Tagged: William H. Whyte
Subliminal XIV: From the Czech Republic with Junk
Travel diaries from Aug. 24 to Aug. 28, Prague, Czech Republic.
……………Socialist Child-Sex Propaganda
This poster I photographed at the Museum of Communism. I think the artist had a lot of fun, but apparently no one noticed. This is a piece of propaganda (or information: let me know) from Socialist Czechoslovakia, during the war of Korea, accusing the US of using bacteriological weapons.
The group of children in the background drew my attention. The Negro boy, whose hand rests on the little blonde girl’s shoulder, is looking at her with a lecherous gaze. The Chinese girl plays at making sandcastles with a pail, while the blond boy kneeling behind her is holding her, arm stretched, by the shoulder, his face flushed and grinning. Looks like doggy-style sex! The penetration is concealed from the viewer by the dress of the grieved and indignant Korean woman. The third boy is looking at his comrade’s doing (not at the sandcastles game, mind) with evident enjoyment.
…………….Pretend You Saw Nothing
This Cubist fellatio can be admired at the National Gallery – Veletrzni Palac. The artist is Russian painter Aristarkh Lentulov (who in Soviet times became chairman of the Society of Moscow Artists), and this work from 1912 is called A Ballet Theme.
If I be not the first to have noticed that peculiar detail in Lentulov’s masterpiece, yet nothing in the material environment of the gallery drew my attention to the explicit material I would encounter while looking at the painting (no mention like “this painting contains sexually oriented material that may be offensive to some people and not suitable for persons under the age of eighteen”).
……………Orgasm Guaranteed
From your regular Czech women’s magazine (lifestyle, cooking, children…), this sex toy ad. ORGASMUS guaranteed. The future belongs to machines.
…………….The Benefits of Cannabis a la Czech
From the same women’s magazine as above, this ad for the Czech company Cannaderm’s products. [Removed]
From internet copywriting: “Cannaderm brings a new approach to skin care. Cannaderm for every age, for all skin types, even for the very sensitive skin of small children or skin with eczema, acne or psoriasis. The synergic effects of healing hemp, mutual combinability and the wide range of products guarantee the potential of putting together a cosmetic range ‘to fit’. For easier orientation the packaging is colour coded and also contains the recommended combination of products.
“Cannaderm Made in the Czech Republic. We use unique recipes, modern technology and the best quality ingredients. All our products Cannaderm are approved by the State Health Institute of the Czech Republic and are certified for sale in the EU.”
Not to omit (read “triple distilled”):
From internet copywriting: “Euphoria Cannabis Vodka is made of extra smooth grain vodka, blended with natural cannabis leaves and cannabis seeds. It is 100% natural product. Each bottle is hand-made. Enjoy the rich taste of freedom!” &
“Beautiful cannabis bud infused in extra smooth vodka 40%. Cannabis leaves extract cannabis oil and CBD. 100% natural product with great cannabic taste and relaxing effects!” &c.
……………Complements
“All our dishes are served with a beer,” according to the placard at the entrance. But in the end the beer is charged. Seeing the bill, you say to yourself: “What’s the use complaining? I should have made the point clear with the waiter from the start.” However, it’s not even sure, not even likely that you would have paid the expected CZK270 for the ordered schnitzel; there must have been a trick even there, the placard probably contained a heap of qualifications in tiny fonts at the bottom, and so, after being made aware of these by the waiter, you would have had to raise from your chair and leave the place to find another one, no doubt with the same placard…
McDonald’s vs the Pettifoggers
It’s just the same where I live. Most cafés and restaurants in Paris touristic arrondissements are managed by people who want to make the most of your pockets at the fastest rate: poor quality of the food, poor service, not enough space, insane prices… Many play music loud so you will feel like leaving as soon as you sit down. French cafés and restaurants see tourists as pigeons. Once I saw the following at a café near the Pantheon (allegedly a prestigious, safe place). Some Japanese tourists ordered food, the waiter asked them what they wanted to drink, they said tap water (for free) and they insisted to make him understand. He pretended not to understand and brought a water bottle that he had just opened. They had to pay for it. He even cursed them in French, to himself, but of course they understood that they were insulted and had to swallow their pride.
Years ago, they said fast foods would never set foot in the country of gastronomy, i.e., France. More recently, they said Starbucks would never set foot in the country of cafés. Even more recently, I told my friends: “I’ve designed an advertising campaign for Pret A Manger – it says Pret A Manger: Soon in France,” and here they are, in the country of the baguette. The reason? People don’t care to go to nasty places where mean pettifoggers will treat them like dirt. When you come to Paris, let me recommend you three places where to eat and have a drink: McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Pret A Manger.
