Megan McArdle on Michael Bellesiles’s latest mess:

I found it incredibly hard to believe that Michael Bellesiles had fabricated the story of “Ernesto”, a student whose brother had died in Iraq. And indeed, it turns out he didn’t. As I initially suspected, the student fabricated the story. Why? Who knows? A student at my high school fabricated an entire fake boyfriend who died horribly of cancer, stories she regaled her creative writing class with for months. And then the teacher called her mother to ask if there was anything she could do to help the student through this terrible tragedy . . .

I have nothing to add on Bellesiles, but I do have some insights on this comment.

When I was young, I used to make up stories. All kinds of stories. And I didn’t convey them as fiction. I mean, that’s true of a lot of kids. But it was especially true for me and my stories would be extremely elaborate. The really strange thing is that I still can’t pinpoint an exact motive. I mean sure, I told “the dog ate my homework” lies, but it went beyond that. They weren’t meant to get me out of trouble. They weren’t meant to make me look good (sometimes they made me look kinda bad). Nor were they entirely for attention as I did not particularly desire attention and I always felt kinds bad and on-the-spot when people would talk to me about something I made up. I kinda wanted to tell my story, have people interested in the duration of my story, then have people forget that the story was ever told. There may have been a desire to be interesting tucked in there somewhere, though contradictorily I would want them to forget what I was interesting because of.

Some of it can probably be attributed to my stellar imagination and the need to express it. It’s noteworthy that the lies stopped when the writing began in earnest, though that could have been a function of age as much as anything else. But if I really had to guess, I would guess it was that I would want the stories to be true because I like interesting things to be true. And on the wings of this desire, “wouldn’t it be interesting/neat if…” because “get a load of this…”.

Should I sire a child, this is one of those things that I am going to keep an eye out on. If my kid is a compulsive liar, I am not going to leap to the conclusion that I did something wrong or even that they’re hiding something. Rather, I am going to wonder if I have a little writer on my hands and dutifully explain the difference between “wouldn’t it be interesting if” and “is.”

I once knew a guy that had an allergy to gluten (coeliac disease). He was always sick and even when he wasn’t was gaunt and sickly-looking. Once they determined that he had the coeliac problem, he took on a gluten-free diet and the effects were immediately noticeable. He then came up with the idea that the problem wasn’t that he had coeliac disease. He was unsure such a thing even really existed, believing that it was something the Medical Establishment (which he loathed) made up. It wasn’t a particularly well-formed theory, but nonetheless he decided that gluten was to blame for all that was wrong with the modern diet and most specifically obesity (he was not himself obese). He told this to a couple other people I know (well, he told this to everybody, but a couple people proved receptive). These people weren’t sick like the original guy, but they were overweight and decided that they would try a gluten-free diet. Sure enough, they lost weight!

Now, it’s possible that there is some sort of relationship between gluten and obesity, but I strongly suspect that the weight loss was attributable to the fact that gluten-free diets were at the time (and are now, though less so) really hard. They prevented you from eating out and from eating a lot of really tasty junk food as well as limiting carb-intake by way of fewer options. They took that out of the diet and they lost weight (until it proved more than they could handle and the weight came back). The gluten-free diet proved helpful by helping them do what they could have done by eating more common food in smaller quantities. It’s sort of like how I intentionally buy crackers that I like less because I will eat less of them. The crackers I buy are not, in and of themselves, weight-loss conducive. But they are insofar as they change my habits.

In other words, I think my friend was wrong about gluten, though his advice had the virtue of helping people lose weight (albeit temporarily) for other reasons.

—

Long before I was introduced to a concept called Game, I had created something I called RAIN (or RAN) Theory. RAIN stood for Relationships As Implied Negotiation. It was based on the observation that my failures in the relationship realm mostly revolved around making myself too available to girls too early on. In other words, I was showing my hand before it was time and I was not demanding that she would meet me where I was before I would move to the next place. The theory expanded over time to improving my bookcover to better make women more interested in reading the book. In the end, I noticed that more than anything else, it was about finding ways to be more appealing, and less scary, to the opposite sex.

So when I first heard about Game, a large part of it rang true. The first variation of it I was introduced to was Doc Love and his System. Then Neil Strauss and Game proper, though by then I was less interested in such things. With the exception of some of the weirdness of Strauss, most of what I initially heard seemed true by the most important standard, which is that confirmed my existing biases. I still think that there is something to a lot of it in the most basic sense. Ferdinand Bardamu’s The Fundamentals of Game post, for example, seems extremely commonsensical. He breaks it down into seven components, all of which are important in some fashion or another. Should I ever be in the position of having to teach a son of mine about approaching women, I might use that very post.

