The Lost Generation (A Response to Time Magazine)

A recent issue of Time Magazine had a cover article called “The Me Me Me Generation: Millienials who are lazy, entitles narcissists who still live with their parents.  Why they’ll save us all.”  It was written by Joel Stein.  Now look, I am the first who will say that there are a ton of the people who this man is describing.  Lazy, entitled narcissists.  It has been rather easy to point at our generation and make insults.  The older generations seem very stead fast in their desire to make themselves feel good by insulting people like me.  A curious trend, to be sure.

But something that gets lost among the talks about how pathetic my generation is is one simple fact – you made us this way.  I am about to do something that is 100% mean-spirited.  I am going to put this in front of the party who is responsible for what has happened to us.

I was raised with during a time when every kid was being told that they were the absolute best that they could possibly be.  I’m not talking in the self-assuring and kind ways like Mr. Rogers used to do.  I mean where self-esteem is being shoved down our throat.  We are made to think that we are the most important thing in the room.

I remember when I was a kid, I played soccer.  Was never very good at it.  I just couldn’t help kicking that ball as hard as was humanly possible.  Nailed a couple of kids in the face with it.  I was a titan back then as well.  But something I noticed – every kid who played got a medal.  Just for playing.  What?!  The reality was that our team sucked.  We almost never won a game, and when we did, it was treated about the same as if we had lost.  We were playing to win, but our coaches didn’t seem to notice that.  We were being told how good we were, even when we weren’t.  This fact did not escape my notice, even as a kid.

The mantra that I was given, growing up, was that we are all totally super and never to feel bad.  It was given to every kid.  Our education system pandered to it (though I suspect more to avoid getting sued than for the student’s sake) by making our education standards more and more lax, with teachers not calling out kid’s mistakes.  We were never given harsh criticism.  I remember that the most harsh criticism I had of my work in school came from myself.  The only reason that I didn’t do as well as I should have in high school is because I didn’t care.  The education itself was a joke, so I saw no reason to get invested in it.

Every kid goes out into the world, thinking that we already rule the place.  You don’t think that that would make us a little bit entitled and narcissistic?  Don’t kid yourselves.  But what is out there to greet us?  What bright future does my generation get to look forward to, since it is clearly your generation who still has control of this country?  Well, we have overwhelming levels of unemployment (and don’t quote statistics at me.  Those are done from the people who are designated as ‘unemployed,’ with the unemployment offices of America.  There is a massive gap of people who don’t have a job, but don’t qualify) and the job market is so tooth and claw, with there being almost no economic mobility for the lower classes, that most of my generation is going to languish in poverty.

Again, I am going to be more than a little harsh – this is your fault.  You raise kids to think that the world is such an awesome place and that they are so great, but when they get out into it, what do they find?  A world that is harsh, unforgiving and doesn’t give a crap about the fact that they are struggling. Is it any wonder that the rates of depression and suicide have gone up as much as they have?  Especially when you look at how quickly kids are being thrown into adulthood.  Seems like kids can’t even enjoy being kids anymore without having to worry about their future.

The most interesting parts of America and how utterly ugly the economic and social future of the nation is looking is that my generation is, in a way that the Boomer generation who is now old has totally taken for granted, taking a subtle revenge.  We aren’t having kids.  A lot of my generation is smart enough to read between the lines.  It’s impossible to survive on the salary of an entry-level job these days.  Heck, it is getting harder and harder to survive on upper-level position salaries for somebody who isn’t employed as an accountant.  So, we are playing it safe.  Fewer and fewer of my generation is having kids, and when they do, it is in fewer amounts.

You know what this means for the generations who mock us?  A lot of things, and all of them bad.  It means that when you get old, there won’t be people to replace you in a lot of ways.  With less people, we will have a lot of the same problems that a lot of 1st-world European countries and Japan are having.  It means that when you get old, and need somebody to take care of you, there may not be so many of us around to do that, even if the pay is nice.

And, like I said, you have nobody to blame but yourselves.  Mean?  Yes.  True?  Absolutely.

Until next time, a quote,

“Youth is wasted on the young.”  -Oscar Wilde

Peace out,

Maverick

The Small Moments

Being an unrequited romantic, whose romantic side has more or less died on the vine, I have a lot of thoughts about those little moments that we get in life.  See, the truth is that life is merely a collection of moments.  There are good moments, bad moments and moments that show us for who we really are.  All of these moments are connected by one thing – the small moments.  For clarity’s sake, let me define what the small moments are.  The small moments are those brief, almost unnoticeable points in time that you are given to comprehend a situation.  It is a point where you are seeing what is coming and can prepare yourself.  And it is my personal belief that the small moments are the moments that make life worth anything.

Take a small moment I had on Saturday night.  I was taking a friend to the airport.  This is a girl that I have gotten very close to recently.  She is leaving, and I don’t know when, if ever, she will return.  I thought that this was going to be an unbelievably miserable experience.  In some respects, it was.  But there was a small moment that occurred between us, right before a major moment that I still am thinking about.  All the time.

I have synesthesia.  It can occur in any number of ways, but for me, it occurs when I taste something.  Whenever I taste anything, there is a reaction where I see a color.  All tastes have colors.  The best tastes have the color blue.  The worst tastes have the colors brown, orange, pink and yellow.  Now, this doesn’t affect me with things like my own spit, because that has taste.  My body just got used to it.  Lord knows, I’ve had this body long enough.

One neat bi-product of this condition is that all the people that I’ve kissed have taste to, and each one has their own unique color.  So, this girl and I had talked about this before.  It was a passing conversation that we both enjoyed.  One of many.  But tonight, with the future of us being able to see each other very much in question, she got proactive.  She wanted to know her color.  Our friendship was tight enough where she could trust me with this.

The small moment came as I said that I was up for it and that the next move was hers.  She came closer and that is when it hit.  Right as we were barely apart, that small moment occurred.  It was…amazing.  Nothing short of breath-taking.  The look in her eyes were just amazing.  And that kiss was incredible.  I haven’t had a kiss that good in a LONG time.

But right after that, there was another small moment.  When it ended, and I was feeling like this was the best thing that could have happened, she kissed me again.  She already had the information that she wanted.  I told her her color.  Velvet red.  What a beautiful color.  But she kissed us again.  Another wonderful moment in time.  Right as I knew that it was going to happen, that perfect balance of beauty and touch made my nerves run wild.  I felt great.

It felt good for a couple of reasons.  The first is that my skills with my lips were still razor-sharp, even though I haven’t gotten to employ them in a LONG time.  That was pretty swell.  The other thing is that I have felt very much unwanted lately.  When you are a titan and not much in the looks-department, it makes it so that very few people notice you.  I have felt so unwanted lately that when a woman was asked by her kid if I was handsome, and she said yes, I felt like a new person.  That was a nice compliment, even if not directed at me.

The little moments are all I really have.  With my health never in the best place, I may not have all that much time left.  I have enough, but time is never my ally, and I am aware of that.  So, getting a soft kiss from a beautiful woman makes all the difference in the world.  Sure, now that she is gone, it has come back to me how sad it all is.  It might be a LONG time until I see her again.  Who knows – with law school and whatnot, she may never come back up here.

I choose to believe that it is all worth something.  Even if all life does is give me shit, I have to believe that all of the shit that life gives me is worth something.  It doesn’t have to be a compelling something.  Hell, it doesn’t even have to be a truly worthwhile something.  It just has to be worth something that I can see and understand.  It’s getting harder and harder to believe it.  My heart aches from both the medical and the emotional.