We all know tourism has generated those shoddy service industries that cater to the “ideal” customer, the tourist, one who will never come back, one, thus, who will never complain, returning to their countries the next day, replaced by a new wave. French cafés and restaurants don’t care what you, tourists, think of their food or of the service, they don’t even give a dime for what you think of la France: they take your money and what you get for it you’d rather pay for not having it. And don’t ask for tap water, because although it is free on the paper of which laws are made, it will cost you the humiliation of your life.
You may say guidebooks are here to help prevent such bad experiences. In theory, yes, but the addresses they will give you, if they’re good restaurants, then the chances are they will be full of people from all the offices around, in their workaday formal dress, whereas you will be dressed in tourist’s attire – casually – and you will soon feel that you look like morons.
Art & the Organization Man
From The Organization Man (1956) by William H. Foote: “Profiles are also worked up for work in individual companies. At Sears, Roebuck there are charts that diagram the optimum balance of qualities required. Here is the one an executive values:
“A man does not have to match this profile exactly, but it won’t help him at all if his line zigs where the chart zags. Take a man who scores considerably higher than the 10th percentile on aesthetic values, for example; such people, Sears notes, ‘accept artistic beauty and taste as a fundamental standard of life. This is not a factor which makes for executive success. … Generally, cultural considerations are not important to Sears executives, and there is evidence that such interests are detrimental to success’.”
There is much good sense in that view expressed by Sears because, as the best definition ever for culture, concise and elegant, goes, “culture is the learning of the leisure class” (economist Tibor Scitovsky), which means that the organization man is an overworked windbag.
Interestingly, Whyte was already writing in the 1950s about those corporations that claimed they were willing to recruit people with literary (cultural) profile and training, yet never recruited them. I have heard this claim from today’s corporations repeated time and again – so nothing has changed and I guess the above diagram, with aesthetic taste seen as quite irrelevant, still holds for today’s organization man.
And yet, “Wu cites a 1990 study that claimed that in the US about 20 to 30 per cent of the market in New York was due to corporate collecting, and outside the city about half.” (Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated, 2004) Contemporary art is a reminder – the reminder that people that work are poor devils. Half the market for contemporary art is made of corporate collecting: top executives adorning their offices with the excremental fantasies of slackers! Ask the connoisseur how much corporations pay artists for splashed mud and monochromes (remember, the organization men’s aesthetic acumen – his taste – approximates zero: see diagram) and compare with your own earnings!
Possible consequences: “Recently, in the Netherlands, a middle-sized bank, i.e. the DSB Bank, came into serious financial trouble for this exact same reason. Only a couple of months before, the bank had bought art for tens of millions of euros, and received a loan from another bank in order to build a museum that was to be named after the DSB bank’s CEO. These prestigious undertakings were one of the reasons that the bank had no financial reserves left when business slowed down due to the financial crisis. As a result, in September 2009 the DSB Bank was declared bankrupt.” (A.P. Buunk et al., 2011) Bankrupted because of dabbling in art.
And then there is the advertising industry, packed with artists (renegades?) and so vital to the organization man’s economic interests…
September 2016
XXXIII How To Make Successful Children Without Parenting & More Data: The Science of Sex VI
How To Make Successful Children Without Parenting: A Practical Guide
1/ Cuckold rich men so you children will benefit from the men’s wealth. Cuckolding poor devils is not as advantageous and should only be done for the fun (too much of that, though, can damage your reputation of seriousness).
2/ Impregnate daughters of wealthy liberals, who will not disown them when you send them back alone and pregnant (with or without your compliments), so your children will benefit from the parents’ wealth.
3/ Impregnate – and leave at once – career women (organization women), if you can bear the tediousness of courting them in the first place.
4/ Donate regularly to sperm banks attended by wealthy people.
In this manner you will write an evolutionary success story without incurring the costs of parenting, which are as follows:
i/ Parenting is an expense of time and resources.
ii/ Parenting decreases testosterone levels. “Testosterone levels go down when a person gets married, and they decrease even further after the birth of a child.” (Kenrick & Griskevicius, The Rational Animal, 2013). You need your testosterone for every situation in life except parenting.
iii/ Parenting leads to cowardice and conformism. In part this is due to the decrease in testosterone levels (ii), but it also exposes you to permanent blackmail regarding your children’s interests.
iv/ Parenting in the nuclear family freezes men into routine – cattlelike routine, as the German philosopher would say: “The reason why the habits of another man elicit our loathing is that the animal transpires too much in a person led instinctively by the rule of habituation as if by another (non human) nature and who thus runs the risk to fall in one and the same class with cattle.”* (Kant, Anthropologie, I, 1, § 12, my translation)
v/ Parenting, via the institution of matrimony, is aimed at the enslavement of men. As implied in xxxii (here), marriage in the past was tacitly understood as the contract by which a man was free to force copulation on a woman in order not to be stuck in the infertile phase of her cycles – being stressed that the Ogino-Knaus method of natural contraception, endorsed by the Catholic church as an alternative to mechanical or chemical contraceptives, cannot work: “the human menstrual cycle is nowhere near as predictable as many people think” (Baker, SW 112).