The problem with Game, though, is that it often comes with a lot of baggage. And a good portion of its acolytes extrapolate these lessons the same thing that my friend extrapolated from Gluten-reduction. They found something successful (or claim to have, or have heard someone else claim to have), but often come up with reasons for its success that have more to do with confirming their (often very angry) biases rather than simply accepting the formula as something that can work. I am not calling out Bardamu on this. Though I disagree with him on a multitude of issues, his explanation of game is such a productive one I am not interested in hashing out the points of disagreement.

The great part about the system is that it can easily cure a very specific set of ills. Namely, what ailed me for the longest time. There are a lot of smart people that have poor feedback receptors. They obviously don’t know what they’re doing is not working, but don’t know why. I managed to figure out a lot of this stuff on my own because my feedback receptor is better than that of the average geek (I’ve noticed this most recently on job interviews, where I can tell if I am getting off-base really quickly). But a lot of people don’t. And so they can just keep making the same mistakes over and over again and never be able to isolate the problem. Further, these people often have limited exposure to girls and so they don’t get enough repetition to see their mistakes.

A problem with Game, as it is frequently discussed, is that its proponents often tend to fixate on a few aspects of it. Ferdinand, to his credit, manages to address the often (though not always) neglected aspects of it such as Presentability and Sociability. I know some guys that fit the first five to a tee and have no success because they completely and utterly fail on the last two.

So having it outlined is an extremely helpful thing. Perhaps the most important of the seven is Indifference because it’s Indifference that allows you to take the hits that come with asking girls out. When you ask out one girl a year, it’s (a) difficult to learn what you might be doing wrong and (b) inherently a big deal. If you can make it not a big deal, you can extend yourself more often without fear of being shot down. Not that you won’t be shot down, but you’ll be more likely to realize that in the end it is only as big a deal as you allow it to be. Calmness, another of the seven, is also helpful.

Insofar as Game is what Ferdinand describes it to be, I think it’s an extremely helpful thing for guys that have trouble with girls to consider. The main thing is that it seems to so rarely stop there. I think it’s one of those things that seems to commonsensical (when you think about it and have your “Eureka” moment) that people feel the need to extrapolate on it. And those extrapolations can lead to some pretty bad places made all the worse that the people that talk about it the most are often the people that have a history of failure and the bitterness that so often accompanies it. Folks like Roissy exploit this by playing to the dark aspects of the theories and making it so dark that the whole thing turns back on itself and the guy feels better about himself (or at least more Righteous) for not playing. For Roissy and his ilk, this is perfect because it becomes a loop of bitterness and self-righteousness.

In our discussion about mail-order brides, Phi linked to his inaugural post, which involved the subject:

1. The first point is that a man’s sexual market value is perceived relative to those around him. IMBs capitalize on this by taking middle-aged, middle class men with low status in a rich country and marketing them in a poor country where they enjoy relatively high status. This works . . . as long as he stays in the poor country. If he brings his foreign bride back to the U.S., it will matter very little that he rescued her from a life of poverty in Ukraine. She will eventually perceive him to be low status by American standards.

While I think this is true, I think it is a narrow look at a broader concept. One that applies not only to women and status but men and women and options in general. People are as loyal as (a) their commitment and (b) their options. Using mail-order brides is a good example of this for a number of reasons.

First, there is generally a lack of commitment. It’s a marriage of convenience. They sidestepped a good part of the “getting to know you” phase. She’s often looking for material goods and access to the United States and he’s looking for someone with a greater degree of (superficial) devotion (under threat of deportation) and often a more attractive woman than he would be able to get stateside. They’re the best that they can do, but far from perfect. They don’t have much in common. They barely know one another more often than not. Often, if he could find himself an American woman as attractive and attentive as she is, he would not have given her a second look. Likewise, if she had access to a Russian man with his traits and wealth, neither would she. They’re both in a position of need and willing to overlook a lot.

That’s not the foundation of a strong marriage. The same often occurs early on in relationships between unattractive and unpopular people. The main difference, though, is that over time these two are more likely to genuinely bond than are an American and a foreigner. They’re more likely to have more in common, to understand one another better, and so on. And so they’re more likely to reach the point where they would forego “better options” because they’re attached. Maybe I’m being overly skeptical that this is going to happen with people that start off with virtually nothing in common, but I don’t think so.