When Camille was around, I will say that one draw between us that probably worked against us in the long run is that we tended to fuel one-another’s depression.  She was as depressed as I was.  Our mutual hatred of life and the world made it so that mocking it was a common pasttime.  Once she was gone, I lost that.  I can’t try too hard to find it again, because I have already seen how that can push people away.

I am so tired, lately.  My job fucking sucks and hardly anybody seems to want to hang out lately.  It is getting so hard, finding reasons to keep going.  But I do keep going.  I can’t tell you why.  Maybe it is best that I don’t know.  But then there are the small moments.  Those moments where you feel like you aren’t going to just crumble into your own life and the pathetic bullshit that it is on all sides of it.  I choose to believe that those moments are worth something.  Even if it isn’t profound, it is worth something.  It has to be.  If not…then maybe there will come a point where my mind’s lack of a desire to wake up will finally convince my body that it’s the right thing to do.

Until next time, a quote,

“If I laughed at every bonehead stunt you pulled, I’d laugh myself to death!” -Baron Franz d’Epinay, Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo

Peace out,

Maverick

2012-2013 Academic Year in Review

Well, we have finished packing stuff for tonight.  So, we thought that we would do our yearly post on the academic year, and our thoughts.  This isn’t going to be a review like I normally do.  No final verdict.  Just my thoughts.  I feel so tired.  Physically, mentally and emotionally, I am drained.  Up front, this has been the worst year of my academic life.  It feels like it has gone on forever.  For real, this year feels like it has been an eternity.  Part of me is so glad to see that it’s over.  Another part of me wants to cry right now.

I’ll start at the beginning.  This year didn’t start out well.  A former best friend of mine got upset with me.  As was typical with every time she was upset with me, she didn’t say anything.  She just got mad, to herself, and then it led to some ugly repercussions when it finally did reach me.  She didn’t want to see me around her work anymore.  Since I was already not in the best place, with a new job that I was not particularly enjoying due to the late hours and the long commute, along with some pain that I was in at the time, I did what I had usually done – I blogged.  Angry venting online is not anything approaching a good thing to do when one is mad with somebody.  And I didn’t hold back.  No names were mentioned, but it would take a blind hyena not to see who I was talking about.  And she did see this post.  But, again, she got mad and didn’t talk to me.  She said nothing at all.  Instead, I got the silent treatment.

The fall semester starts.  I return to campus, living in the dorms again.  I was already not in the best place, but the way I saw it, it could be worse.  I started up with a REALLY full course load.  Working the job I do, this didn’t mesh well.  A couple of classes saw grades start to hemorrhage.  I dropped them, and things evened out.  Well, evened out better.  For a while, they were even looking pretty good.  I was feeling okay.  One class was hurting, but I did manage to salvage that grade into something semi-respectable.

There was one really good thing that happened in the fall semester.  It’s about 2 in the morning and I get a text from a different girly-mate of mine.  She is at a bar down 5th and was ditched there.  Her friend and their companions disappeared and she was alone.  Scared, she reached out to me.  The girl did everything right.  She stayed in public, making sure that she was never alone anywhere.  Downtown on a Friday night, with the drunks at full-tilt, this was NOT a safe place for a girl to be alone at.  I headed out as fast as I could.  I get to where she is and she runs to us.  I felt like fucking Galahad, rescuing her from certain danger.  That was awesome.  We ended up going to McDonald’s for some fries.  Her nerves were calmed and she was better.  This girl and my’s friendship has never been stronger.

But back the former best friend.  I got a new phone and could text as much as I liked.  I hadn’t had that before.  So, I was thinking that now I would have new avenues to reach out to people and have lots of great conversations.  With some, that idea worked like a charm.  However, this friend, was strangely silent.  When we did talk, it was in the shortest and choppiest conversations I have ever had.  Like she didn’t want to talk to me any more than I wanted to talk to her.  This didn’t bode well.  I’m not blind.  Very quickly, I saw that something was wrong.  So, on Facebook, I wrote her a message, confronting this issue.  See, I was told by SOMEBODY ELSE (something that gets under my skin in ways you can’t believe) that she had a beef with me over a blog post.  Which one?  Well, I was curious, so I asked.  I got a reply that set the stage for the fallout of our friendship, and the pain that I have been suffering for this entire spring semester.  She told me that she was angry.  She didn’t say why.  She didn’t say what.  Instead, she told me that she would get back with me.  When she was not upset, because she wanted to talk rationally about this.  Okay.  Not the worst idea.  However good in theory it was, the execution couldn’t have been worse.

Right before the final in a class that I wasn’t doing too well in, I check my Facebook page that morning.  I see that I have lost a friend.  Okay.  I wasn’t too thoughtful of this, because sometimes people just moved on.  I have plenty of fair-weather friends on Facebook who I gain and lose without much notice.  It happens.  But I look in my “Close Friends” page, and see that somebody who was there before is now not.  It was her.  A person who said that they cared for me so much, and that our friendship meant the world to her.  This is four months after she told us that she would get back to us about what was bugging her.  Four months, and instead of keeping her word, she throws us away.  My response was measured.  I wrote her a message asking her what had happened.  As somebody who believed that I was in her inner circle of friends, I think I earned that.  The reply I got was almost a point-for-point replica of a problem that she had had with me two years prior.  She tells me that her boyfriend and her were having fights about me (even though the most I existed in her life was as a Facebook IM and an ever-decreasing number of text messages).

I knew that something wasn’t right.  My gut-instinct is never wrong, and it wasn’t wrong here.  So, I took a different tactic in my reply.  Made that I just wanted my Scrabble partner back, and if we could keep things impersonal, that was fine.  She replied with the truth – getting rid of me was the quickest and simplest solution to a problem she had.  And this solution was to get rid of me.  Naturally, I was pissed.  I went back at her the angriest I have been in a long time.  I made a rather fitting comparison between her and I cousin of mine who had also thrown me away for FAR less than I was worth.  He had been a best friend to me as well.  Both of them used me, liked me when I was around, but would then drop me without looking back.  She and I got into a back-and-forth bit of arguing.  She still claimed that her boyfriend and her were having fights about me.  So, I asked a simple question (that I deserved an answer to) – what were the fights about?  She told me that she didn’t know, and then told me not to ask.  She said that that just made her mad.  In hindsight, I should have pressed the attack.  At least when she was mad, she was talking.  Which is more than I could say for the rest of the time.

But, it was done.  Here’s how it broke down.  Since I won’t ever get to tell her, I guess I’ll tell you.  Because I want you all to see as clearly as I do how she fucked up this entire situation.  It started in August, with her getting mad at me.  Instead of talking to me, like a friend, and saying that she was upset, she says nothing.  Then, when this problem starts compounding on other problems (that I knew nothing about), and I hear from other people that she has a problem, she tells me to wait.  Instead of not being rational.  Instead of just getting upset and getting it out of her system, she tells us to wait.  That she will talk to us and we will figure things out.  Four months later, having said nothing to us, she then unfriends us and tells us that we have no place in her life, because her relationship with her boyfriend is threatened by us.  Man, who are we to these people?  Do I have a power that I wasn’t aware of?  She did absolutely everything wrong.  But you know what the worst thing was?  You know what the most hurtful thing was?  The most hurtful thing is that after doing all this damage, I don’t think that she would have ever, EVER talked to us again if we hadn’t have demanded an explanation.  So, she also broke her promise.  If there is an uglier way for a great friendship to die, I don’t know what it is.  And the worst part of all of this is that this could have easily been avoided if she had just treated me like a friend and talked to me.