The legal invention of spousal rape has suppressed – or is at the very least deterring – the possibility of forcing copulation on one’s wife thanks to which the man would make his best to insure he raises children of his own. Moreover, a woman’s infidelity is not always recognized as a breach of contract incurring the sanction of the law: “a divorced man is, in many jurisdictions, required to continue making child-support payments, even if DNA tests establish that he is not the biological father of a child born during his marriage.” (Kenrick & Griskevicius 2013) Given these, one wonders whether Kenrick & Griskevicius here quoted were right to name their book “the rational animal.” Men who marry are dupes and suckers.
vi/ Parenting is largely detrimental to paternity. We have already seen that women who stray are more likely to conceive with their lovers than with their long-term partners. Another factor to take into account is the woman’s immune system: “Conceivably, antibodies produced by married women may be specific to husbands’ sperm. This raises the discomfiting possibility (for married men) that the gametes of facultative mates may enjoy a competitive advantage over those of husbands’ handicapped by wives’ immune systems. Significantly, ‘condom therapy,’ [for the treatment of infertility] that shields wives from exposure to husbands’ sperm for a period of several months, apparently halts production of antibodies and causes reduced female titers of sperm agglutinating and immobilizing factors (Kay 1977).” (R. L. Smith, in Sperm Competition in Humans, 2006, ed. Shackelford & Pound).
The figures of children raised by a man different from their biological father (without the latter being conscious of it) have been already given: between 10 and 15 per cent in industrial societies. There may be a problem with the figures because other sources state that, in societies where promiscuity is high (extramarital sex is common), such as the !Kung of Botswana or the Yanomami of the Amazon, the figures, according to the same researchers who stress the promiscuity prevalent in these societies, are 8-9% (R. L. Smith, SCH 80). If 8-9% is a valid figure in promiscuous contexts, how should we interpret a 10-15% figure?
An appraisal of the opportunities of female polyandry in our societies appears useful. David Buss considers that these opportunities have increased from man’s environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) up to the present day, with respect to 1/ housing and 2/ woman’s independence.
1/ With respect to housing: “We inhabit a social landscape that is forever changed from the Stone Age world in which our sexual psychology evolved [the EEA]. The anonymity of large city living creates more opportunities to carry out affairs undiscovered, compared with the small group living arrangements of our prehistoric ancestors in which it was hard to conceal a sneeze, much less a torrid affair.” (D. Buss, The Dangerous Passion, 2000). The passage’s scope is more general than just housing, but “the small group living arrangements” alluded to refer to living in caves or on small tracts of land, perhaps with enclosure. As far as I’m concerned, I hear my neighbors sneeze through the walls, and this has been the case in all the apartments I have been living in after I left my parents’ house twenty years ago. Furthermore, the flat above my head is rented to occasional tourists and I am aware, as they have no clue or do not care, when the people getting in are having a “torrid affair,” like in a hotel room. Long-term neighbors are compelled to discretion (no screaming, no moaning) in order to avoid drawing their neighbor’s, just the same as their children’s attention (and their neighbors’ children’s), and I believe the situation is the same for virtually all flats older than fifteen years in this town (Paris). (Perhaps not including apartments permanently exposed to strong traffic noise.)
This empirical and limited evidence is confirmed by the study on American suburbia by William H. Whyte in his deservedly famous Organization Man (1956): “Personal morals? The court is the greatest invention since the chastity belt.” The reason for this lies in thin walls common to row houses (semi-detached). Such arrangements are very cavelike: people hear each other sneeze all the time. The question then turns out to be: Is Dr Buss pulling our leg?
Among ancient Greeks, a common wall for two houses was a forbidden arrangement. Overcrowded compounds developed among the Romans to lodge an ever-increasing, permanently unemployed urban proletariat, while the patricians maintained the Greek tradition of isolated manors in the country (the villas). The present-day megalopolis is a further development of proletarian compounds, and cavelike.
2/ Whatever the housing, sexual intercourse still can take place unnoticed, due to either stealth or secluded and/or impersonal settings. Contemporary women’s independence may well offer numerous opportunities in this respect, especially the fact that they have entered the workplace (when the economy had already ceased to create jobs): “In the modern sexually integrated workplace, men and women who share similar interests work side by side for eight or more hours each day. Repeated workplace flirtations flower into perilous passions.” (Buss 2000).
