeTdyCIEE?si=fCaOqKdpBJGx_SXD
Must run - I appreciate communicating and connecting with you Tereza!
Daaaamn, girl. I couldn't not read, then not watch this episode. And I'm still working my way up from your earlier works. Good thing you throw some in with your current ones too.
Now you don't be messing with my boy, JC? lol kidding. But looking at both sides and obvious generation gaps within the Substack community's pool of enlightenment, we can see the full effects of misguided regulatory backscratchers. The evolution of what ancient Egyptian's have mastered over the millennia.
Ho's and Bro's, the Kardashians, hip-hop and Ballers. And they used to say rock & roll was the problem before that. I agree the problem is and has been, post 1776 and the US made it's progress historical after the Revolution whilst not engaging in foreign affairs: Isolation.
Much like the days in the story of Moses the lawmaker. The Rush albums like 2112, songs written by Neil Pert: Temple of Syrinx. It's practically foretelling what's going on.
Back to JC, he's correct because of the fact that we'd have to literally go back in time to fix what the deciders have done, or freeze time and smash the fuckers to pieces. The agenda is written, they have the game fixed. What we're witnessing is the residually planned side effects of thousands of years of world domination, same process, different time. Money is their ultimate weapon. Everything is money because that's how it all works. If not money it's food, if not food it's family, if not family, it's whatever you possess, if not possessions it's your life and if not your life it's your spouse's, if not the spouse it's your child, if not the children it's your pet. Get it? Pure evil.
Technology cannot be put into the hands of people that want to capitalize from it in any way, shape or form, only for the benefit to all humanity so that our environment can be one with God or Nature, as many people prefer to believe. I say to the establishment, Go the Fuck Back To Egypt and stay there. Get back in the fuckin pyramids and take the fuck off, back to where you came, never return to our blessed planet. Fuckin aliens.
Haha, it's usually another JC people don't want me to mess with ;-) I never criticize people, only words and actions. John is a damn fine writer, is always a pleasure to read and gives me ample fodder to rant about.
You put that really well, Orion: " the residually planned side effects of thousands of years of world domination, same process, different time. Money is their ultimate weapon. Everything is money because that's how it all works."
I've thought about an internet and media in which no commercialization was allowed. Wouldn't that be cool? But it would have to plan for the surreptitious control that comes along with 'nonprofits' and foundation grants. But it could be done in my system, and I have thoughts on that.
Is it the Egyptians? I'm leaning towards Hyksos as the invaders there. Still working on my episode, "Elohim, Aliens and Archons, oh my!" Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
Oooh, Aliens! Thanks, Tereza-Darling I'd never mess with you. 🥰
I'm not going to jump into this quagmire as it's a no-win situation. Battle of the sexes I'm certain predates Adam & Eve. I bet God has his own 'Man-Cave' to retreat to.
This article just hit my 'Inbox':
The Magic of Sex
Male and Female Polarity in Western Esotericism
WILLIAM HUNTER DUNCAN
APR 5
https://williamhunterduncan.substack.com/p/the-magic-of-sex?publication_id=988747&post_id=143263057&isFreemail=true&r=rc3yr&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
I"m not going to read it............................simply because I really don't care.
My relationship with my opposite is between the two of us and the 'Rules' are a constantly moving target. Principled in trust, respect, need for some personal space (and avoiding topics where we simply agree to disagree) helps keep the 'Dance' fun, and without endpoint.
Just to put the 'Rules' in perspective I signed us up for a 'sewing class' (knock yourself over with a feather, I know) today.
Imagine Tereza if your significant let you know that the two of you are signed up for a 'Worldanz' & Blue Martinis' Class. Manly? Anti-Manly? Tonic-Relations? Would I be stripped of my 'Man Card'?
Two thoughts about relationships:
Some women were discussing their relationships when one of them declares:
"For me, it's really quite simple, a woman needs a man that is fiercely strong and a protecter of the family.
And I need the man to be an excellent lover, meeting all my needs for passion.
And I need this man to be an excellent father to the children, caring and understanding.
And lastly I need the man to be sensitive to me, my idiosyncrasies and still love and accept me.
And truly, the MOST IMPORTANT thing of all.............................................these 4 men should never meet.
And on the more serious side of the relationship 'Dance':
During and after the massive Tsunami that hit Thailand a number of years ago, washing away entire shoreline living inhabitants, the warning was sounded ahead of time and people fled as soon as they could.
Running as fast as they could, men carried the babies and small children while women did their best with the youngsters at unfortunately a lesser speed.
Some survived, but many perished as the Tsunami was registered as as high as 60 feet.
Within days after the devastation receded back into the Indian Ocean survivors returned to their shoreline.
What was most interesting was that the men returned with their surviving offspring, not to celebrate their victory against sure death, but they came looking for ANY surviving FEMALE members of the community. Their hope was to find a female mother to TAKE the children and raise them because the man/father was simply physically/emotionally unable to do so all by themselves.
Conclusion: Women clearly define "COMMUNITY" and hold it together.
Women are the 'Center' that glues the fabric of existence together.
Yes men have clear functions as well.
Without both, we would have all perished long ago.
And therefore we should NEVER disvalue the importance of both.
My opinion of one of course.
Now I need to get back to figuring out how to thread a needle and load a bobbin with my manly fat fingers and thumbs.....................whatever a bobbin is.
Haha, love the idea of God's man cave and happy to get a comment I needed to expand from someone not willing to jump into the quagmire. Imagine if you had!
I just got William's article but haven't read it yet. He mentioned in the comments he was going to write about alchemical marriage.
When Nef told me he practically spewed his beer on my last line, I reminded him that the two of you had encouraged me to rant and stop being so nice. So I blame it all on you!
Now here you go girl, blaming dudes for encouraging. Poor Nef, I bet that was good beer too that you almost forced him to spew. You totally would have messed up his nice corinthian leather recliner, his Cabela's cup holder and probably got some 'spew' on the dart board across the room right next to the 65" big screen. And you wonder why guys like us 'stick together' and never go near the ladies, for the 'blame' for some reason becomes us.
PS: Talk to your exercise class instructor about setting up a once a month dance and drinks class. So many themes as Danzworld has no limits, nor would therefore be drink options (I'm thinking Jamaican music with some rum drinks just to start, and away whirls my brain).
Indeed, that was his homemade brew from the brewery he's converted his garage into. I think he probably wears his Viking hat while drinking it from a horn.
Oh you have no idea how much trouble my dance teacher gets in with the woke police. Right before a class with a Rasta theme, one woman accused her of cultural appropriation because, you know, Rasta is a religion. And there was the Jamaican party at the university--before my time--where they got banned over the afro wigs ... talk about having no limits!
You covered a lot of great points here in the male and female dynamic. There are many excellent comments here too.
On Beauty of the Feminine; there's an unspoken deep seated acknowledgement, there exists in the male gaze. While quite often it may convey desirability and attractiveness, a simple and sweet smile will give a sense of warm acceptance. In an esoteric way, what do we see when we notice someone beautiful? We are experiencing the inner Self. Beauty is it's reflection, not to detract from the other person; but the other person, is also experiencing the inner Self. The attractiveness is not just biological, it's Energetic. We are all experiencing the biological aspect in varying ways, with psychological self acceptance and sometimes social self worth tied to appearance based judgment. I've had to help my daughter to realize that her sense of self worth is not tied to the approval she thinks she gets socially. She has adjusted quite well, with a great sense of humor and excellent sense of balance and personal confidence.
Glad to have your thoughts on this, Nef, both as a man and a father of a daughter. My ex was trapped in the high tech sales world, something that never suited his disposition, and would get pushed into going to strip clubs by the other guys on sales trips. He never got it, and always felt, "Hey, that's someone's daughter debasing herself for these idiots."
I'm sure some would say, "Oh, that's what he'd tell you" but I know he was speaking the truth. Once you're a loving dad of daughters, you see the other side, whether you want to or not.