I go home for Christmas break.  It wasn’t pleasant.  At all.  All of the Christmas spirit was literally sucked out of me.  And with there being pretty much nobody to see out in the Valley, I felt oh so very alone out there.  That whole affair, happening just a couple weeks before the holiday itself, ruined Christmas for me.  Forever.  I don’t even care about the holiday anymore.  Next year, come Christmas Eve, I am staying at home, getting some sleep.  But, as is usual whenever I am having problems – if I voice any discontent with this holiday, the mother-unit assumes that I am somehow insulting her.  Yes, I can’t have my own problems.  That would just be too much.  In her mind, if I have problems, I should just shut up.  That is much simpler.

However, there were two bright spots that made the end of break worth it.  The first was seeing an old friend again.  Her and I had spent almost no time together.  We go out to the movies and after it is done, we got to talking.  It was one of the best conversations of my life.  She was loyal to our friendship.  Even though we were very different people, she was loyal to it all the same.  That made me feel very good.

Another thing that happened was something that felt pretty good at the time, and saved that break for me.  Though it would become an issue.  I found a girl who was interested in us, sexually.  I decided to see where that would go.  She was my Dom.  I was her sub.  It was…pleasant.  Kind of.  See, it started out great.  But after a while, she was becoming more and more undependable.  She would make plans with us, only to break them without telling us.  I was quickly annoyed, and it ended about a month and a half after it started.  After it was done, I felt even more lonely than I had before, because it was another reminder of how little I am wanted.

I get back to the dorms for the spring semester.  This started on an even more sour note than the fall.  Still emotionally beaten from losing a best friend, trying to wrap our minds around it, we were not very pleased to come back.  Plus, another friend we had in Anchorage was almost totally absent from our lives.  But that is part of a long story about her and her three-way relationship with a guy and girl that I won’t get into.  Mostly because it’s none of you-all’s damn business.

Spring semester has beaten the shit out of us.  Came so very close to breaking us.  Our classes were hard as fuck, there was almost nobody to see and the gig I had going with the aforementioned Dom was hitting a dead-end.  But it gets worse.  See, there was this shrink that we were forced to go and talk to.  Part of the effort to make me and me accept that we are not mentally healthy and need all kinds of super-duper support from shrinks.  Yeah, fuck that.

But you see, this time was different.  See, this shrink decided that he would do something for which I should sue the son of a bitch – reveal something that I specifically told him was in confidence.  I signed a waver saying that his final report would be able to be viewed by the parentals.  Included in this report is a secret that I have been carrying with me for a LONG time.  So long now that it feels like an eternity.  And not only did he mention it in his report, but when he was giving the Cliff notes version of the report to one of the parentals, he made sure to bring up that secret of mine to them.  Twice.  Fucking asshole.  You have no idea how pissed I was at the time.  I wanted to beat his head against his desk until he went limp.  He made sure that the parental in question knew this secret.  That was clearly the goal.

Now, nothing in my family stays a secret for long.  Once one person knows, it is pretty much a guarantee that others will know.  So now I was put into a position that I never wanted to be in – having to either wait for this to get out on its own or to talk to the person who this secret involved.  I chose the latter.  I cannot tell you how nervous I was bringing this up.  My hands were shaking.  But since the parental knew what, but not who, I didn’t want this person finding out from somebody else.  Lord knows, I have seen very recently how well that turns out.  So, I got this person to talk to me.  And you know what, that conversation went so much better than I could have ever anticipated.  Turns out, they had figured this out a long time ago.  And this knowledge was doing harm to our friendship.  By getting it out in the open, the two of us were able to put it behind us.  I think.  We have hardly spoken since then.  I don’t regret my actions.  But I do wonder if they are cool with me.  I can’t tell you, for sure.

Classes kicking my ass, personal problems piling up and the residual pain of being betrayed and thrown away by yet-another person I held in my inner-most circle of friends.  I was breaking.  My supports were crumbling.  I lost myself inside of Mass Effect for WAY longer than I should have.  It was all I could do to not lose myself to despair.

The only truly good part of the spring semester came from the time I got to spend with a new friend of mine.  Her and I have been growing on each other.  It started out slow, as most things with me do.  I am slow to trust.  But as we got closer and closer, we found that we were kindred spirits.  Every Friday night, we had a routine of going to IHOP and eating there.  It was a nice way to finish up a week.  We also had some nerd nights and just hanging out.  It was a small comfort from what was overall kicking my ass.  I am so glad that she and I found one-another.

Now, it is all said and done.  The friend I rescued from the bar goes home tonight.  I am driving her to the airport again.  And now I kind of want to cry, because she is going to be leaving, never to return.  I may never see her again, and it is hurting me.  But I can’t say anything.  I can’t say that I don’t want them to go.  I can’t tell them that I just want them to stay.  I don’t want to hurt her.  I love her.  And so I do the noble thing.  I say nothing, to not hurt people.  Good people hurt and what is their reward?  Being the better person is fucking bullshit.

So much ugliness.  So much pain.  Given all this, you might thing that me and despair are pretty tight.  But I am not despairing.  The reason is simple – this is about as bad as it could be.  I have hit rock-bottom.  Nowhere left to go but up.  I have hope for the future.  It has to get better from here.  Sure, things are going to be hard ahead, but for the moment, it’s done.  And that is something to feel good about.

And who knows.  Maybe this summer won’t be so bad.  I do have a few people that I mean to see.  I am going to be making the most of my cooking and baking talents, since I will have a kitchen again.  It isn’t great, but this could get better.  At least, that’s what I choose to believe.

Until next time, a quote,

“Times like these, you know who your real friends are. They’re not the ones running around, looking for an escape route. They’re the ones who stand at your side through the worst of it. Who never give up on you.” -Commander Shepard, Mass Effect 3

Peace out,

Maverick

A Feel-Good Story from Work

I make no effort to hide how little I view humanity.  They are a truly awful species who does so little to help their fellow man (or woman).  But every once in a while, I come across something that just makes me want to believe that there is something better waiting for us.  Today, I got such a thing, and it happened to me.

So, I’m at work.  Another boring morning.  I hate morning shifts.  Especially when I have to open.  Too early, and I feel like a zombie.  Today was no different.  I was feeling totally bored, not wanting to be there.  I was out in the stacks when I came across somebody.  This was a guy.  Young guy, but still a grown-up.  And this dude looked lost.  Now, when I say that he looked lost, I mean that this dude had a look that was VERY reminiscent of one that I had seen on kids in a grocery store when they are lost.  It was the exact same look, except this dude was a grown man.  I decided to be very pleasant, which wasn’t easy for me, given how tired I was.