Another consequence of women working is the drastic decline of breast-feeding. An argument of opponents to breast-feeding is precisely that it’s incompatible with the pursuing of careers by women. When a woman returns to work after a pregnancy, she cannot breastfeed her baby while she’s at work. Although overlooking this reason behind the widespread opposition to it, in his book Baby Wars Dr Baker makes a strong case for breast-feeding, given its many advantages: “Studies that have divided breast-fed babies into categories based on length of breast-feeding have found that those breast-fed the longest did best in terms of avoiding diseases such as gastrointestinal illness, upper respiratory illness, multiple sclerosis, diabetes and heart disease. Also, the babies nursed the longest scored the highest in IQ tests.” (BW 90) & “One benefit of breast-feeding … is its influence on a woman’s ability to regain her pre-pregnancy weight, shape and attractiveness. Even more seriously, breast-feeding influences a woman’s chances of developing breast cancer.” (BW 98).
Seduction or Hysteria?
The present section is an annex to the appraisal of infidelity opportunities. Its title consists of two archaisms. The first (seduction) was sometimes used in the sense of rape, especially in the legal jargon. The second (hysteria) refers to a discarded pathology.
A not so remote affair, in France (the 2004-05 Outreau trial), involved several children accusing a number of adults of repeated pedophilic acts (a pedophile ring); after a first judgment convicting several adults, the public learnt that the children had lied. A similar topic was already hot in the nineteenth century, as the sex war raged in tribunals by proxy of rapist males and blackmailing or fantasizing females. It was claimed that manipulation by adults, hysteria, as well as personal interest and spite, would provide the ground for frequent false accusations by children and women against innocent men.
In England, Dr Lawson Tait was commissioned to produce a report on false accusations of rape (published in 1893). His conclusions were that women had a powerful weapon at their disposal and so were to be expected to use it: “Matters are such … that however men may laugh at it and make jokes, they do not willingly travel with single unknown female companions in railway carriages. They know very well that for a man to have the finger of a woman pointed at him with a charge of a sexual offence is to secure that man’s extinction, no matter what the verdict of a jury may be.” (Quoted in The Legal Subjection of Men, 1896, by Ernest Belfort Bax, who adds: “A woman can accuse a man of sexual irregularities with absolute impunity. But it is not to be supposed that he is to have a like privilege. A special statute (Slander of Women Act) passed a few years ago, makes such slander of a woman actionable.”) This report, and the book which quotes it, by a Socialist essayist** who also authored a manifesto jointly with William Morris, may be a case of male chauvinism at its worst, covering the acts of rapists – or it may not.
What the society thinks of herself (let us give it the feminine gender) and of the practices in her bosom, the way she apprehends and analyses them, retroacts on her. When she publicizes the idea that women have an interest in making false accusations, she incites men to commit rapes because the probability to escape condemnation increases (juries and judges are “primed”). On the other hand, when she publicizes the idea that man is a sexual predator, she incites women to make false accusations (e.g. as blackmail). When one priming is stronger than the other, the opposite tendency takes advantage. When one tendency is stronger than the other (men are more predators than women are blackmailers or vice-versa) and at the same time the society is convinced that the other tendency is stronger and must be thwarted, or even the society remains neutral, then the stronger tendency maintains its position to the detriment of victims, because juries and judges are rarely above holistic perceptions of the society on herself, even in the presence of evidence.
In his time, the revolution in Sigmund Freud’s thinking, abandoning his “seduction theory” for the view that hysterical and neurotic women’s memories of seduction from childhood are fantasies (and symptoms), may have been influenced by this debate and by the extant documentation on false accusations of seduction (including by hysterics, as reported by French Dr Brouardel: cf. E. B. Bax).
Woman’s Anatomy
Evolutionary biology has explained the function of the different parts of woman’s anatomy and why men are attracted toward some traits rather than others: These traits are markers for fertility and good child-rearing. For instance, “Whereas the babies of other primates can cling to their mother’s body hair as they travel, human babies and infants tend to perch on their mother’s hip, supported by a restraining arm. Hips are perches. This is why the ideal female shape … gives a waist considerably small than the hips and why males have been programmed to find such a shape attractive.” (Baker, BW 101). And female breasts are made of soft tissue because they serve as airbags (BW).
Hips are perches and steatopygia, a characteristic of (among others) prehistoric Venus figurines, is a driver’s stand (see picture below).
*“Die Ursache der Erregung des Ekels, den die Angewohnheit eines andern in uns erregt, ist, weil das Tier hier gar zu sehr aus dem Menschen hervorspringt, das instinktmäßig nach der Regel der Angewöhnung gleich als eine andere (nichtmenschliche) Natur geleitet wird und so Gefahr läuft, mit dem Vieh in eine und dieselbe Klasse zu geraten.”
**No less than George Bernard Shaw recommended the man to me: “I hardly noticed Schopenhauer’s disparagements of women when they came under my notice later on, so thoroughly had Bax familiarized me with the homoist attitude, and forced me to recognize the extent to which public opinion, and consequently legislation and jurisprudence, is corrupted by feminist sentiment.” (Preface to Major Barbara, 1906)
March 7, 2016