There's a different male gaze that's appreciative without wanting than the one that's wanting without appreciation. Men who are indiscriminate flirts are a joy to be around: by indiscriminate, I mean making girls from 9 mos. old to 90 glad to have been born female. Not creepy, not selective for 'marketable' looks, but appreciative and admiring of a general quality of femaleness. We need more of that in the world.
Is there a relationship between the word leer and leery? The leer conveys, not just wanting, but entitlement. It turns on a dime from desire and flattery to anger and hatred when rejected. It does nothing for the woman, unless she's selling her looks or sex as a commodity. And even then, it will turn on her, the way johns kill prostitutes out of their own humiliation.
I worry that zinnia is rejecting the female gaze that says, "You're beautiful just the way you are. Now can we get to work?" and is being lured to seek the approval of 11,000 predominately male subs on John Carter's site, where he is very judgmental about women based on appearance. As he says, 'Fat-shaming and slut-shaming are looked down on by left liberal women because they're effective.' IMO, that male gaze is a leer about a woman's value as sex object, and has nothing to do with the appreciation you speak so eloquently about.
I'm glad your daughter and my three have gotten the message that self-worth isn't tied to social approval. I'm sure it will serve your daughter well throughout her life.
She's a fighter.
"The Strong are Strongest while they stand alone, a God given Force is their Might." --- Sri Aurobindo.
Self Reliance is something that must be learned and practiced daily.
By the way, when I was watching your video, that last line you gave, just about caused me to spray my beer across to table, took me by pleasant surprise--- Lol ;-)
Hahaha! I recorded that segment, then recorded it again without the last line so I could decide in editing whether to use it. But I took to heart you and Gary encouraging me to be less 'nice.'
Geez..............now I'm 'Gary'.
At least I have my entire collection of Nordic Horned Helmets to cling to (one for each Hockey Team). And yes, the horns are removable allowing one to imbibe. At least Nef has a home-brewery right there in the converted garage. No need to 'hold' (let it spew/spray) your alcohol when it's free...........or almost anyway. LOL
For the record, Gary here also raised a daughter, and yes, she too is thriving. Raising a successful, strong, confident individual does take parental support and family infrastructure, something many never receive (both genders can suffer without).
Being also in 'sales' the evening useless entertainment was surely available, but mostly those that chose to go had 'leer issues' (if I may).
Not been to JC's site. Plenty of healthy learning, dialogue and 'Longhouse' feeling of inclusion.
Thanks for listening to 'my' rant.
Gary
Greg!!!! So sorry. As soon as you wrote that I knew. But I didn't misgender you so you can't sue, in case you're a boy named ... There's a song that hasn't aged well.
Hey, we learn more every day. Librarian turned out to be a guy, even with the silly pic right out there in front. Who's hiding behind what these days, we'll likely never completely know.
Best
Gary, aka: The Nordic Helmet Guy (kind of like Tim the Tool Guy). LOL
PS: Helmets and drinking and all takes one back to college days (over-rated for sure). I was "GAR" the "Dude". Thought I was a big drinker until I woke up in my underwear one morning laying on cement I didn't recognize.
Shows you what half a beer can do to you when you don't eat.
Explains as well why I have no idea what a blue martini even is.
Huge John Carter fan, but mainly for the resistance to anti-European trends. I like your points too, well worth reading
Thank you so much, Bill!
Thank you for a most riveting analysis Tereza. This I a subject I could write volumes on and interests me immensely because I believe the source of our malaise today is the imbalance of the masculine and the feminine. Everything we do is solely male-oriented. Truly everything. So it is like looking at the world with one eye only and does a huge disservice to all of humanity and nature. Trust between women and men is priceless and we need to restore this again, which is easy if we understand what is going on.
Firstly, we need to look at circumcision. This barbaric practice needs to end and it is up to mothers to make sure it does. What this does I would imagine is make a boy grow up with an inbuilt distrust of mother which he then internalizes subconsciously and carries around with him unknowingly. He blames women because deep down inside, mother wasn’t “there” for him, mother didn’t protect him and he knows this with every cell of his being.
It is true of course. Imagine who thought that up – slicing off the sexual glans of a baby in order to be “cleaner”. You just can’t make this stuff up. It’s like we have been directed by the most twisted minds and we are just waking up to this now after eons of horror and misery. But I think that’s it, that’s what incites men to look at women as though we are worthless. We need to recognize well that women are now almost totally entrenched in patriarchal thinking because we have been taught by the patriarchy, worked in the patriarchy and live by it.
Men have everything to say about abortion. Men kept women out of business affairs, education and public life. Who would want to do that? There is something in men that is envious, I think that’s where it stems from because woman have a huge intellect, it comes easy, we figure things out and are ten steps ahead of men. That is because women think in terms of long-terms because women get pregnant and nurture children. Men ejaculate and are more immediate. Men are the builders, women are the designers. Women see the big picture while men see details. That’s what builders do. Architects design because they have a big view. We have to work together – one without the other leads us to impotence for both (as we can see)
It is not a competition but our entire civilization is based on competition and self-gain. These are very poor things to build a civilization on. They exist because on their own, predatory men brought them in. Warring men who favored invasion and colonization, who held no ethics in personal sovereignty.
Patriarchy usurped matriarchy where women didn’t rule, they owned everything and let people work out their own problems unless there was an impasse in which case, the women’s counsel would be sought. They didn’t sit every day, for eight hours waiting for problems to come to them! Patriarchy thinks like that. Patriarchy wants to control and so to control it requires certainty and thus everything must be scheduled and arranged beforehand.
This is a little about how I think it came about to what we have today. It hinges on circumcision and war. Women must be opposed mightily to anything that harms the body or kills. We need to even get the word “anti-biotic” out of our lingo. Our language is so filled with killing terms that we barely blink when we talk about war. War and weaponry are the purview of men. The exceptions only prove the rule. We must look at ratios rather than instances.
While many men see women as worthless sluts, it’s funny that they never see themselves as warmongering psychopaths. A woman having an abortion receives more vitriol than a man dropping bombs on people he doesn’t even know. This is how warped our views are and it all comes about because women’s wisdom is never sought or even recognized. We live in a totally male-designed patrix. But now women at least are able to change that pattern and initiate something new. We are the designers remember! Men who care about empowering everyone could notice when an imbalance of women occurs and invite women to chime in and get her perspective. There is a whole universe of intelligence we are not tapping and it impoverishes everyone including men.
denise, you're making me eat my words for when I snubbed you on the economics. I could listen to volumes of you on this subject, you make so much sense and bring up such clear points. I'm glad you didn't give up on me.
I think the circumcision point is brilliant. Isn't that exactly what the anti-Matri male is--a son who wants to dominate his mother, in another form, as punishment for her having not been there for him when he was dependent on her? Jasun Horsley talks about birth trauma and wanting the mother's attention in Big Mother, but doesn't make the circumcision connection.
It makes so much sense that this traumatic event would be seen as the mother's betrayal, never to be fully trusted again. Anneke Lucus talks about the pedo-predator cults like Illuminati as passing down intergenerational trauma, horrible things that were done to upper-class and royal children that they inflict again.
It's so interesting too that circumcision was instituted by the most patriarchal religion, Judaism, and passed on to Christianity. Like it's symbolic of some kind of child blood sacrifice or castration.
And anti-biotic = against life. More good word deciphering, breaking these word-spells.
I remember reading that to be consistently pro-life, you'd need to be against war, abortion and the death penalty and almost no one was against all three.
And I like the idea that women are the architects because we think long-term. Thanks for this thought-provoking comment.