I approached the guy and asked him if everything was alright.  The guy said that he couldn’t find his mother.  And the tone of this guy’s voice gave me all the answers that I needed.  This dude was mentally challenged.  Severely so.  A grown man though he may be, he has the mind of a kid.  So, even though children are something I loathe, I decided to treat it like such a situation.  I thought back to my time working retail.  You find a lost kid, you take them to the front and they will get on the intercom to find the parents.  So, I told the guy that if he comes with me to the desk, we can help him find his mother.  We start walking over and something I could never have expected happens – he grabs my hand.  This was about as strange as it gets, but he looked so nervous that I didn’t have the heart to tell him not to do that.  We walk to the front desk and I get a LOT of weird looks.  But a few people could see the situation as easily as I could.

We get to the desk and the desk attendants are just as confused.  I explain to them that this guy had lost his mother, not being condescending at all.  This really isn’t a hard deduction, and when they caught how I was speaking, they knew.  So, I asked him what his mother’s name was, and he told me.  So, one of the girls got on the intercom and told her to come to the desk.  Turns out, she had been looking for this guy too.  She had gone to the bathroom and he had wandered off.  Out in the stacks, I can attest to how easy it can be to get lost, if you’re new there.  Warm feelings all around, and the woman thanked me like crazy.

As they left, the guy gave me a hug.  My first thought was – strangest morning ever.  But then I did feel pretty good that I was able to amend a situation and help two people.

So yeah, there’s your good feel for the day, and here’s a nice quote to wrap things up.

Until next time, an excerpt,

Alice came to a fork in the road.
“Which road to I take?” she asked.
“Where do you want to go?” responded the Cheshire Cat.
“I don’t know,” Alice answered.
“Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.”

Peace out,

Maverick

The Legacy of Justin Bieber and the Pussification of Humanity

I have recently been made aware of a group of people.  This is a growing trend among young people, and seeing it disturbs the shit out of me.  Because what we are witnessing with this group of people is something that we can attribute to two things – 1. Justin Bieber and 2. The growing trend among people to be complete pushovers who won’t take any criticism.  The group of people that I am referring to calls themselves, “Video-Makers.”

This is a unique group.  See, what this group does is they take pop music that already sucks, speeds up the audio so they sound really high-pitched and girly, use god-awful lighting effects so they look like they are doing an actual music video and do jump-cuts every syllable of the songs that they are “singing.”  Though if you ask me, their singing is on par with the girls who did the song “Hot Problems.”  These people represent the ultimate legacy of Justin Bieber.

Now, I will admit that I have never been all that big on following pop culture.  It is something that I have tried my damndest to avoid.  But wouldn’t you know it, it finds me.  But from what I have heard around the internet water coolers is that Justin Bieber is the culmination of this movement of pseudo-males who get popular by basically becoming ball-less and acting as castrated as possible.  Now, this may not even have its origins in America.  From what I hear, the idealized vision of feminized men being the symbol of attractiveness has some deep roots in Japan, where it has been that way for some time.  And now America is getting on the bandwagon.  I mean, the popularity of Justin Bieber is much the same.

Look at how “manly” he is. Don’t you just see how legal he is? Ugh…

Justin Bieber has been, for almost all of his “music” career – a feminized version of a male.  I have a feeling that the Tumblr feminists must love this guy.  Or at least they should.  With how quick they are to jump on the – no-balls and men are evil bandwagon, they should view this movement of popularizing feminized men as just the best thing ever.  And thanks to the Disney Channel, they have seem to be winning that battle with the latest generation of men.

And all of these “Video-Makers,” or at least the ones who are guys, seem to have a lot in common with Justin Bieber.  They share the same god-awful haircut that he used to sport, until he recently became a more “adult” persona, which entailed that he actually look a little more grown up.  Not much, mind you, but a little.  He still shares the look of a guy who is 14.  But before, he looked like he was 10.  Also, the guys in these videos where really cheap hoodies (and all the girls wear them too), skinny jeans and sneakers.  They are trying with all their might to emulate Justin Bieber.  And given the fact that they get millions of views, they seem to be succeeding.

But all of them make covers of modern crappy songs, while trying their damndest to look as childish and silly as possible, and not in the “that’s actually kind of funny” way.  No, they’re shooting for the, “awww, that’s so adorable.  I love you!” kind of way.  The videos they make that aren’t music videos are all the most insipid pieces of I-have-no-balls pandering to make people like them, because that’s what’s popular.  And if I believed that they had more than 10 brain cells to rub together, I might actually believe that they were just following a trend.  But now, these guys and girls are doing what they think is genuinely good.  They think that they are just the bosses.  And anyone who says otherwise, they sic their minion followers on to and start false-flagging campaigns.  Because these people can’t take the slightest amount of criticism.

But the reason that these people annoy me so much is that this is the next generation.  This is what teen girls look up to.  This puss-ified image of what a guy is supposed to be is what teen girls think is attractive.  That is totally disgusting.  This is not something that we should be looking up to.  Because the reality is that these girls who make out with cardboard cut-outs of Justin Bieber are someday going to enter into real relationships.  They will have real responsibilities.  They will someday have to look after their own life.  And if we continue to indulge them this vanilla world-view, then continue to indulge that delusion by making the rest of the world conform to it (so they don’t have to tax their tiny brains too much), then we are making this species dumber!  For real, we are making ourselves stupider in the process!

These people bitch and complain, not about some of the totally mean-spirited comments they get (of which there are a lot), but because people don’t like their videos.  What, you mean that people don’t like your pathetic attempts to become Justin Bieber by osmosis?  I mean, you are trying to emulate him hard enough.  These people don’t want to face the real world.  And you know, part of me wants to like that.  Embracing adulthood sucks.  Adulthood sucks.  Life sucks.  But the problem is that people like this are making our culture conform to them.  We make the world easier for them.  It’s one of the many reasons that America’s education system is in the shitter.  We don’t want to make our kids think to hard, and guess what – they aren’t thinking too hard.  They are thinking less and less.

Perhaps the reason that this modern movement of the youth trying to be as innocent and naive as possible pisses me off the most is because of the fact that the flip-side of that is that we have a movement of kids who think that thinking and intelligence is a bad thing.  All over Disney Channel, you have kids who view school as the enemy, partying and having fun as the friend, and any form of intellectual pursuit as wrong.  Because of this, we are getting kids who are otherwise talented squandering that talent on the pop-y drivel.

Humanity is becoming pussified, one generation at a time.  This needs to stop.  But how can it be stopped?  Do any of you have any answers?  If you do, please, let me know.

Until next time, a quote,

“I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.”  -Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth, Futurama

Peace out,

Maverick

What is it All For?

I have been asking myself that question with increasing regularity, ever since Christmas break.  What is it all for?  What have I been doing this whole time?  Was it all just a waste?  Was I wasting my time?  And why can’t I move on?  So many questions, no answers.

Something that I haven’t told much of anybody, but I figured that I would tell you, my faceless audience.  The night my fiancee died, she told me that she hates me.  Our relationship had hit a major snag.  It was a lie that I told her, but it wasn’t that big, in the grand scheme of things.  It just triggered a cascade effect, and everything was going to shit.  She was going to break up with me.  I am certain of it.  She was going to leave me, and I would be one of the guys who has to return a wedding ring.  As it stands, I threw the fucking thing into a storm drain.  Let nature have its precious metal back.  A silver lining to the car wreck that took the life of the woman I loved most?  No.  Just another reminder.

