"Will #MeToo dating rules bring on an 'end of men?'"

The porn thing is somewhat interesting. I only viewed it a few times in my teen-age years. A friend's dad had the cable channel that used to show it, and a few of us watched it a few times at sleepovers - probably when we were 14 or 15, maybe? I couldn't take my eyes off it. Naked woman sightings for me, until probably college at least, were rare.

My dad had one "Playboy" - one - and I discovered it. Every few months, from probably age 13 to 17 or 18, I'd sneak down to the basement, heart thumping through my chest, and check it out.

We had a few pregnancies at my high school, including two of my teammates and their girlfriends, one of whom was one of my best friends (to this day). But the idea that high school kids were regularly having sex, I think, largely escaped me. I caught all kinds of shit as a college freshman because I was a virgin. I had thought it was totally normal, and that only "bad girls" did it.

Anyway, today's kids are growing up quite differently than I did, where this is concerned.

 

I went out out with a woman between wives who tried to get me drunk so she could get some.

 

Been there.

 

Last year, I'm at the library. A 12-year-old boy. At the library. I told one of the librarians, who didn't think that was possible, to use the library computers for that. Well, it was.

Though, hey, last month, I roll into a coffee shop, sit down in the back and two women near me are watching Blue Is The Warmest Color on a laptop. A movie I've seen. A movie I would not see in a coffee shop.

 

If on occasion you use YouTube videos to illustrate certain concepts in your statistics or management science class ... make sure you don't let the class see the "preview" pane.

 

Same.

 

You should see how undersexed fruit flies beat the shit out of watermelon when they're drunk.

 

This apology is a doozy.

 

"If every generation gets the intellectuals it deserves, we’re in serious trouble."

Laurie Penny takes apart Jordan Peterson. Nothing left at the end but a suede elbow patch and a hank of hair.

Peterson’s Complaint

"The first time I waded through the collected polemics and YouTube punditry of Professor Jordan Peterson — the unthinking man’s televangelist, inflated to the status of serious truth-seeker by respectable newspapers around the world — I was expecting to be at least slightly dazzled by his rhetoric. But no matter how long I stared at the magic-eye picture of jumbled platitudes, masturbatory nightmares about being devoured by an all-consuming mother figure, and occasional sensible tips about making your bed, it failed to resolve into a work of epoch-defining insight. Instead, it reads as if St. John the Divine of Patmos settled down and got a job selling insurance but occasionally had flashbacks to when he used to lick blue fungus off cave walls and babble about the Great Dragon."

 

Here's Martin Amis, 27 years ago, on 'Iron John.' Another witless, up-with-men pseudoculture.

LRB · Martin Amis · Return of the Male

At least Bly was a very good poet.