That is very kind of you. I'm glad you can see this because it seems to explain a lot. Women and especially mothers have so much sway. If women were against wars they wouldn't encourage their sons to join the military or celebrate it when they did, they wouldn't have sex with husbands who fight in wars. But they wouldn't need to go that far if women simply objected to war. The patriarchy has so traumatized women for eons that now women have lost their womanhood. Womanhood is currently defined by the patriarchy but womenhood is many more things than we even understand. Women are stalwart defenders of life and the vulnerable. However womanhood has been almost totally lost. I found it again only because I dipped out of the political and money system and I learned to see it all as an outsider and also what it does to people's thinking. These two arms of enslavement (the money system and representative politics) are designed to allow pedophiles to be at the top of the food chain. They have it so well arranged that mostly nobody can even see what it is really designed for. It is staggering how the money system and the political system gets us to do things for pedophiles that we would never do without those two vehicles. I think they cooked it up because everyone wants to hang pedophiles and so they had to be super smart and cunning to be able to live and also keep their predilections. Without this system, they would never be able to get the number of children that they do. The money system rewards those who steal children for them and they are all around us, and we just don't know it. It is very well covered up. Money can do that. Money can buy anyone nearly. But I must qualify, it is this money system, a system based on centralization and debt that enables all of the horrors of the world to persist. This is a most important subject - the relationship between the masculine and the feminine - and it is actually what is at the root of our ailments. It can easily be remedied though - by seeking the wisdom of women and resurrecting this incredible source that we have almost left to die.
I will once again say, to this comment and your reply to Decoy, you're brilliant denise. There's so much resonance in me to what you say. Yes, the world is run by pedo-predators. That's what all their power is for, the sacrifice of children. It's at the top of governments, banks, celebrity, courts.
We should talk. I'll give you my best pitch that living in a house someone else built does incur a debt--to past generations and to pass the gift on in a better form to future. I know that our goal is the same, whether or not our logistics differ.
That's very heartening. I'd like to talk more. I think we are very aligned in the big things that matter.
Really interesting, denise. I'm running out to a dance class but will respond in full later. Thanks for this and the intriguing connection to circumcision.
Absolutely excellent comment, Denise. Agree with you 100%.
Hi Tereza.
Well written (as usual) and thought out.
Among so many other things going old world-wide, I am also trying to come to grips with my own impending mortality. So male-female relationships and my failure to start my own family have recently been on my mind. I am still collecting data and trying to integrate it with my experience and intuition. Maybe terminally so.
But one guy I've found to bring me new insights is psychologist Orion Taraban. Even after a couple of listens, about my only hedges are the differences in social contexts between Japan and the U.S. I have not yet read his book, but here are Soft White Underbelly's interviews with him.
Part 1 ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgR01vEOdwU
Part 2 ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXoEW-TYHrY&t=1256s
And I still have a thread with you and Guy to follow up on ... some questions regarding correlations between sociopathy and trauma.
Catcha later!
After finishing the first one, if you're feeling your mortality, I can see the attraction to it. It sure made me want to stop the planet and jump off. I think it should be subtitled, "How to be a Romantic Sociopath for Men and Women."
You could have saved 3 hrs with this summary--The wallet is the male breast. Make a lot of money and be an asshole. If she asks where you've been, just sneer. Women like that.
LOL ... when you frame it like that, yeah ... it was a downer. I should have read more books about the process. On the other hand, I think I was born low in animal instincts for striving and competition for resources (physical or social). Rather than having a low self-esteem, I tended to think more highly of others ... maybe taken in by the way they were taught to compete and market themselves? Here in Japan, I even tended to treat my former elementary school students as 'equals', much more so regarding college students ... and that did not set well with the more authoritarian-edged colleagues. Ha, even now, I hear the chickadees complaining that I did not put enough dried cat-food on the veranda for them.
Last night I watched a podcast by a YouTuber I am increasingly fond of "Diary of a CEO", and his interview of Dr. Ramani regarding narcissism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTkKXDvSJvo. Though social-psychology is a 'soft science' (low in predictability) she pointed out the current scientific literature suggests that as many as 1 in 6 of the general population, and most of those who strive to become 'famous', suffer from one of several potentially sociopathic forms of narcissism. But one point that stood out for me and reinforced my prior assumptions, is that this is a temperament that can probably not be changed, and not emerging from trauma. I want to continue this with the thread that you, Guy, and I were talking about last week ... but for now just mentioning it because she also mentioned narcissism (and/or specific narcissistic behavior) fall on a spectrum within which we all fit. Perhaps the opposite of narcissism is not altruism, but rather a pull towards self-destruction? Many a psychologist seems to think so, but I have pursued educational ideals as if alstruism is the opposite. In retrospect, self-destruction as well as altruism may describe the arc of my life.
One point that Taraban brought up, which revulsed me, is how and why men fall in love with strippers, whores, and mentally ill women to which he answered, because such women fuck their (the men's) brains out.
Warning ... the following may be too personal to be appropriate in comments for any and all to read. If you think so, let me know, and I will copy-paste to a personal message to you.
That comment by Taraban did not sit well with me because of that one time I mentioned about asking a young lady to marry me. She was so sick (and so brilliant — tested out as 3rd highest in Tokyo on a standardized math test), that after long hours of philosophical conversation in the car or over a light meal at a restaurant, and it became late, and time to drop her off near her house — she would ask me to close my eyes. I complied, and then she would kiss me on the cheek. I was delighted and neither asked nor expected anything more from her.
During one of our many never-ending conversations, she brought up the fact that her family ... otherwise well-off enough to send her to an elite Women's college in the the U.S. and then hire Steven Levenkron (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Levenkron) as her personal doctor when she relapsed ... was on the urge of bankruptcy because of the medical bills for treating organ damage from severe anorexia.
Surprising myself, without hesitation, I immediately suggested we marry, and let my insurance take care of it. As I said earlier, she declined because "it was too soon". But I did not feel hurt or rejected at all. I simply saw myself as offering a practical solution to someone out of unconditional love ... and I knew that I was in the dark regarding all she was going through. Shortly after surprising myself as much as her by popping the question ... she ghosted me for a few months. It was only after I bought a book I thought she might enjoy and had it shipped from Amazon to her place that I received a message from her mother. A rather matter-of-fact message of Asako's passing away, including a grisly detailed account of her autopsy. I met her mother a couple of times after that, she showed me where the grave was, and I never heard from her again.
Maybe it was just the 'white knight' in me, made all the purer because I had often been marginalization for the crime of being a foreign resident in Japan (certainly worse in some other countries). But I cringed at Taraban's analysis that I would have asked Asako (just typing her name hurts) to marry me just because she 'fucked my brains out'.
I realize that Taraban (a former actor) has been a successful player ... and that is why he can afford to see it all as a largely subconscious game. But if life is all a game to most people, regarding my relationship with Asako ... if it had come down to it, I would have unconditionally given my life to save hers, just as many a mother or father would have done for a new-born.
Just a couple of days ago ... I visited her grave, and took a photo, as I have done every week for about 10 years now. Strange. Though from a relatively upper-middle class family (her father in upper management, probably with their family having Samurai roots) ... her gravestone is in a common pauper's graveyard ... not the family plot.
The following inscription is written on her gravestone ... "You can't erase the times. But you can change the future. I know it won't be easy. But you can. Believe yourself. Don't be sad, you will never be alone. I am always with you. I love you."
This is not a translation of the inscription. Oddly, it is written in English. To who? To someone like myself who speaks Japanese, but is functionally illiterate? To her mother? Or is it her mother's message to me — implying I forget her and move on? I suspect I will never know how either Asako or her mother felt about me. I only know how I felt. And it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. And I do resent Taraban's implication that my once and only marriage proposal is the equivalence of someone trying to save an abandoned puppy ... or because her brief pecks on my cheek were the equivalence of 'fucking my brains out'. In this respect, maybe he and I are both outliers, but on on opposite sides of a bell curve.
Occasionally, I entertain the idea that this was all an elaborate ruse to reject a foreigner from an upper middle-class family with an otherwise "international" mind-set ... and that she is now living comfortably as the wife of well paid Japanese professional, probably a doctor. If so, they are playing the long game ... as is common with Dune's metaphorical "Bene Gesserit", and a gravestone in a pauper's grave was a small price to pay to say "stay away".