But she said that she hates me.  Those words, to this day, have stuck with me.  I did something once, back in high school.  There was a girl I wanted.  I wanted her so much, that when I found out that she has a boyfriend, I did everything I could to manipulate both of them into hating each other.  All the skill I have of manipulating people came to the front as I ruined their respective lives.  I wanted her, and I would have her, no matter the cost.  And, low and behold, it worked!  I found the tiniest cracks in their relationship, and used them to drive the two apart to a point that both of them were so miserable that they had one last bout of sex, and unknown to me, she got pregnant.  The girl was so broken, and she looked to me to be there.  But, a new woman came into my life, and she had suddenly opened up to me, wanting me to be with her.  She would later become my fiancee.  The girl, who I had manipulated and used, was broken by this.  She fled the state, and will likely never return.  I saw the damage that my cold-blooded use of another person had done, the carnage I left in my wake, with both her and her ex-boyfriend, who has no idea that he is a father, and I felt my self-respect die.

I made a promise, that day.  I promised that I would never, ever use somebody like that ever again.  I would fly right, and do the right thing.  And every single day, I have kept to that.  I have done everything that I possibly could to make up for it.  Even if this girl would never know.  I would try and help every single person who I brought into my inner circle.  And people in general, of course, in whatever small way I could.  I would open doors.  Every single day, I have gone out of my way to be as nice as I possible can, to the people who mean something to me.  I kept thinking to myself – if I am a good person, and loyal to those who have earned my friendship, then somehow, it will all be alright.

But that’s not what’s happened.  Instead, I am used, thrown away, unwanted and often hated by the people I try and help.  Why?  What is it about me that just ruins my life so fucking much?  I am being a good guy!  I am doing right and trying to help people!  Sure, I make mistakes.  That’s life.  But at the end of the day, I am still trying, god-dammit!  But that’s not enough, is it?  Because what is my reward for all my effort?  What do I get in return for how hard I try?  NOTHING!  I get hated by people.  I get hated by people who I am trying to just be kind to.  I have no ulterior motive.  I admit, I am attracted to one of them, but that is secondary, in the highest degree, to my friendship.  My friendship with a person will always come first.  But it doesn’t matter.  Nothing I did matters.

I feel so alone here.  So few want me in their lives anymore.  Seems like everybody has moved on from me, and I am stuck here, in this place.  I want to leave, but where would I go?  I am alone here, in this room.  I count the days of my life by how many unfamiliar ceilings that I come across.

So, here I am, listening to “Blade Runner Blues.”  I’m sure that I don’t need to tell you what that’s from.  It’s an awesome tune.  Otherworldly, but still familiar at the same time.  I want to just cry, but I have no tears left.  I promised myself that I wouldn’t manipulate people.  I promised myself that I would try and help.  But that same sadistic monster that I listened to and chose to follow back then is back.  And it is hungry.  It wants to feed itself, and I know that I could feed it again.  But once I do, where does that get me?  No-fucking-where, that’s where.

It hurts, to not be wanted by anybody.  I am getting in better and better shape, but nobody wants me.  I walk through life like a corpse.  My faulty heart is beating away, counting the seconds until it beats no more.  I won’t miss it.  I will just…fade away.

Another thing my late fiancee told me, was that she wishes she had never met me.  Part of me is scared that every single person who I try and be a good friend to, and who I try to do right by will feel the same way.  It has happened several times already.

What was it all for?  In the end, I don’t have an answer for that.

Do you?

Until next time, a quote,

“I’m losing hope and fading dreams and every single memory along the way.”  -Anonymous

Peace out,

Maverick

“Radical Feminism” is a Platform Now?

I wanted to feel good today.  For real, I did.  I had plans to get to have fun with my Dom tonight (that’s right, I am in a Dom/sub relationship, and it’s awesome), and overall, it hasn’t been a bad day.  But wouldn’t you know it, I came across something that really annoys me.  Damn you, Internet!  You have taken the wind out of my sails!  See, one YouTube vlogger who I have followed for some time is Zinnia Jones.  I have agreed with her a good 70% of the time in what she says, and I like hearing her opinion on issues of gender, gender identity, gay culture and religious bigotry.  She is a neat vlogger to listen to .  But then I saw a video that her partner made not too long ago, and it has annoyed me.  I didn’t want to, but here goes.  Here is a link, and here goes.  Oh, and I should note that I am not going to be attacking the speaker of this video.  I want to talk about the ideas put forth, and why I think they are horribly wrong.

Radical Feminism is a platform for gender equality which includes, among other things, a belief that most gender is performed.  As a radical feminist, I believe that gender roles are artificially created.  That most a morphism is affected, rather than mandated by nature, and that the divide has been pushed beyond all reason for the express benefit of men.  This is what we call “the patriarchy.”

Huh.  Well, first let me say that this is not a good way to start a conversation about gender equality.  Because the biggest problem is that it puts the viewers into two categories – the oppressors and the oppressed.  Now, I could go out and ask people, and I bet you a shiny nickel that most women would not identify themselves with being oppressed.  And most men would not describe themselves as oppressors.  Not in most situations, anyway.  I’m not saying that there is unilateral gender equality.  There are definite problems on both sides.  But when you start a video with a comment that is intentionally drawing battle lines, then you open yourself up to the criticism of people like me, who say that we are just trying to live our lives and don’t want to hurt anyone.  That we want all genders to have equal rights and equal treatment.  But immediately, you put people like me on the defensive, because you have just said, flat-out, that men are oppressors, and women are the oppressed.  Not a good way to start a dialogue.

One unfortunate aspect of this socialization is that society, through various messages, including but not limited to, role modeling from peers and media teaches young men that they are entitled to the hearts and minds of women.

What?  Where is this being taught?  For real, I was never told that we are entitled the “hearts and minds of women.”  My whole life, I was taught that you should be nice to other people, but nobody is required to like you.  In fact, most people won’t.  This is because, underneath it all, people suck.  That’s one of the true equal parts of gender.  Men and women, we all just suck.  I was never taught that I was entitled to anything.  I was taught that I had to work for it.  So has every single person that I can possibly think of.  This genuinely makes no sense.

Including, but again, not limited to domestic and sexual servitude.  Women, no more fond of subjugation and servitude than men, become, unfortunately, prone to self-loathing and more unfortunately, prone to rebellion.

Are you talking about America?  I mean, really, are you?  Because, if that is the case…what?!  Not one time has I ever heard any woman be told that her role is to be the domestic and sexual slave of men.  Now, there are some backwards-ass countries where women are getting some really fucked-up messages from people, like most Muslim countries, but in the Western World, this doesn’t jive.

And how is being prone to rebellion a bad thing?  One of my big button-issues is how people, both men and women, are taught that rebelling against what you don’t agree with is bad, and following the mandate is good.  Rebellion is what inspires change.  Rebellion is what made this country.  The people didn’t like the governing body that lorded over them, so they rebelled against it and got themselves a new one.  Now, I will be one of the first to say that women get the raw end of the deal when it comes to things like body image.  The media tells them that being skinny is good, and being fat is wrong.  That unless your thighs don’t touch, there is something wrong with you.  But to say that being prone to rebellion is a bad thing seems totally antithetical to empowering women.

If the contention of radical feminism is that neither behavior, nor presentation, nor physical appearance should make or break the difference between men and women, why draw the line at the word “man” or “woman?”  The very words will become nonsensical and impossible to define.  Sure, there will still be some natural hormonal division, but when people can safely, permanently and completely alter these differences at will, why deny it?  When women and men are socialized equally, what will anyone have lost?  What will anyone have gained but the right to define themselves?  The right for which radical feminists so arduously fight?