The second thing is that MOBs draw attention to the quick increase of options on the part of one of the two partners. As Phi points out, the guy who seemed fabulously wealthy to someone living in The Ukraine no longer seems so in the United States. Further, since wealth is by its nature comparative and absolute, she is confronted with more of what she is missing the same way that someone that upgrades neighborhoods suddenly notices what they don’t have that their new neighbors do. In any event, she can now bad herself a man of more comparable attractiveness or that doesn’t have whatever the man had that forced him to resort to MOBs. It’s not quite that simple because she will always be a foreigner (and on something other than her first marriage to any new guy she meets in the US) and that’s a liability, but it’ll be closer. While she might leave the guy for someone wealthier, my guess is that she would probably leave him for someone more attractive if there is a great disparity.

It’s harder to find a place with the sudden increase in options amongst Americans. The most obvious place to look is college. One of the reasons that so few high school relationships survive college is that each partner is suddenly confronted with so many more options. You do the best you can at the high school level, but when you get to college you’re more likely to find someone cute who also shares your weird interests or someone who shares your interest but, unlike your high school sweetheart, is also kinda cute. These relationships also often fall short on the commitment scale since we’re dealing with still-developing senses of attraction.

Another example is when one partner suddenly loses a whole lot of weight and starts getting the idea that they might could do better than their still-fat partner. This is the example where the first factor, commitment, helps a lot because it’s more likely to exist.

Not to get all One To Grow On or anything, but this is one of those areas where being with someone (and having someone together with you) for the right reasons matters so much. In the case of MOBs, both partners are in a way cheating. He’s using leverage he didn’t particularly earn (it was afforded to him by virtue of being born in the United States of America or into a family of citizens) to score a wife with attributes he would have a lot of difficulty getting otherwise. She’s cheating to get into the US and to get access to the comparable wealth by using her attractiveness. Again, this is not the foundation of a successful marriage and it’s not unlikely that either party is going to bolt at a better opportunity (though only one of these two is likely to rapidly see better opportunities). But the same applies to other sorts of relationships. Two unattractive people can fall in love, but if they’re disgruntledly settling for one another (which I’ve seen happen) it’ll usually fall apart even without the option. It’ll merely take the perception of an option with a “real girl” or “real guy.”

So in conclusion, I would just like to say that anyone that says “I wouldn’t sleep with you if you were the last person on earth” is probably lying. They may not have the commitment, but expectations are quickly adjusted based on availability.

-{The next installment from a dormant series}-

While staying in Estacado, I have been the guest of my good friend Kyle. Kyle has been a great host in every respect but one. In The World According to William, when hosting somebody from out of town, it’s best to make accommodations for them to eat where they want to eat. You live there. You can eat wherever you want to whenever you want to. If they’re just in for a couple of days, they may want to eat some specific places. Now, if you really don’t like eating there, maybe you find a compromise.

Kyle has been really hip on showing me some of what he considers the best restaurants in Santomas to be. I appreciate the thought. I really do. But there are already so many great restaurants here that I already know about. Eating at a new great place (and I don’t doubt that the food would be good) just gives me another place to miss and to add to an already long list of restaurants I want to eat at. Fortunately, I managed to convince them not to take me to a place that I knew I wouldn’t like, but even that took effort. I don’t like raisins. No, it doesn’t matter how great or “unnoticeable” they are. I don’t care if I can just overlook it if I don’t think about it. I don’t want to overlook it. I want to eat at a restaurant I haven’t been able to eat at in over two years.

It’s a really hard point to get through. I run into the same problem with my father. We have a tradition of eating breakfast together. I want to eat at Happy Burger, which he likes as well as most other options, but he keeps wanting variety (which come to think of it is kind of odd for Dad). He keeps wanting to take me to Denny’s because he has a coupon. But he, and I, can eat at Denny’s any time (and I’ll pay for Happy Burger!). I don’t get the opportunity to eat at Happy Burger very often. Fortunately, I think after a few rounds of this he’s finally “got it.”

Yeah, I’m whining and grumbling a bit because I had a list of three restaurants I wanted to eat at over five meals and I only got to eat at one of them. Two of them couldn’t be helped just because of my itenerary, but in two cases I was left with the choice of either going somewhere alone instead of enjoying food with my friend (I should add that these are restaurants that I know he likes, he recommended a couple of them to me in the first place!), getting into a dicey standoff with my friend who has otherwise been the perfect host (and whose efforts on my behalf lead to the visit in the first place!), or skipping out on where I want to eat for a new place that I either won’t like or will like and will not be able to eat at again.

