Porn
Scott Galloway:
I graduated (barely) from UCLA with a 2.27 GPA. I did, however, go on campus almost every day. Specifically, I left my fraternity to venture on campus as UCLA in the eighties was like a Cinemax film set in Brentwood. I would hang at North Campus with friends and, to be blunt, hope to meet someone I might (note: “might” is doing a lot of work) have sex and establish a relationship with. If I’d had on-demand porn on my phone and computer, I’m not sure I would have graduated, as I would have lost some of the incentive to venture on campus. I just read the previous sentence, and it sounds crass and shallow — but it’s also accurate. And that’s the rub, so to speak. Porn can reduce your ambition to take risks, become a better person, and build a better life. The best thing in my life is raising two men with a competent, loving partner. The catalyst for me risking humiliation, approaching her at the Raleigh Hotel pool, and introducing myself wasn’t a desire to someday qualify for lower car insurance rates, but the desire / hope to have sex.
Scott can be obnoxious at times, but I admire his candidness.
Trump Is Courting Apolitical Young Men. Will It Pay Off?
Finn Murphy, a 20-year-old college student in Carolina Beach, N.C., generally stays away from politics. But when he listened to snippets of the podcast, he liked what he heard. That’s why, hair still wet from an afternoon of surfing, he was standing in line last week alongside people three times his age to cast a vote for Mr. Trump.
“He’s strong; he’s a man,” Mr. Murphy said. “I’m here to make sure he wins.”
Anecdotally, this is working. Trump has won over a lot of young men this way, if only because he appears “strong.”
Ever the showman, he’s closed the loop on making our politics entertainment. Recently, I heard a guy my age — single, white, rural, gay — tell me he really appreciated Trump working at a McDonalds for a day, “so he could understand what it’s like for those of us without anything.”
Nevermind that it was a choreographed publicity stunt — it worked.
What does this say about our country, that we can’t discern real from fake, television huckster from serious politician?
Some people would say there is no difference, and hasn’t been in many, many years.
We are not a serious people. And we might deserve what we get.
That fills me with sadness.
You Don’t Have to be a Try Guy
The point is that you don’t know someone’s character until that character is revealed to you in a way that’s entirely separate from the performed, self-conscious aspects of a person. This, again, is another aspect of human social life that’s made harder in the internet era, given that there is no such thing as an affect-free presentation of the self online. Decency and integrity can only be discovered through the process of actually getting to know someone; they are not superficial virtues but instead deep, in-the-bone qualities that reveal themselves only slowly and with effort.
A decent man does not have to put on an elaborate performance of being sexless and unthreatening towards women, in part because he understands that such a performance is no guarantor of safety at all. Very often, such affects are the very tools of predation. Nor should any of us operate under the impression that because some men are strong in the commission of abuse then the problem is the strength and not the abuse. It would probably be more convenient if good and bad came to us labeled and prepackaged, but they don’t. Sometimes the best men are some of the least ostentatiously feminist men, but only sometimes. You just have to live with someone long enough to find out when nice is only Nice. As Little Red Riding Hood taught us, nice is different than good.