There’s a lot to talk about here.  Bear with me.  Okay, first, are you saying that the difference between men and women is limited to their hormones?  Last I checked, men have an additional chromosome.  Yeah, it’s called the Y chromosome.  It makes us men.  We also have these genitals that are different and far more vulnerable to pain than yours.  The growth of the terms “man” and “woman” didn’t evolve because of some effort to subjugate women.  They grew out of a biological difference between the males and females of this species.  If the contention you’re making is that we immediately are defining you by your gender, then I would have to call bullshit.

Next, I am with you that emphasizing the differences between the genders interests isn’t the best idea, and we could stand to talk about it far less.  However, that said, if your contention is that women have the same desires as men, the same interests, then you are patently wrong.  I have yet to meet two people who have the exact same interests as one-another, let-alone an entire gender.  What we should be doing is letting people culminate their own interests.  Not forcing anything on them.  And it’s done with men, too.  Boys are still sold Army toys, because it still is popular in America for young men to be soldiers.  However, there is no reason to think that a perfect blending of genders is the same as gender equality, because everybody has their own interests.

The problem with your video, Heather, is that you seem to have the notion that you are fighting for what all women want.  And that’s not true.  I had a friend who is an artist.  She has a vision completely her own in what she likes, what she wants to do, and how she executes it.  This view isn’t shared by you.  Something tells me that you don’t go nuts over great works of art, love ice-skating and want to kick a lot of ass at Tae Kwon Do.  And she isn’t the only one.  I have another friend who is a sub, like me, and she is into D&D, kinky sex and role-playing (not in the sexual way.  She used to be part of a LARP group) various stories she likes, or changing these stories to make them her own.  Not all interests are universal.  You don’t speak for all women, Heather.  In fact, I would be surprised if you spoke for many.

And let’s not forget, Heather, that you and your ilk do not speak for all transgender or transsexual people.  I have heard from a fair amount of these people who say that they are not attacked every single day by men, and are actually kind of offended when people like you seem to think that you speak for them.

The patriarchy has the same persistent negative impact on trans-women as it does on cis-women (I hope I got what she said right…?).  Society tells them that they are more acceptable when they present in a feminine manner and worth less as a person when they fail to please the eye.

Okay, here’s the problem with that – society does that EXACT same thing to men.  Guys are judged by their appearance ruthlessly.  So are women, I admit, but yeah, men get the criticism just as harshly.  If a man doesn’t have a monster cock, he is looked down upon.  If a man isn’t the buff display of manhood, women seem to think that they are lazy, stupid or worthless.  It goes both ways, Heather, and your lack of seeing that kind of irks me a bit.

The rigid physical standards applied to women cause trans-women inordinate amounts of stress.  The sex-classing of women and requisite caste system of the class, more commonly known as varying degrees of “fuck-ability”, or even more commonly known as the scale from 1-10, has inhumanely relegated trans-women with a certain remaining organ to the undesireables.  They’re expected to be content with either fetishization or pity-fucking, along with siz-women of the overweight and differently-abled variety.

Once-again, bear with me.  We have a lot to talk about.  See, I have heard this kind of stuff from lots of these feminists, and it honestly strikes me as insulting.  What Heather seems to be implying is that it is society that somehow controls what people are attracted to.  Society tells you something is unattractive, so you naturally think that way.  The implicit statements in that are more than a little insulting.  See, if you buy that logic, then basically, gays and lesbians are choosing to be gay, because society somehow informed their thinking.  For real, if you think that the human mind is so easily persuaded by what culture tells them is hot, then you have to admit that you are saying that those who are gay and lesbian are, on some level, choosing their sexuality.

But the reality is that attraction isn’t that simple!  You can’t choose what you’re attracted to.  Your brain is hard-wired to like certain things, and not other things.  Heather kind of touched on this, without knowing it.  She said that trans-women are fetishized, without realizing that there wouldn’t be a fetish if there weren’t people who are attracted to those kinds of people.  The same way that Dom/sub relationships are a fetish.  I am attracted to my Dom, partly because I like women (but not men, as Doms.  I prefer men as subs) who take control and know what they want.  We call it a fetish, but the truth is that it is attraction.  And you can’t choose that.  Your demand that society should say that these things are beautiful is all well and good, but that won’t automatically make people think that trans-women or plus-size women are beautiful.  Oh, and by the way, my Dom is a little on the heavy side.  So yeah, I don’t have a problem with that, either.

Is a childhood of boy-designated socialization sometimes evident in arguments with trans-women?  Absolutely!  For starters, they don’t question themselves, apologize for themselves, or wait for their turn to speak quite as often as cis-women are taught to do from birth.  Likewise, a childhood of girl-designated socialization is sometimes evident when trans-men make arguments.  It will be nice when girl-designated socialization and boy-designated socialization include a childhood where respect and assertiveness are taught equally, but though there has been progress, we’re not there yet.

On some levels, I agree with this.  On others, who are these women who are taught from birth to be quiet, wait for their turn to speak and not assert themselves?  When I was growing up, my girly-mates were just one of the guys.  We didn’t see them as any different.  We talked about Pokemon, Digimon, and the cool books we were reading like it was nobody’s business.

There are problems between the genders, both against women and men.  And there should be a continuing dialogue.  But when Zinnia did a response to this, she focused simply on the trolls, and not on the people who had real comments to say.

Gender equality is something that I am definitely for.  I can’t think of anyone I know who isn’t.  But, I am definitely not going to be one of the people who thinks that radical feminism will get us there.

Until next time, a quote,

“Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”  -Tweedledee, Alice in Wonderland

Peace out,

Maverick

My Time in College

I don’t know how I was ever as naive as I was.  Honestly, I don’t get it.  As far back as I can remember, which isn’t as far as you’d think, because a head injury, I was never an especially upbeat and positive guy.  I always kind of knew that life sucked, but I never figured myself for being as naive as I was.

My time in high school was so pathetically sad that it bordered on it might as well not have existed.  I seriously hated it.  My classmates were almost all incomprehensibly stupid.  The level of ignorance that I saw in my classmates left me wishing that I had just gotten my GED and gone to college.  I took the HSQE the first time in my sophomore year.  I passed, 100 points over the expected cutoff in all areas.  It was a piece of cake.  From right there, I should have known to just go.  But I didn’t.  Boredom incarnate, I hated every minute of it.  Well, except for the underground candy market that I cornered when they banned candy and soda from being sold at the high school.  I made SO much money off that.  Lived pretty well, too.

Once I got out of high school, some incredibly ignorant part of me thought that I would leave there and an entire world would open up for me.  I would go out, and there would be opportunities, people and a new world of like minds who I could connect with and we would find a place in the world.  I didn’t think that opportunity would just find me.  But I figured that this would open doors, in a pretty substantial way.  Again, this came from ignorance.  I knew that life and the world sucked, but not as much as it truly does.

I get to college, and for the first year, it was pretty alright.  I was at the community college in my hometown.  I was taking classes that I wanted to take, and I had what I thought was a direction.  It felt good.  I was getting to learn the knowledge that I wanted to learn.  Sure, there were a couple stumbles, but at the same time, I was still heading in that direction.  I still felt like my plan to find a place in the world would work.  That was five years ago.