My acknowledgement of Taraban is that he appears to be accurate and insightful for a large number of relationships in the U.S. context ... maybe the majority. Again, from a young age ... I could feel some vital animal instincts was lower in myself than others ... ambition, and maybe the ability to find self-worth only in of what service I can be to others? If I had never moved to Japan over 40 years ago, maybe a similar scenario would have played out here in the U.S.
My own parents' marriage was a brief (6 year) shot-gun affair, and they both eventually settled to re-marry others, in what appears to be more out of practical comfort and convenience than anything else. But I may be mistaken there too. Now both deceased, all I have is photos of 'happier?" days.
Lots of mistakes in my life. It will be finished soon enough. I am beginning to take some consolation in that.
Again, the shorter video of Michelle 'Mike' Ng's "Farewell funeral" is even more poignant ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0m6Sw5_uMc&t=10s.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-13259999/dying-woman-terminal-ovarian-cancer-hosts-living-funeral.html
It is short, worth every minute, and hauntingly memorable.
Later Tereza
Thank you for honoring me with this personal story, Steve. I'm very happy it exists on this page, as a testimony to exactly what I've termed tonic masculinity, the desire to protect without ego and self-interest. You've never made a mistake, my friend. The world simply hasn't been ready to have someone like you in it. You being in it, however, is making it more ready.
You and the other worthy men on this site (by which I mean all) are the contradiction to Taraban's theory. For the women, imagine how it feels to know that you peaked at 18 and your value in the sexual marketplace will only decline as men's increase. For men, imagine how it feels to know that no one will ever love you, only want your money. That's the reality Taraban presents and I wouldn't envy either side.
Let me confirm what you know deep inside--Asako wrote her last message to you. Her inscription is the most beautiful thing I've ever read, and it's clearly intended for you. No one else in her life could have written that. And how perfect for you: "you can't change the times" the times you were born into, "but you can change the future." That's what you've been doing with every relationship you're in, in person or online.
Now I see why you haven't married. Your fate is intertwined with Asako. I don't know why her grave would be separate from the family plot. Have you checked to make sure it's not a duplicate? But I would say that her wishes were to have a place that was for you. The details on the organ failure and expert doctor indicate this wasn't a ruse. The family had to be desperate to keep her alive.
That Ramani video on narcissism is the one that comes up most often in my feed, with others from Diary of a CEO, and one on What is Gender? This is through no encouragement from me. There's something they want us to believe, and propaganda they're feeding us. I don't like labels. They stop us from understanding each other and asking, 'why? Why is this person acting this way? What's the story they believe that they're reacting to?" Narcissists, if they exist, are made, not born. What's making them?
I appreciate you, Steve. Thanks for being who you are.
Hi Tereza.
Just heading to bed, but wanted to thank you for such high praise. It was difficult to put that much of my past out there. I assure you though, I am a thoroughly flawed man, don't know if I could have been any better as a husband or a father, and guess I never will know.
On reading your take on Taraban, I am now more inclined to agree with you than with my first impression of him. I think I explained a bit why in my previous comment ... one of the blind spots in my experience. But his explanation did offer an explanation for something a former student brought up with me in an on-line chat about a semi-functional marriage.
Regarding narcissism ... I agree that it is a trendy catch-all term nowadays, and depending on how one defines the term, I guess nature or nurture could both account for it. I've been following Dr. Ramani for a few years now, so I am not surprised she popped up in my feed, though I do not follow all her podcasts. She can sometimes come across as a bit shrill and over confident, if not downright scary. But I've come to see trust her in hinting at the social dynamics of the toxic workplace in Japan, particularly in my applying "collective narcissism" and its relationship to the token foreigner, and a couple of experiences with pathologically malignant narcissists. My experience was worse than marginalization. It was dehumanizing.
I agree with Ramani about those malignant types. Their behavior was consistent over time, and they are just clever enough at post-hoc rationalization so that no amount of counseling will ever change their behavior. Her breakdown of their psychology pretty much matches my experience here in Japan, and is pretty close to the analysis by a couple of other professionals in that field who I follow.
On the bright side, looking at the kind of Japanese I've befriended here in Japan, I quickly realized they were the same 'kind' of people I had been friends with back in the states ... and I think that kind tends to be predetermined before socialization or early childhood education.
"Temperament" appears to be the word used to classify patterns of behavior that extend over time and beyond particular situations ... and are probably more genetically influenced, while "character" is closer to temperament plus experience under pressure. I am about as far from a scientific-mechanical reductionist as you can get, but I suspect that just like pups from the same litter are born with different temperaments, so are people.
I am guessing we all go through some kind of trauma in growing towards social maturity, but as a recent guest in Tess Lawrie's March 30 substack reminded me (https://drtesslawrie.substack.com/p/mind-control-who-makes-your-decisions) while Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome is more in the headlines, meaningful growth might also require stress. I think it was the novelist Kawabata Yasunari who said that a good artist must die a thousand deaths, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. said something like "We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” If I approach closer to tonic than toxic (Ah but a man's reach ... 😂 ) you've just read one of the more stressful experiences in my life leading me to that goal. I have another, a near death experience, I'll share with you another time if appropriate for the topic.
Following that Anna Karenina Principle of everyone being unique in their stresses and problems, even if we could 'standardize' stress, and put everyone under the same stress, what would distinguish differing outcomes? Nature or nurture? I think it was in that Diary of a CEO interview with Ramani that I was reminded of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment of delayed gratification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment) There is some support for nurture in that the more successful children come from high enough of a social caste to have learned to expect to be rewarded for good behavior. Those who were raised with scarce resources tended to "fail" the test. I still need to look deeper into the study to find if there was a pattern indicating temperamental differences ... and think about the fit between the Marshmallow test and some patterns of narcissistic behavior.
But I do hear you about the danger of labeling people. When I used to teach freshman writing, I always spent a couple of classes on logical fallacies ... and the fundamental attribution fallacy is one of 'em. Still, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it might indeed be Fauci. 😂
Regarding Asako, (sighing ... not wanting her to be on my mind as I fall asleep), I've thought a lot about that epitaph ... especially that "You can't erase the times". Who is "you". Me? Maybe. But certainly not the FDA, mainstream media, digital social platforms, wikipedia, or even public school boards. They are constantly erasing and rewriting narratives to fit their ideologies or their boss's whims. I suspect much of what we call history is the narrative left by master manipulators.
And her grave? I can not verify if the grave is a duplicate because her mother dropped contact with me after a couple of post burial face-to-face chats. But now close to 10 years, and someone besides me still visits the grave about once every 2 or 3 months, and places flowers or an ornament on it. I presume it is her mother. But why would a grieving mother have her daughter buried in a community graveyard, apart from the family plot, with an inscription to me, yet drop all personal contact with me? If things are as they appear, the cognitive dissonance in her must be as overwhelming as my own.
As I mentioned earlier, I met Asako's mother for the first time only some months after Asako's death. But before meeting her, I could not help but to see in her mother's first e-mail informing me of her daughter's death, included such finely described details of an autopsy — a little too much detail for someone who should be grieving, perhaps ornately contrived. After all, Asako's dream was to become a writer. Maybe both the letter and her epitaph were trial runs? If so, clever girl.
Still, I would much rather be a deceived fool, and she happy with someone else and doing what she loves to do, than to imagine her dead. Yet if I were rejected, would that not be more evidence that I am too flawed to be worthy of that epitaph? Catch 22. Trapped in my own post-hoc, second guessing of evidence.
On that, I will thank you Tereza, for giving me an opportunity to spill my guts on something that will probably torment me until the day I die. I just hope I grow enough so that it becomes little more than an itch I can never scratch.