Bakadesuyo asks if writing can make someone more forgiving. The study he cites talks about writing more broadly and determines that it can indeed make people more forgiving of personal offenses. I think this makes sense from my own perspective in that when I put down my thoughts about something on paper, it makes me consider interpersonal issues more broadly and more likely to see things from the other perspective. I think this works for me in particular because I have a keen countervoice that argues against a lot that I say. It can make me a more effective and sometimes persuasive writer because, as my wife discovered during her brief stint in sales, whoever gets to the objection first wins.

When I first read the headline and hadn’t read the article, I was thinking more about writing fiction. I think the same applies there, too, much of the time. Sometimes people write fiction with a very specific axe to grind. This writing can be compelling, though it is made moreso when the writer can encapsulate the alternate point of view if only to knock it down. Swiping at strawmen is good at convincing the converted, but usually amounts to little more than a rallying cry. Taking the best opposing arguments and putting them out there with care is essentially getting to the objection first. People that are not already on your side can often latch on to anything that you missed and posit that it undermines your entire argument.

But beyond that, a good story requires three-dimensional characters from differing perspectives. Otherwise, there’s no conflict and no good story.

One of the things I take pride with in regards to my own novels written and unwritten is how well developed my characters are and how they are not simply compelling characters echoing my perspective and buffoons airing the opposite. The main characters in all of my stories do typically come from backgrounds similar to my own insofar as they are WASPy (if not always strictly WASP), but the ways that they see the world can differ greatly. They range in politics from far-right to far-left and everything in between. Most struggle with religion, though a couple (in different novels) are dedicated Baptists while a couple others are committed atheists. A couple characters who are reliable Democrats nonetheless express startlingly conservative viewpoints on particular issues and one politician who is a booster of the Religious Right is privately an atheist. And rather than being portrayed as simple hypocrites, I approach the characters with a great deal of care because I care about them. They’re complicated people. Most people are.

When you’re creating people from scratch and having basically good people holding views that you want to throttle them for, it requires a degree of forgiveness of backwards thought (however defined). It challenges assumptions on who your philosophical opponents are as people. When you have a thoughtful, honorable character with views that differ greatly from your own, it forces you to think about honorable people with very different views from yours. It becomes harder and harder to be smug and self-righteous.

Of course, writers can alternately rely on stereotypes and caricatures. Everybody that disagrees with them can be a knuckle-dragging fundie or a limp-wristed heathen. I certainly see enough movies and read (or listen to) enough books where this is the case. I am reminded of something Roger Ebert said about a movie being only as smart as its dumbest major player (usually the antagonist, but I think in the reference he was making it was someone supposed to be assisting the protagonist but whose job it was to be loudly and arrogantly wrong about everything). That’s something that gets lost along the way.

Irin Carmon at Jezebel argues that shameless (sexual) objectification can be a good thing. She gives five reasons, but it ultimately comes down to the argument that “Well, it’s okay if women do it” as well as arguing that the sexual objectification she’s talking about (regarding World Cup soccer players) is not entirely sexual.

I am actually somewhat sympathetic to arguments that behavior is more tolerable or less so depending on who is doing it. Ultimately, though, I found Carmon’s reasoning unconvincing.

Her first argument is context. It’s okay for women to do it because women are at a social disadvantage and it’s therefore not damaging for them to behave in a way that would be damaging if it were those at a social advantage doing it. I think that this is sometimes true. For instance, Mormons refusing to hire non-Mormons in Delosa is far, far less damaging than Mormons refusing to hire non-Mormons in Deseret. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the former is okay, but I would definitely place it pretty far down the list of injustices worthy of our collective attention. So does that apply to men and women? Perhaps it makes it less damaging. However, I find the notion that the difference is so substantial that objectification by men can be completely unacceptable while objectification by women is not only acceptable but “a good thing.”

Her second argument for the gender distinction goes a little further in trying to explain why objectification by women is a good thing by arguing that it disrupts the narrative that women a not visually oriented. I actually agree with Carmon that the distinctions between men and women as far as visual-orientedness is vastly overstated and could even be convinced that it’s non-existent if only because I don’t care all that much. However, in point of behavior there is a distinction between the behavior as you see it. It could be because of social conditioning or it could be because genetics. If it’s the former, though, do we want to bring women down to the level of men? From my perspective, I think it would be better if men became less transparently visual in nature. Or, in fact, that we acknowledge that men are less visual than popular culture would have us believe. The best argument that Carmon could be using here is if there is a genetic component to it and we wish to disrupt that because if there is a genetic component then we don’t have to worry nearly as much about women becoming as flawed as the male stereotype.