Now, it is my sixth year of college.  The end is in sight.  I see that final stretch.  I’m not there yet, but so close that I can taste it.  And…I couldn’t possibly care less.  I am in it now just so that I can be done, and finally free of this insufferable nightmare.  I have changed so much in my time being in college.  My naive idealism about saving the world is long-gone.  Now, I am just trying to find amusement in humanity’s self-destruction, as we slowly circle the drain.  It is kind of funny.

I feel like I have lost so much.  I no longer care about love.  Romance is nothing but a dangerous distraction, as Sherlock Holmes said.  I know SO many people who just think that love is the greatest.  They’ll learn.  Just give it time.  They’ll figure out that love is just a distraction that we wrap ourselves up in, to protect us from how ugly this world is.  It’s the rose-colored film that we put over our eyes, to protect us from reality.  People that I know bury themselves in it the same way that an alcoholic does with booze, or the drug addict does with the drug of their choice.  But in the end, like most forms of happiness, it’s based on lies.

See, that is the one thing that I truly have lost here, and I know now that I will never be able to get it back – the ability to lie to myself.  I can’t tell myself that everything will be alright.  I can’t say to myself that everything is going to be alright, because the truth is that I don’t buy that.  I have changed so much in six years.

The biggest thing that does frighten me sometimes is how I am starting to lose my connection to the human condition.  I seriously don’t give a shit about people most of the time.  There are those who I care about.  Those who I have grown with, and who have grown with me.  Our dynamics have changed, our relationships have changed, but these people have stuck by me, and me with them.  And I am grateful for them all.  Of course, I have also lost people.  Some of whom meant so much to me.  I cry for some, forget about others.  Such is the way of things.  But at the same time, I am caring less and less, about life itself.  I am still a good friend.  I am still there for the people who matter to me.  But at the same time, I go through life like a corpse that has been reanimated.

Do I regret going to college?  Well, the answer to that is yes, and no.  I am grateful for what doors that it will open for me, though they won’t be as plentiful as I had hoped.  But at the same time, I have had some people who meant so much to me when I was here, only for things to end in such a brutal way.

But at the end of the day, the only thing that really matters is that I am still moving forward.  I was naive when I came here.  I am naive no more.  My eyes are opened to the world, and what a cold and cruel place it is.  But I am still moving, still trying, still making the effort to be a good friend and a good person.  I may not give two shits about most any of these people that I meet, but I still work to be a good guy, because it is the right thing to do.

I don’t know what lies ahead of me.  I thought that college would be a wonderful experience.  Now I know that I will walk out of here dumber than when I came in.  But, whatever it is, I suppose…I suppose that I will just keep walking down that road.  Come what may.

Until next time, a quote,

“Life is pain!  I wake up every morning, I’m in pain.  I go to work in pain.  You know how many times I just wanted to give up?!  How many times I’ve thought about ending it?!”  -Gregory House, House M.D.

Peace out,

Maverick

Fat and Skinny War – Epic Butthurt

There has been an image going around the online sphere, and I find this image interesting, because it is showing a major butthurt part of the population, which in this case is ironically, not skinny people.  Now, this is not going to be a lambasting post.  I am genuinely intrigued by this.  I am not a super-skinny guy.  I am not some super-fat guy.  I am a little overweight, but since I am a titan of a man, for how tall I am, I am actually not that overweight.

But when this image came out, from Kate Moss, of all people, I had a feeling that there would be a social backlash against it.  But honestly, when I saw some of what was being said, I almost got a little sad at how easily people can be butthurt and get pissed for no good reason.

For real, there is no reason to be mad at this.  She actually did say this.  It is an actual quote from her.  She believes that she likes to be skinny more than she likes food.  But here’s the question – what’s the problem with that?  For real, if she views being skinny as better than food, what do you care?  A lot of people have really wanted to really get emotional over this.  But that makes no sense.

For one thing, who cares about Kate Moss?  For real, who the fuck is this woman?  What has she done?  I don’t remember her in anything.  Not in any movies, TV, music, nowhere.  This is a name I know, but I don’t remember anywhere near the top of my head where I know her from.  Even the celebrities that I hate, like Dane Cook, pretty much any modern pop artist, or almost all of the pseudo-celebrity jackasses in Congress, I know why I hate them.  I have very clear defined reasons why these people annoy me.  And for some of them, why I am annoyed by them is a very good reason, because some of them can have a very large impact on society, like the jackasses in Congress.  They are able to affect things in a huge way.  But what has Kate Moss ever done?

A lot of people will come back and say that she will inspire women to have eating disorders.  Um, you people are stupid.  The fact is that having an eating disorder is not simple.  There are a lot of complex reasons why people have eating problems, and for you all to think that it is because somebody told them to be simple, that only shows that you are too dumb to think.  Oh, wait, you clearly don’t think.

Plus, this just shows the hypocrisy of our culture.  If a severely obese girl came out and said that she likes to eat more than be skinny, people would be applauding her and saying how brave she is.  What?  How?  It’s the exact same thing.  Ironically, in the modern culture, we are having a paradigm shift, slowly but surely, that says that being super-skinny is actually bad.  We are having a shift that says that women shouldn’t be super-fat, but not super-skinny either.  I have seen this a lot more than you’d think.  It’s encouraging, but at the same time, so what?

The reality of the situation is that all the butthurt people are clueless.  They don’t seem to understand that society isn’t as simple as it looks, and also, you need a thicker skin.  The people who tell you that life gets so much better when you grow up, and that you are going to be happier are idiots.  The same bullies in high school will become grown-up bullies.  The title will change, but they will be the same.  The same people who called you fat will still call you fat.  Ironically, a friend of mine gets called too skinny by people.  She is a little underweight, but that’s just how she is.  I wish I had a metabolism like her.  That would suit me for all the walking I do.

America, you’re dumb.  That’s the basic point I am making with this long rambling post.  Okay?

I should have another piece of The Wolves up tomorrow.

Until next time, a quote,

“The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.”  -Albert Camus

Peace out,

Maverick

Feminist Frequency and her First World Problems

Now, this isn’t going to be one of the posts where I go off on somebody.  I want to legitimately dissect some of the things that I have heard this woman say and talk about in her videos, because I honestly believe that everything that she stands for with her YouTube channel is a complete waste of time, and as the title suggest – first world problems.  These issues aren’t even feminism in the way that most people would understand it.  Not one of the things that she takes apart in her video has anything to do with women’s rights, or issues that have any bearing on their rights.

For those of you who don’t already know, the YouTube vlogger, Anita Sarkeesian, better known by her YouTube channel, Feminist Frequency, has a channel where she discusses pop culture, from the perspective of women’s rights.  That is the first glaring problem – that pop culture is somehow hurting women.

In one video, she makes the point that many female characters in games are…well, I’ll let her say it -

Have you ever noticed that, with a few notable exceptions, basically all female characters in video games fall into a few handfuls of cliches and stereotypes?

She shows pictures of hot women in video games.  Well, by that exact logic, I could make the exact same argument back to her about men.  And I would be right.  Most men in video games fall into the category of the cold-blooded white knight, who is totally unphased by the killing that he has to do in order to save the day.  Sarkeesian paints women as the victims of culture, always culture.  What about rights?  We’ll get to that.