I only skimmed other reader's comments and your responses ... and am amazed at the heart, body, and soul you put into those responses. When I get caught up over the next couple of days, I will read those comments and your response more closely. You are drawing a lot of good stuff out of people Tereza. I wish you only good things with your good work.
Good night from Japan
(aghh! Past 3 in the morning!)
steve
It is beyond the gods
why we hold onto our sorrows
so long, and so stubborn.
~ Wang Ping ~
LOL. Good question.
My best before-the-eyes-close answer ... maybe it is in overcoming our few traumas circling around death rather than enjoying the ephemera of every day delights which most define us. Maybe.
Good night Tereza
Caw-Caw-Cacophany ... a serenade to come in another couple of hours. 🤣
You need to explain to me what you found insightful about Orion Taraban. I'm not all the way through the first but I found it pretty disturbing.
He is not a particularly philosophical person, but is well-read, and I like his second interview better than the first ... (I had never even heard of the word "limerence' before hearing it). But one reason I found him compelling is his descriptions of many of the "is's" of personal relationships rather than the "shoulds", and particularly of America. But to show why I found much of what he said is refreshing by Japanese standards, I have to talk a bit about the Japan most tourists do not see. And myself.
I have been an idealist all my life ... whether pursuing Platonic ideals for educational goals, "true love", whatever ... whereas most Japanese seem to regard me as maybe useful or amusing, sometimes funny, but also quaint and naive in my idealism ... and inevitably disposable.
I am not sure if I mentioned this to you before, but although I have had my share of relationships (was a shy, late-starter), I only asked one young lady to marry me. She refused saying it was too soon. Within 6 months, she had passed away due to long-term complications of anorexia. Will not go into the gory details here.
The corporate nation-state of Japan is a cut-throat business world which includes replaces trust and a man's word with contracts. For example, affordable housing ... I am still paying bubble-era prices while newer apartments around me are cheaper — but moving expenses in Japan are notoriously expensive, thus keeping most of the working class locked into place. I could theoretically move to the deep country-side where there is a lower cost of living, but there are also fewer opportunities, and I would have to start from scratch in building new relationships. No easy feat for a foreigner in Japan trying to mix with a rural community. (Think Amish). It is as if every nook and cranny that can be financially exploited over here ... is.
Getting back to marriage and family. While there are a few high-profile entertainers who marry out of romance, (and just as often fall out), most Japanese marry as a kind of business arrangement with clearly defined, specialized roles. The man is the bread winner, the woman is the master of the house and children. End of story. Sometimes, a true fondness, and even deep love can grow from even the still arranged marriages over here. Sometimes. 'Caste' is a dirty little secret in Japan, and is every bit as present as in America, but kept behind family doors. But that is another story for another time.
They rarely talk about their spouse or married life to others except their very closest of friends, and even then they do not tend to praise their spouse ... presumably because it is perceived as boastful. This is connected with a strong in-group mind-set ... which again, te corporate nation-state is trying to replace with itself as the nanny-state.
Ever since the Meiji-era of large scale industrialization, families and communities have been targeted to be replaced by dormitories for workers, families as a minimal support system for the workers, and most urban communities as temporary for families, but useful for quaint tourist magnets to be romanticized for tourists (Shinjuku, Ginza, Shibuya, etc. - the equivalence of mini-Manhattans ... Kabuki-cho, Shimokitazawa, Shinyurigoaka - a mix between the suburbs and Greenwhich Village).
But when most Japanese do mention their spouse in conversation, it is usually in neutral to negative terms ... otherwise they will appear to be boasting. Reading books by Iowa Professor and Japanologist Stephen Vlastos (have exchanged e-mails with him), since the industrial revolution, there has been a domestic (though one-sided) war pitting families and rural communities against concentrations of wealth and power which thrive off of disposable workers ... and it still rages on with rural areas having a similarly slipshod infrastructure as developing countries, and falling / aging populations. Just yesterday, I was hearing news about how slow the rebuilding of the Nodo Peninsula is after the New Year Day earthquake. Thousands are still living in emergency shelters.
(ooos. As I am writing this, just felt some tremors. Turning on NHK news, a magnitude 6 quake just hit near where the Fukushima nuclear plant went down)
With very few exceptions, there are no house parties in Japan ... for business or neighbors. Almost all social and business interactions are held at coffee shops, kids playgrounds, pubs. etc ... which was particularly revealing when the plandemic targeted those social zones as 'dangerous', and even had signs forbidding talking on the train platforms. Most Japanese are well-trained for obedience. The shock-doctrine emergency 'health' policies did exactly what it was designed to do ... prevent opportunities for people to gather to discuss the validity and danger of further concentrations of 'emergency' powers, much less hold public demonstrations against it. The corporate nation-state created a wide-spread sense of anomie by targeting those who depended on families and small communities for identity, thus allowing the corporate nation-state to step in as the nanny-state proxy for their identity. But as people are 'social primates' not 'herding primates', that can go only so far before the fabric of society unwinds very quickly.
As I mentioned, the typical Japanese marriage is like a business partnership. Traditionally, the husband is the property of the company, and the financial well-being of his wife and children are held hostage by compliance and a yes-man conformity to the corporate structure. And typically, the monthly salary was handled by the wife who did the allotment of funds for living expenses, including a monthly allowance which the wife gives back to the husband for lunches and discretionary expenses. Sadly, many subconsciously see children as an insurance policy for their parents, and as many children reciprocate that relationship. I think that would work if small, rurual communities were still viable. But not in large scale institutions.
For all the problems I have described about the Japanese nation-corporate state ... South Korea is being hit even harder.
The family relationship is somewhat of a subconsciously, ritualized tradition that I could gradually observe from the outside ... but I stuck to my own largely subconscious ideals of looking for that one 'unconditional love' ... which may be a fool's errand in Japan Inc.
Other than toddlers, kids are usually not brought up in conversations either — but the dynamics of 'keeping up with Joneses' is very much alive with mothers. The husband is considered enough "property of the company" that they are expected to jump at the order to move away from family and live alone for years at a time. This is called "tanshin funin", and this is still enough of a ritual for advancement, that most fathers have little to do with raising their kids. It is slowing changing (maybe just temporary ebbs and flows) and the temperament of the individuals have something to do with it, but the corporate nation-state gives only lip-service to placing a priority on the nuclear family as the bedrock of society.
All of this about the dysfunctional aspect of trying to marry and raise a family in Japan, is of course through my eyes. But there does seem to be some objective data supporting my view.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Society/Japan-heads-for-marriage-ice-age-with-lowest-number-in-90-years2#:~:text=TOKYO%20%2D%2D%20The%20number%20of,heavy%20on%20young%20people's%20minds.
And kids ... up until the end of elementary school, are like kids everywhere. From Jr. High onward for all but the richest, the youngsters are treated to a rigid military-like public education based on the Prussian system, copy-pasted from the Victorian era to produce compliance to authority as its highest ideal, and brute memory for competitive standardization as its preferred heuristics. Most kids are forced to wear their hair and uniforms according to standards which are rigidly measured to the centimeter by the school, and students are expected to obey school rules even when not at school. There have even been high profile cases of families suing a school for forcing a policy of jet-black hair, even on a student who might have a naturally lighter colored brown hair.
Will end this rambling essay for now by saying I have survived thanks to the generous help of only a couple of very close friends. If I had married in Japan, with my stubborn idealism, I would have probably been more of a hindrance than a help to typical expectations of a Japanese family ... and conformity to expectations is a big thing here.
As a former professor but foreigner, outside of those few friends and maybe three quasi-volunteer groups of friends, have little to no identity. I am thankful to be in a process of tryin to start up a Monetessori-like school here in the local community with a younger similar minded Japanese guy, though at first glance, he appears to be more focussed on the business model at the moment.