In short, the last argument is that “it’s okay for women to look, too!” while then proceeding to argue away the “too” by maintaining that it’s not okay for men to.

As an interlude, I will take on the weakest of the five arguments. It doesn’t matter a wit that women are also oogling over foreigners. Believe me, men do it, too.

The remaining two arguments involve the context in which the men are being displayed. Female “objects” are “sexyface, no corpse-like poses” while the male objects are doing what they love. The thing is that men don’t need pornographic poses to objectify in an objectionable manner. Women can simply be crossing a construction site on the street! That doesn’t make it okay, does it? In fact, the counterargument could be true. The women who are taking on sexual poses volunteered for objectification. The men are just playing soccer and may just want to be left alone unless one is of the mindset that men are more sexual beings and thus are inherently more receptive to the attention of random women. I don’t think that’s the argument that Carmon wants to make.

Flawed, too, is the notion that it’s okay to objectify soccer players because they are in good physical condition. Anyone remember that UCLA track team girl that had an inappropriate website dedicated to her? She was in fantastic physical condition and those doing the oogling could easily make this argument. How likely would that fly with the Jezebel crew? Pretty poorly, I would imagine. There’s nothing wrong with appreciating a beautiful body in a non-sexual context. Clancy has been known to look at physically fit individuals and comment that they would make an excellent medical school cadaver (it’s awesome that I married someone that makes observations like these). But that only really works if you’re looking at individuals that you internally consider to be sexually appropriate. If you’re not appreciating female athletes, too, or athletes that you would consider too young to otherwise unavailable, there is a strong sexual component to it. This is true even if you’re not actually aching to rip their clothes off and make mad love to them.

So what are my thoughts on objectification? I agree with Carmon that context matters. I would just argue that it’s not an “okay for one gender but not the other” sort of way. Any objectification that would make the other person uncomfortable is inappropriate. That means that while your thoughts are your own, a website you put up for a UCLA track star is not. Appreciating a woman walking down the street is one thing. Disrupting her thoughts by whistling at her is not. Appreciating the beauty of the opposite sex (assuming heterosexuality) is fine, though talking about it in the company of people of the opposite sex that it would make insecure is not. I think the big thing is to be unobtrusive about it.

The following contains spoilers on the eighth and final season of 24.

In some ways, the 8th Season of 24 was the most interesting. A weakness of the show, in my opinion, is that the presidents on 24 tended to fall distinctly into two categories: Good and honest presidents (Presidents Palmer, President Taylor) and terrible and dishonest presidents (President Logan, Acting President Daniels). In that sense, President Keeler struck me as the only realistic president. That’s a topic for another time, but what Season 8 did was present a real fall from grace from an erstwhile good president.

One of the things that struck me about President Taylor throughout the course of the season was that, being such a good and wholesome person, she simply didn’t know how to be dishonest. Or rather, because she was so unaccustomed to bending, she couldn’t do it without breaking. I was actually with her at first. I thought that sidelining Jack Bauer, while obviously tactically a bad move (nobody sidelines Jack Bauer), to be a reasonable move under the circumstances. He threatened a peace process that far bigger than the crimes that he wanted to expose. I really thought it was Jack Bauer that was the unreasonable one.

The problem really began not just when Bauer escaped, but when she kept trying to cover everything up afterward. One can forgive her for her misjudgment on Bauer because she doesn’t know that he’s the star of a show in which he is a force of nature. But there came a point where it was obvious that she lost control. Nevermind the morality of the situation, the threat of even an unlikely exposure by Bauer represented a far greater threat than a temporarily derailed peace process. Where the situation became entirely unsustainable was when she had the reporter jailed. At that point, it was nearly impossible to imagine that she could get away with it. Even having her killed would have resulted in too many questions being asked (Bauer’s death would have been easier to cover up).

Taylor’s ultimate problem is that by being an honest person, she couldn’t bend without breaking. She didn’t know where the line was between cutthroat politics and myopathy. Someone with more experience skirting the line would have known when it was time to cut their losses.