This is nothing new.  Throughout her entire career, Sarkeesian has chosen to take apart popular culture, and has no really original thoughts.  If you look at her college thesis paper, this is blatantly apparent.  For only about 8 pages of a 50-odd page paper, she actually gives her opinion, and even there, she still is quoting the opinions of a lot of OTHER people.  So, rather than engage in anything really deep and complicated, she chooses to look at the most simplistic of concepts.  Like what, you may ask?  Well, there are many things.

How about the Powerpuff Girls?  In a video, she talks about how the Powerpuff Girls are a malicious design against women, and that they are part of a backlash against feminism, where the creators of the show have created a world without gender oppression, so that they can see it where none exists.  Interesting concept.

Or maybe we can talk about the very influential views of Twilight, like in her video “The Real Reason Guys Should Hate Twilight.”  If you watch that video, and you listen to what she says, you can quickly see that Sarkeesian believes that women are so easily influenced by pop culture, and that people don’t have the brain power to think for themselves.  I like what Doug Walker had to say about Twilight in a review he did of Breaking Dawn: Part 1 (the stupidest movie of all time).

It’s the fact that any girl that would be like ‘oh, I really like Bella!  I just want no responsibility and I want men to do everything for me and blah, blah, blah.’ Most girls go through that phase, and most girls are, you know, reality hits them and it hits them pretty quick.

The reality is that the real world isn’t as nice about these pop culture stereotypes as she wants them to be.  And it makes sense, if you listen to how she talks, and what she talks about.  Sarkeesian is a preacher, for all intents and purposes.  She is a preacher who preaches to her congregation about how evil pop culture is, and how corrosive it is to society.

I genuinely believe that Sarkeesian doesn’t know how to examine culture in a serious way.  If you are wondering why, it can be traced back to her college thesis paper.  In a large section, she talks about women who she views as good feminist role models in shows.  Care to guess where a lot of these women come from?  Shows by Joss Whedon.  Almost exclusively.  Really?  There aren’t any great film characters who are good role models?  Or how about novel ones?  And why on Whedon TV shows?  You think that other TV writers haven’t made very good female characters?  It’s telling.  See, the thing about Joss Whedon – he is a good writer, but he isn’t writing Shakespeare.  And what’s more, he knows it.  I’m not putting him down.  I have enjoyed his writing for a long time.  He writes to nerd and geek culture.  He’s the lord of it.  But if you grew up watching only his stuff, you aren’t going to get an insight into the human condition or anything grand.  He knows he isn’t that kind of writer, and he doesn’t try to be.  So it makes sense that Sarkeesian doesn’t have a background on how to digest culture at large.  Hence why, in her critique of Kanye West’s music video “Monster,” she showed an absolute lack of understanding of black culture.

Oh, and she has this bad habit of classifying everything as a “trope.”  Huh, interesting term.  Webster’s Dictionary defines the word “trope” as “the figurative or metaphorical use of a word or expression.”  So, when she calls something a “dead woman trope,” is she saying that there is the figurative or metaphorical use of dead women?  Or when she classifies women in video games as different tropes, is she saying that these women are figurative or metaphorical?  No, she isn’t.  Like everything else in her videos, it is a word that sounds smart, and therefore makes her look smart by using it, instead of using a word that might actually make sense, like calling something a stereotype or archetype.

And her views are completely one-sided.  That can’t be argued.  She went off on the singer Amanda Palmer about her album “Who Killed Amanda Palmer.”  There was a track in that album about Palmer’s experience with being raped and getting an abortion.  This track got a lot of flack from the media, but she wrote a response defending it, and there was a choice (albeit unknowing) refutation to a large amount of what Sarkeesian has said in it -

In art, everything must be fair game, everything must be explorable, everything must be speakable, or we go BACKWARDS! we go DOWN!

That’s a great statement, and absolutely true.  When looking at how Sarkeesian operates her channel, it is very telling.  Sarkeesian moderates comments, deleting what she doesn’t like.  She blocks people from commenting who she doesn’t like.  She shuts down all dissent and differing opinions.  The reality is that Sarkeesian doesn’t want women’s rights.  She wants a world that flows according to her tune.  She wants a world that is made in her likeness (metaphorically speaking).  And in her world, everything is wrong.  Every single part of culture is wrong.

She made and then deleted a video some time ago where she said that a subway ad for the game Bayonetta was misogynistic because people could remove sticky-notes from it, which is akin to disrobing a woman, which in her world is…wrong?  What?  Disrobing a woman is wrong?  No wonder she deleted that video.  Even looking objectively, you would have to ask yourself – is she saying that having sex is wrong?

Another thing to think about when looking at Sarkeesian is – how often does she have an original thought?  About a movie or song, often.  About a large issue like violence and women in video games, never.  When she is talking about a small item, it’s easy to think for one’s self.  But talking about something that is a cultural issue at large isn’t so simple.  Much like her thesis paper, a new kick-starter project she has looking at women in video games borrows HEAVILY from words that you could almost cut-and-paste from Hillary Clinton, in a press conference.  And what solution does Sarkeesian have for this issue?  Well…I have yet to hear one.  And the reason is simple – you can’t censor video games.  Not anymore.

A lot like with violent movies, violent songs and many other forms of the art mediums, it has simply grown too large.  But there is a some good that has come out of that – reaching out to multiple markets.  During all the shots of her hands with an Xbox controller, never once do you hear from Sarkeesian that video games have now grown into a cultural phenomenon that is now reaching more audiences than ever before.  Characters are becoming more and more complex, because the audiences who grew up with this medium have seen its potential, and want more.  But the biggest point of all – nobody is holding a gun to women’s heads and forcing them to buy these things or watch these things.  For as popular as video games are, they are still a niche market in a lot of ways.

Sarkeesian basically has a problem with this – women who are strong, weak, dumb, smart, ugly, pretty or anything in-between, if they are somehow sexual at all in video games.  She is against anything that can arouse a man.  Well, sorry, Anita, but you don’t get to do that.  You don’t get to push your values on us.  And there’s a reason – because you don’t control our sexuality.  What people are attracted to is their own.  If a man likes a woman in a tight shirt with big boobs, that’s his business.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  I am very much in love with a woman who has long brown hair, is in good shape, but not a super-model, has large breasts, a very well-defined ass, and isn’t afraid to show off her figure.  Is that suddenly wrong?  Am I suddenly a bad person for liking that?  Is she a bad person for taking pride in how much work she does to stay in shape?  How can you make that argument?  Oh, right, she makes it all the time.  She basically says that women who want to express their own sexuality are too stupid to know otherwise.  Who’s the misogynist now, Anita?

The real truth about Anita Sarkeesian and her channel, Feminist Frequency, is that it is a one-sided ego trip, designed for her to preach to her congregation, and now, her kick-starter project has elevated her to feminist stardom status, even though there are many women with opposing views, that she never once acknowledges.  Sarkeesian looks at every opposing view as coming from misogyny, the patriarchy, or simply stupidity.  And should a video actually reflect negatively on her, she immediately deletes it.  She is a vacuous, insipid vlogger, who elevates her own status, by talking about things that are culturally relevant.  Her entire world view is shaped by her professional victimhood that has given her carte blanche to hate men as much as she wants, while not acknowledging any other viewpoints that aren’t just trolling.  She goes out of her way to say that she is not a misandrist, but constantly attacks men like they are the enemy.  She is not somebody that anybody should take seriously.  Ever.

Until next time, a quote,

“I do this real moron thing, and it’s called thinking. And apparently I’m not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions.”  -George Carlin

Peace out,

Maverick