I think what most impressed me about the podcasts is the focus on human relationships from what appears to be a more primatology / evolutionary biology -grounded perspective compared to the institutionalized traditions of Japan. I can't say that I agree with everything he says, and he does appear to have a slightly different temperament than I do — and in framing life as a 'game', I can see different reasons for why I lost. As an idealist, I didn't even some of the more biologically-grounded rules.
I appreciate that detailed background of marriage and family in Japan. It's so hard to imagine for me as a born-rebel. But maybe rebels aren't born but made, and I wouldn't have gotten that chance.
I did agree with the podcast that women do better as hunters than choosing among the ones that come along. Two of my daughters may end up only ever being with one man in their lives. My oldest is married now to someone she made her feeling known to 12 yrs ago--and was rejected. She said, 'okay' and went off to college. When she came back that summer, he (and two other guys) had changed his mind. To her credit, she made him work for it, but then they did long-distance during college and lived together after that.
The youngest had a crush on her co-worker, who is Mexican, and I was her wing-man on their first date, which was an invitation to a baptism! This involves a lot of drinking and dancing, apparently. Then they had a picnic on the beach and she asked him later if that had been a date. He said, "No, that was just chilling. When I do a date, I do wine and dinner." She was crushed and thought he wasn't interested. I had to convince her that maybe he was just shy and awkward and didn't want her to think he couldn't do better. She finally texted back and said, "Well if it was a date, that would have been okay with me" and the rest is history. Last I heard, they're thinking about moving in together.
So for all the scheming in the podcast, I think there's a lot of old-fashioned love still going on. That guy gives me the creeps. His cold blue eyes when he says, "Just let her cry. Don't give in. She'll know she can manipulate you and won't respect you." Basic training for sociopaths. Maybe he schools Guantanamo guards in torture techniques as a side-hustle.
Another LOL. Though I would not classify that as sociopathic in the strictly "societal breakdown" meaning, I would say it is a very narcissistic and machiavellian tactic, which unfortunately matches the norms for big business, politics, academia, and most modern institutions ... East and West. I can see why that "Just let her cry ... " quote can be chilling. It is an ugly fractal of society at large.
From what I've observed of many relationships, as dysfunctional as they may be, that appears to be a commonly used strategy in Japan. Though surveys will never reveal "the" truth, many Japanese women are just as manipulative as men, and I suspect the same is true world wide ... just in different ways. This was a bit eye-opening for me because other than early childhood memories of extended family, I have never been privy to the group dynamics and psychology of women regarding the dating-love-marriage scene ... and not perceptive enough to see it.
Most of my life, I have been so simplistic in more or less placing women on a pedestal as recipients of more brutish tactics by men ... so some of his insights, more or less leveled the playing field for me ... and supported some of my observations of how the game is played in Japan.
But you are both insightful and successful in nurturing positive relationships. From what I hear about how nasty identity politics can be in the states, that takes particular skill in the case of the Mexican-American connection.
I've never been in the position of a matchmaker here in Japan, aside from communicative "humanistics and values clarification" approaches in the classroom. Two books that have had a big influence on me as an educator ...
1 — https://www.amazon.com/Values-Clarification-Handbook-Practical-Strategies/dp/0396084702/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2JKM6C327MMH3&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.TYOsCZ4_X0Hm6jrtpREHE4KfTzJzrTHf95Ec6_LUJVrImvNBfcqoMvNKvmLecd7acVqihzj8rj9A5xO3p6xh4EnT9Sqv9pivnFtrPxJEKhInVLujBL96YaqKNg39AnTqNGhdCZAvGD7fBsAdAG7wpuUQNzDn4KBu-r-9uApomuZJAo6NKhBGQivqoeLG-tDb.Gmsm0qMikUV2T_bP7_3LXOyMnd0zr_hz1MW-rj2FCFM&dib_tag=se&keywords=humanistics+and+values+clarification&qid=1712213314&sprefix=humaistics+and+values+clarification%2Caps%2C380&sr=8-2
2 — https://www.amazon.com/Caring-Sharing-Foreign-Language-Class/dp/0883770989/ref=sr_1_1?crid=NMA9IZS560S9&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.A47uA_d1XGOJsSNEKfUYx1iaoeCSaacV_koZ2SZ_Neoyz5EOPZmDCbPsAO2RtlrxvDtmIn1Vw4YVHu1bMUHvC3NpBeowd8ZPmF_OnTpgyfu-5l1YucQVsOlp02UWd8yStBDj-ySpWWzk5UXVDZ8XKW2QtZZJDwSvSF_CSpr29MW2QUr1iRi4hD6shSOMSpZsAZOjduYng95fFBVA43ZkjJeCLy6F5uzl1fHf3QiGv7w.DRLQTLwk6w8aP3nxhTJPvHt2zPlKhPbQ2LekoIuTqnc&dib_tag=se&keywords=Caring+and+Sharing+in+the+Foreign+Language+Class&qid=1712212794&sprefix=caring+and+sharing+in+the+foreign+language+clas%2Caps%2C467&sr=8-1 ... I
Ooops. Gotta get a move on. Advising the guy who wants to start a Montessori type school by giving a communication lesson through the use of soft frisbees! Love to play with the kids.
Later Tereza!
Thanks for that recommendation, Steve, I'll listen with interest. I wouldn't characterize anything you've done as a failure. You've been put in life circumstances with choices that you made, based on what was presented. Life led you to an unusual place of figuring out another culture from the position of an outsider, and looking at your own culture as someone immersed in another. That awareness, I believe, goes throughout the collective consciousness from your point of light. You are exactly the person the world needed, in the right place at the right time making the right decisions.
Your consciousness never disappears. Maybe this next generation will be born to you in a different body (to keep it simple, I think the reality is we're everyone at once). And the ability to raise a child with ease and security will be available because of how you spent your time in this life. We just don't know. Just some thoughts.
Yes. Ashes to collective ashes. On a fundamentally philosophical and physical level, you are right, and I should find consolation in that.
But from that immediate "Dunbar's number" social-primate thingy? Last year when I visited Arizona to say goodbye to my fading mom, I was not particularly impressed by the well-paid professionals her socio-economic status could afford. But here in Japan, this permanent outsider — aging without family, will be lucky to avoid even more drastic, premature dehumanization at the hands of minimum wage professionals in a health system that has every financial incentive for me to hurry up and shuffle off this mortal coil.
I thought the podcast had a lot of wisdom, and had I met a mentor in Japan earlier, things might have turned out differently, probably for the better. Can't see much of a personal future, so forgive my crying over spilled milk.
The cherry blossoms came in bloom yesterday. Soon enough, they will also be dust in the wind. It might have been in Kawabata Yasunari's Nobel Award speech where I first came upon the traditional, but rarified Japanese sentiment of "mono no aware" — beauty in the passing of things.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1968/kawabata/lecture/
(Doesn't read very cohesively, so "Lecture" might be a better term than "Speech".
But maybe I am feeling a bit down because of another podcast I saw recently ... unforgettably heart breaking ... the wisdom of resignation in her eyes and voice was almost unbearable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0m6Sw5_uMc&t=10s
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-13259999/dying-woman-terminal-ovarian-cancer-hosts-living-funeral.html
Substack writer Aussie17 has been covering the rapid rise of cancer deaths in Singapore. I am enraged at the thought that her death might have been predetermined by the ledger sheets of Phizer.
Hitting the sack.
Tomorrow will be another day.
G'night T.
Very agreeable rant. I didn't know "she-bang" was hyphenated!!
Hahaha, it was Gary (Walking the Dog) and Nefahotep who were encouraging me to stop being so nice and rant. Watch what you wish for! And I had to throw that hyphen in there to emphasize both the She and the Bang. Glad you caught it!
Another great post, thanks for writing this. (I haven't watched the video.)