Of course, in the end Charles Logan didn’t pull it off, either. Sort of for the opposite problem. Unlike Taylor, Logan would have been willing to do whatever it took to keep it quiet. But without any sort of moral compass beyond expediency, Logan simply didn’t know where to draw the line for practicality’s sake. In his own warped sense of morality, he too was doing the right thing. He had his own myopathy that pushed him to do some pretty bad things not only without regard to basic morality but without a complete understanding of how perceived immorality – even if what he was doing was completely right in his own eyes – could undermine his cause.

Back to Taylor for a moment, the idea struck me somewhere after Bauer escaped and prior to Merideth Reed being jailed that there was a compromise to be struck between Taylor and Bauer. Taylor wanted her peace process and Bauer wanted his justice. Had Taylor simply been willing to look the other way while Bauer extracted justice, they both could have been satisfied. President Suvarov could not have made too many waves for fear of being exposed. Of course, when Suvarov himself was discovered to be behind it all, that would have complicated things. At that point, Taylor could have offered Bauer a plane ticket to Russia and requested that he wait until then and that he cover his tracks.

In the end, neither Taylor nor Bauer would have probably consented to The Truman Plan. It was too far outside of Taylor’s character to be so aggressively amoral for the greater good even if the alternative was to back into something worse. It’s sorta like the young couple that can rationalize having unprotected sex as spur-of-the-moment but believe bringing a condom is a sign of sin because it meant that you had planned it all along and were therefore more morally culpable. She had to be pushed into it one step at a time. And Bauer’s sense of morality would likely have made allowing Suvarov to go down in history as a respectable figure of peace (having signed both Logan’s accords as well as Taylor’s) would have been too much for him to accept. Or maybe not. The guy was a former black ops operative, so he must have had some understanding that some things are best left unexposed. That’s a harder sell when his girlfriend’s body is not yet cold, however.

A while back, Stan (OneSTDV) wrote a post about odd and unusual baby names and what they mean:

But as with most SWPL phenomenon, this younger cohort is mirroring black behavior in a parallel opposition to mainstream white culture. Extreme Hollywood examples such as “Apple”, “Suri”, and “Pilot Inspektor” reflect a growing trend amongst the SWPL class. These effete urbanites eschew mainstream/traditional choices in favor of “unique” and “special” names like Aiden, Elijah, Jayden, Nevaeh, Makayla, and Hannah. Are these choices outrageous? Not really, but they represent a conscious effort to individualize their children by opposing “boring” names that harbor historical sentiment.

I think that there is something to what he’s saying, but I think that he over-universalizes it. Frequently the names are not attempts at individuality at all but are simply following the pack. They heard a name, they like it, they apply it to their child. At least, I believe that’s the case for a lot of the names that he mentions. Elijah and Hannah are in the Bible and names don’t go back much further than that. The fact that they have a sudden resurgence has a lot more to do with herd behavior than an individuality banner.

I think for some of the really original names, that goes under the individuality banner. I don’t know how much of that is actual hostility towards middle America and what is not. When it comes to African-Americans, it obviously plays a role. That they would be unenthusiastic about perpetuating names from a culture with whom they have had a historically contentious relationship is no surprise. With swipples, I think it’s more of a mixed thing. I think some do want to distance themselves from middle America, though I have to say that it has always been thus. Names work their way down the SES-chain. In some cases, it’s less about differentiating from Middle America as it is differentiating from People Poorer Than You. The ultimate rebellion against middle America would be to adopt names that are a poke in the eye of their perceived enemy. If they really wanted to state their opposition to American culture, they’d adopt black names. Few, however, do. That’s why I think it has more to do with basic class dynamics than it does a desire to differentiate themselves from one particular group (“Middle America”). Even though it would not be inappropriate, I would be surprised if we have a whole lot of white Baracks graduating high school 20 years from now. And that guy is not only hated by the people they are supposed t0 be hating, he’s the President of the United States.

And another puncture in the theory is that it’s not just poor blacks and rich white swipples that are adopting these names. The first time I was introduced to a lot of outlandish names, it was in… Deseret. Not rich. Very white. Not hostile to middle America. 70% Republican. And no, they weren’t specifically Mormon names. Indeed, it wasn’t just the Mormons doing it.