My experience in the last dozen years has given me a slightly different view of your statement that "Taking care of places is where masculinity comes into its own. Men like to build, to make things, to tinker with a machine until it works." I certainly did a lot of that in my two marriages, but in my second marriage we both did a lot of the building. We built a house together, doing most of the work ourselves (with the exception of the foundation). My ex-wife was, in fact, more of a brute than I was, doing more of the heavy lifting and physical labor. She did nearly all of the roofing, flooring, and interior sheathing, and the kitchen construction later. I was more the brains of the team, reading and understanding the instructions, cutting all of the wood, figuring out how to do the plumbing and electrical, designing the interior walls, etc.
I've also known a woman who could do things like rebuild car engines, and a man who stayed at home with the kids while his wife worked as computer programmer.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's possible for men and women to break out of their stereotypes in real ways.
I'm so glad to see the competition for who is more constructive enter into the conversation! And to have a man graciously give that to a woman. As you'll see on my next post, I've been having a lot of arguments with men who are claiming that the core of masculinity is 'domination, superiority, aggression and violence' but insist that it's women who are toxic.
You're saying, if I'm getting it right, women are also competent builders and makers and growers and fixers. And I agree! My oldest daughter's life was revolutionized by the discovery of power tools and she's spread the gospel to her sisters and me.
And this is particularly interesting because, like others on my thread, you've come out of an abusive relationship. I'm curious, was that the same woman? Sorry if that's more personal than I should be posting in a public forum. But I know you've posted about it on yours, so I thought it might be okay.
"You're saying, if I'm getting it right, women are also competent builders and makers and growers and fixers."
Absolutely. My ex-wife was a great example: huge energy, hard worker on that house project (often wanting to continue working when I was near exhaustion at 7 PM), ambitious farmer (we had three greenhouses and an acre of veggie crops). Just not good at keeping machines running; that's where I stepped in.
And yes, she was the one I had to escape from, due to the abuse. The thing is, I still feel very grateful for the experience of being with her those ten years. I learned a huge amount, and the house building was the best work project I ever did, way better than anything I did writing code in Silicon Valley.
You do my heart good, Mark, that you could come out of all that and still be grateful. Have you sold your Vermont house yet?
Yes, I have a buyer. Closing May 14, same day as closing on the Sierra cabin. Should be at the cabin on the 20th.
Congratulations! I hope it's a healing transition that gives you a community more in alignment. It's hard to go back to feeling the same way about people after the ConvidCon, as seeing how quickly they can turn.
I really hope you're right about community. I feel pretty alone right now, and don't know anybody in this little town I'm moving to, but I'm remaining optimistic.
About 20 years ago I had directed a play by German playwright Frank Wedekind who is known for prodding stilted German society into talking frankly about sex. His version of the femme fatale is one who climbs the class ladder, leaving dead bodies in her wake, figuratively and literally, but in the end she gets her wish - to fall prey to one who is a better hunter than she is.
I don’t know if women follow social norms because they have to or because they want to. When I ask myself that question and I’m being honest, I wish I had met someone who was a provider and a protector but because I didn’t, I became one myself. I’ve enjoyed the role because I’ve played it well and it’s easy to enjoy that which you’re good at.
Masculinity and femininity both hold magic. They’re both sacred. I appreciate you looking at the subject. Even if it’s fraught with unsavoury opinions.
Thank you for this and all your brilliant work. I’m deep into your impressive and important book and highly recommend. Decoy 9/11 beat me to the ‘punch’ here (sorry so male) and articulated much better than I could have.
It’s clear if you’re alert that the “battle of the sexes” is part of Power’s divide and conquer rule. When I used to read the New York Times, I really wanted to track all the articles that were being written telling women how society, or the patriarchy or something is screwing them over.
'sorry so male,' that's so funny! Yes on the divide and conquer aspect of the Battle of the Sexes. Very interesting on the NYT. I could see there being a direct correlation between women who read it and their sense of victimization. Not that they're wrong, just that, like the Virginia Slims feminism, it's another way to herd them into a stepped-up exploitation.
I'm thrilled that you're reading my book and liking it, Charles! Thank you for that and the kind compliments.
"zinnia’s partial explanation of zoomer girl derangement does a sensitive job of detailing the ways in which girls deal with their innate desire for the male gaze: commodify it, resist it through anorexia or transgenderism, or embrace it to fall in love and become a mother. Nowhere is there a breath of criticism of men. Is this also what men want?"
It was not the purview of her article to comment about men and their disfunction, it was about giving voice to what young women are going through, in this society that has become pathologically confused about sex. I thought it a very thoughtful and beautiful article, and I encouraged her to write more and expand on the topic.
"Use that pretty little head, zinnia, to change the fucking system. Or the system and men like John Carter will find the cheapest way of fucking you."
This I thought was demanding more of her than what any man might expect. Does Zinnia not capitalize her anon, or is that you condescending? Real men have skills, and criticize ideas, not taking cheap shots at people. It was John who originally cross-posted her article, not you.
I don't know if tonic masculinity really describes what John is up to, but I am going to challenge you to talk less about how certain men are not living up to your idea of tonic masculinity and start describing what you think tonic femininity might be like.
Hi, William. Let me ask you, then, the same question I asked John. Are you looking to provide for a woman so she can stay home and raise your kids? I think this system has failed you, in the same way it failed Steve in another comment, because you both would have been great and loving dads, from what I've seen, and that opportunity has been taken from you.
If you see a way for women like zinnia to get what they want--the ability to raise kids with security--without changing the system or being fully dependent on a man, please explain how.
On Steve's comment he has a link to a psychologist explaining how women can get any man they want by becoming hunters, being their sluttiest and nastiest in bed, making themselves useful, and never criticizing her man. I found it disgusting but it actually made my point. Children are either abandoned by both parents who have to prioritize their jobs, or a woman has to be a cunning she-wolf to ruthlessly trick her prey into marrying her.
I'm not sure what this means: "Does Zinnia not capitalize her anon, or is that you condescending?"
John calls women hoes, sluts, bitches, traps, obese HR goblins, and these are off the top of my head. Clever insults are his stock in trade. You wouldn't call these cheap shots at people? Are you saying that John's not a real man because he takes cheap shots at people rather than ideas? What I'm challenging is John's idea that people, like zoomers, have good choices to make but are making the wrong ones. I don't think we have good choices so it's pointless to criticize other people for how they make it through. We're all, imo, doing the best we can.
Tell me where I'm wrong, William. John believes that women who engage in transactional relationships are hoes, correct? He's critiquing women who commodify their sexuality online or actual sex. Yet John states that marriage is a bad deal for men, and doesn't recommend it. Where does that leave women like zinnia? Is this not a calculation of whether marriage is too expensive for men, when milk is free and maybe you can be a dad without it? Not the stuff of romance novels, is what I'm saying.
It's not merely my 'idea' of tonic masculinity. No one questions that Jay got the term from me, when he replied to my comment with 'stealing that!' If John had invented the term and used it to describe his idea, I would have no right to disagree. Likewise, he has no right to take my term and change how I defined it at the time I coined it. If he doesn't want to live up to how I defined it, he shouldn't use it.
Does "I'm going to challenge you to talk less ..." not seem condescending? Yet I'll answer your challenge that everything I write is about tonic femininity. When I tell zinnia to change the fucking system, it's to heal an economy that places children last. Tonic means healing. A world that places children at the center, surrounded by women, is tonic femininity. I certainly don't think we can leave it up to men, although I am encouraged that many here share the goal.
I honor you for replying to my comment. I have been banned for less.
As for John, I have heard him use such language about women in a general sense, though I have never encountered him disrespecting a woman directly. There is a difference, and I suspect if he is looking for a woman, he is looking to attract one who understands that and yet can temper that impulse while making him stronger.
As for Zinnia, I think she needs more encouragement than criticism and unrealizable expectations.
As for me, if I am ever in a relationship again it will be an alchemical marriage. As for what that means, after this, I am preparing a post about that. Otherwise I have been practicing the fugees version of "No Woman No Cry."