Heather Horn from The Atlantic has another interesting post on “original baby names” in which it points out… they’re not that original. Not just insofar as they’re copying others by trying to break the baby norm, but the names follow certain patterns:

You end up with those six names that rhyme with Aidan in the top 100 names of the 2000s, and 38 of them, from Aaden to Zayden, in the top 1,000. The irony is that classic English names such as George and Edward, Margaret and Alice — the names that used to be standard-bearers — all have distinctive sounds. They aren’t prisoners to phonetic fashion; each of them sounds instantly recognizable. Contemporary names, by contrast, travel in phonetic packs. More than a third of American boys now receive a name ending in the letter N. (In decades past, the most popular boys’ names were more evenly split between a number of endings, including D, L, S and Y.)

This strikes at the one reason that I am ambivalent to unique names. Basically, there is value in throwing more names into the mix. As someone whose had name(s) shared with classmates throughout school, I can appreciate the diminished confusion by adding a Laetwyn in with a Lenny. Of course, it’s never worked out that way and the result is that you get classes with 27 Jennifers (a name that was not all that common before) and 15 Jasons. But I thought that the names that were punched up at least offered an alternative to that. Even they, though, have become entirely contrived.

One of the attendees of my church growing up, Humboldt Ford was something of a local big to-do. He was a black man that had to overcome a lot to get where he got. Raised in the South, in order to get an appointment to a military academy he had to get an endorsement from a congressperson from the midwest. He made an interesting point about his experiences in the South and in the North. He said that being in the North made him a lot more nervous when he was younger. Why? Because in the South, as unacceptable as the rules were, he knew what they were. With gritted teeth, he could follow them. He knew what restrooms to use. He knew what he could and could not say. In the North, a lot of people had a lot more liberal attitudes and he could do a lot more. The problem was that the rules would be unevenly applied and what was acceptable in one place would get him hurled epithets and threats in another. So he ended up following the rules of the South wherever he was.

The above story should not be considered an apology for the South. On the whole, we had to reach the inconsistency of the North as a middle ground to minorities being able to do everything they’re rightfully allowed to do today.

Rather, it reminds me of some of the values of social norms. The most obvious value is when they encourage good behavior. Few would contest that there is value in that except to the extent to which we can agree what “good behavior” consists of. Norms also hold great value in those with the influence to be able to set them. I mean, you get to tell people to do what you want! But sometimes the norms are pretty neutral. Or they can be extremely negative, grossly unfair validating behavior that should be unacceptable. But when that’s the case, the problems are with the norms themselves instead of their existence.

Seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? What about those norms, however, that are either completely arbitrary or difficult to really justify on an objective basis? Those kinds of these where we look at the people trying to enforce them and want to say “Oh, come on, just deal.”

When Mom was raised, it was common for young ladies to go to finishing school where they would learn how properly to be a lady. A good portion of the instruction there involves teaching things that are, in the end, of pretty minimal importance. The objective rationale for never putting your elbows on the table or holding your fork just so are pretty weak.

Fashion norms are themselves are often completely arbitrary. How should you dress? Well it changes from one decade (or shorter) to the next. We judge one another on how we dress not by any objective criteria but rather by how it fits in to a bunch of arbitrary norms. Middle-aged conservative folks see a kid with a dog collar and role their eyes even though a collar is objectively not much different from a necklace. And the kid wears the collar precisely because she wants to be seen that way (whether she admits it or not). All of these communications take place because of shared norms. Arbitrary ones.

In the last half-century or so, there has been a gradual shift away from respecting cultural norms and considering their arbitrariness to be a reason to ignore them. Society obviously has not succeeded in this venture, as the collar demonstrates, but significant headway has been made.

This benefits the individual insofar as they can look, dress, and act as they prefer with far less harassment than they might have seen in yesteryear. This is the upside. The downside, however, is that with loosened cultural norms, it becomes much more difficult for people to know how to behave in the most socially acceptable way. It creates a sort of chaotic landscape.

Dressing and acting however you want, even when you’re not hurting anyone else, will never be entirely okay. There will always be a segment of the population that wants its norms. There will always be a segment of the population that considers what they and those around them do – whatever they and those around them do – to be normal. These are variations as to what has always been the case.

But one thing that is done is that in a void of shared, arbitrary norms of acceptable behavior, acceptable behavior can be conveniently defined and redefined and enforced in an even more arbitrary manner. So in the old way of thinking, wearing a hat indoors was impolite. In the new way of thinking, it’s polite. Until someone you don’t like does it, then you can suddenly decide to enforce that norm as you talk about him behind his back with a bunch of friends that can’t really remember or don’t care that they have done the same. And even if it’s pointed out to them, they can draw whatever arbitrary distinctions that they want.

At least when society draws its arbitrary norms and distinctions, it’s something collectively agreed upon by a group of (granted, wholly unrepresentative) people. People can write a book about it. People that want to know what to do in “polite company” can read that book. It can be taught in finishing school. While these norms were typically written by the privileged, it gave the outsiders an opportunity to learn and abide by them. They probably wouldn’t get it right, but they could try.

In a world where arbitrary norms are derided, they rules can be written and rewritten as often as is convenient for the keep the walls as erected as possible between acceptable people doing acceptable things and unacceptable people doing unacceptable things. Dressing correctly shifts away from standards that can be adhered to and be defined entirely by who is and is not engaging in them. By the time people far down the social pole get word, you can change it all over again. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that as communication has increased, fashion not-quite-norms shift faster and faster to the point that it’s impossible to keep up.

By and large, chaos benefits the powerful. Kids in black and red shirts saying “ANARCHY RULEZ!” are often the very losers who would fare the worst in a more anarchic environment. Rather than creating an environment where the norms of the least among us would be regarded as just as legitimate as those among the most powerful, it creates a system where acceptable behavior is defined precisely around who is doing what. Even if there are no right and wrong things, people will make darn sure there are right and wrong people.

We can’t bring down barriers and norms until and unless we can actually get people on board. When being considered too judgmental (even and especially on arbitrary things) is a bad thing, you get people that quietly judge (which is unfair to the judged because they don’t even know how they are falling short) and you get those that make a big point of judging to be disagreeable and to register their protest at their preferred state of affairs being challenged. The latter folks are often asshats by nature, thus further silencing the first group.

Of course, when a social norm is affirmatively wrong and needs to be challenged, you have to plow forward. It’s hard to argue that a period in time where Humboldt Ford doesn’t entirely know how to act isn’t worth it for Hum Ford to accept a high-level appointment in the administration of the first black president. When a social norm is affirmatively right, it should be defended. In the in between, though? Sometimes having arbitrary-but-harmless rules is better than not.

It’s one of the notable things in popular entertainment and advertising that while variations are allowed in the attractiveness of men, the same is not true of women. With the exception of character for whom fatness is integral to the part (and even then they are sometimes played by future anorexics that were never fat to begin with). But the rest of the time, unattractive means “hot but with braces and kooky glasses” or in other cases “hot but referred to as ugly.”

From which is born the term Liz Lemon Ugly. Liz Lemon is the main character on 30 Rock played by Tina Fey. According to Chloe Angyal, Liz Lemon is an archetype for the character that is deemed ugly by the characters on the show so that the audience knows that the character is supposed to be ugly because there is no way of knowing that by looking at their beautiful faces.

I sort of take objection to the characterization of Lemon. I have been watching a lot of 30 Rock during the move and few negative comments are made about physical non-beauty. Her lackluster romantic life is mostly attributed to her social ineptitude. Be that as it may, Angyal’s point still stands. Indeed, Fey was indeed used as the “ugly woman” in the movie The Invention of Lies. And the crucial difference between popular and attractive characters and characters cut from a more inconspicuous cloth has far less to do with the attractiveness of the actress in question (few are anything but beautiful) and more to do with what the characters say and context.

Angyal wants to see this change. I agree. There’s no reason why television can have room for men across the spectrum but not women. The problem is that Angyal and I are in the minority. This is an area where I would argue that men are not really the culprits here. Guys not only appreciate women in more size and shapes than we’re given credit for, but we seem to appreciate them in more size and shapes than women themselves do.

There’s been a push lately towards showing real-size women and plus-size women in advertising aimed at women. The idea is that ordinary women will relate better to more ordinary women in advertisements. I think it’s fair to say that men are more broadly represented not only because women are alleged to have much more tolerance for different kinds of men (an allegation I’m not sure is true in scope) but also because men are more likely to bond with guys as flawed as they are. We see a guy like Rob Riggle and see a little bit of ourselves and relate. Meanwhile, we often become excessively critical of guys that become heart-throbs. Bruce Willis up, Tom Cruise down.

Women… don’t seem to work that way. With the exception of a fascination for certain actresses (Angelina Jolie comes to mind), they seem to line up behind whomever it is that men are supposed to line up behind. Indeed, it seems at times that they flock to Kate Moss and then get upset at men for being fixated on waifs. Not that there aren’t men that consider anybody above a size two to be fat, but there seems to be far more women. The patriarchy is so successful in this regard that it no longer requires further male involvement.

Well. Further straight male involvement.