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kOmhVEiq95I&pp=ygUWZnVnZWVzIG5vIHdvbWFuIG5vIGNyeQ%3D%3D
Thank you for that acknowledgment, William.
I look forward to your post on an alchemical marriage. Great title!
And love this song. Always brings tears to my eyes. I hadn't seen the fugees version, thanks for that.
I often go back to what you once said, "Can't we just like each other?" That's what I'm hoping for in the future of relationships.
Everybody be so hot about everything lately. Better to be good and kind and friendly and disarming. Save the real fight for when it really matters.
No cliff-hanger here like a highway 1 in Big Sur except for the fact that this could be a good reading while waiting. I have no time or desire to go deeper into the subject matter like Russain dolls deployment of who said what and when. We may have too much leisure time that we use at not solving anything. It is unreal that it will go on forever.
oh and I've been thinking about that Big Sur slide. Two weeks earlier and my son-in-law would have been right there, if he'd escaped the trail slide he was in. And other roads are caved in around here. Call me a conspiracist but I think it's part of that geo-engineering agenda ...
I hear this a lot from males. But actually the recovery of our human lives and souls is dependent on rebalancing the masculine and the feminine because we live in a totally male-constructed patrix and this does nobody any good and it is even going to make us extinct if we do not address it. But of course we all have different interests. However I wish to make it clear that this subject is the subject of our era and is what will get us out of the hellhole we find ourselves in.
It's only about that article of Tereza. I wrote her that she is a soulmate but I don't have to be in sync with everything she says/writes. I appreciate her mind and bought and read her book with much delight. Only there are more important issues right now and we certainly will soon fail as a species because indeed we live in this excruciating world produced by alpha males with apparently the complicity of too many males and females and everything in-betwwen and beyond. I am interested by the interaction/interface between the material and immaterial world and everything that would produce an equilibrium in this material world from the models from the immaterial world. So far we only managed to not doing so.
May I suggest that I think you're both right? I agree with you, Marc, that it's the immaterial world that provides the model we need for producing an equilibrium in the material world. I pulled a card from my crow tarot deck to help make a decision and it was the Magician representing the alchemy of connecting the physical world to the spiritual realm and bringing the energy of air, water, earth and fire to create a spark that has the power to manifest into a transformative idea. It was exactly what I've meant by socio-spirituality.
Yet my gut feel is that denise is also right that the dys-function between the masculine and feminine is key to our whole dys-connect. To serve the feminine isn't to enable women to work in the market, it's to prioritize the security and self-reliance of the family. My book is, of course, a feminine economy but I think the real work is in the spiritual realm.
I was thinking about the Egyptian mythology when I wrote this article. Osiris, perhaps the constructive masculine, is dismantled by Set, the destructive male god of domination--whose cult is behind everything happening today. It's Isis, the female, who puts him back together and resurrects him, to have Horus, the unified Christ-mind of masculine and feminine. I didn't find a way to work that into this article but I will in a future one. Thanks to both of you for illuminating this discussion with so much respect.
I feel certain that the material and immaterial worlds will be clearer when we remedy the imbalance between the male and the female. The sexes are like the charge that generates electron flow. You can't get a charge when they are not working in unison, when one part of the equation isn't functional. It's also like the two hemispheres of the brain working together. We will see everything clearly when we have both polarities functioning in equilibrium. To me it is fundamental that we get the masculine and the feminine harmonized. It will usher in a new frequency that will energize our "soul" and give everything more clarity.
Lots to respond to here, Decoy! First, great quote.
On men being inherently violent and aggressive, I don't know about that. If it were true, then it would seem societies would have to be run by women who control the men like they're weapons. You're saying that male instincts are destructive and not constructive. I haven't found that true in my own life. I find men instinctively like to build but killing has to be taught. And I'm an animal husbandry gal so I think that's a necessary skill--not one I've found men to be better at than women in a practical sense although with more macho show when they do it, especially with an audience of other men.
On the virginity of the 'cow' so the man knows he hasn't been 'cuckolded' and the child is his, think about that for a moment. It says that the woman is his possession, something he's bought and paid for as a breeder to have his seed. She gets to live as a household servant on the condition that she perpetuates his genetics and no one else's.
I would never want to go backwards to that. As we know, that emphasis on lifelong monogamy never applied to men, only to women. In indigenous societies that were matrilineal and had actual (not digital) longhouses, women were secure as mothers and could raise their children without the 'bastard' problem of them not being claimed by a man.
And the article about women needing three men isn't saying women should trade their husbands in for a younger model. Or that the same man can't fill all three roles. But it's saying that there are different phases in life where women, like men, want different things. Is that different than 'just can't make a thot a wife?' Yes because for men, being the bad boy who gets the sex without the responsibility is a brag and taking something away, in your opinion, from the one who takes responsibility for them. For the woman it's a slur that blames her for being a ho no guy wants to marry. But it all comes back to money and that our right to procreate and raise a family depends on our service to the oligarchs.
That's the transactional relationship where we're all getting fucked.
What an excellent hamster quote! Laughed so hard. I'll be citing that, probably first in a text to my daughters.
Any mother with more than one child is an expert in 'equal but not the same.' If I were to have treated my daughters the same, it would have been disastrous. Finding out how to be fair when you can't split the baby in half is the biggest challenge. And that's why I think mothers are the ones who should be the architects of the economy.
I define 'toxic' as superiority. Patriarchy is the assembly of male archons who owned the land and ruled over others. Is that what you're happy is never going away?
I watched the Joy Luck Club clip but didn't get it. Is a separate accounting of what each person makes and spends equality?
The idea of monogamy is a male-created idea. Before patriarchy, men didn't have as much to do with the offspring, they would go about and have their adventures whenever they wished. The male relatives in the mother's family would help bring up the male boys. Today what good role models do boys have? Close to zero but there may be a few. The idea of the military again is all male-derived - it is the male need to fight and war. I don't understand it myself, I don't know if it's intrinsic like it is in male animals but we are more than animals I tend to think. Our entire society is based solely on catering to males, women don't even rate a mention. I can prove this by citing how ignored child minding is and how breastfeeding is considered obscene and never done in mixed company or shown in the movies. Yet we see violence, wars, weapons, fast cars - all the time!
It is not the males that really care about continuity, it is the mothers and grandmothers. If it were males, we'd see continuity but we don't, families are in an atrocious mess. As for not believing that our entire society is based on catering to males, we must look at the paradigm we exist in. Males wrote the bibles, the constitutions, the laws. Males even coined the language. There isn't even the language for women to speak because women were prohibited from education and public life. So men designed it all. That's why we only hear of male inventors, etc. Often their wives came up with much of the creation but their husbands got the mention - women were chattel. Today women have been trained in the patriarch (as all education is patriarchal except for schools like Montessori, the Kin School, Waldorf schools, etc) Everything is based on hierarchy in normal society which is all around us. Hierarchy, oneupmanship (competition) and making numbers in one's account. Nothing else really matters. Look at violence and especially gun violence or bombs - there are women who use guns but they are a small minority. Women have as much freedom to use guns and form armies as men do but they don't do that shit. They're just not interested. Women's bodies are flaunted everywhere if they are seductive, but to feed their infants - oh no - that's "obscene" and must be hidden. We never see mothers breastfeeding in the movies or anywhere else. This is not good for girls who must grow up without knowing how to ride a bicycle. In the workplace - there is no catering for women menstruation time, barely cater to pregnancy and infant care or child minding. It's just not an issue because this is considered a woman's issue and women are still considered second class although with a patina of politeness. The thing we don't ever realize is that the entire milieu is male-designed for men. The money system, the political system, the education system, all of it was laid down by men and women have simply learned to become competent within that framework. I'm not saying this to elicit sympathy. I think it's time now for women to initiate a currency and it would put rings around this stupid currency. And relieve everyone of their slavery which most aren't even aware of because when you're in the paradigm, it's hard to see it as an observer.