An amazingly original piece of work by Tilcsik et al., “Concealable stigma and occupational segregation: Toward a theory of gay and lesbian occupations” [Administrative Science Quarterly 60(3)], came up with a theory of which occupations gay males and lesbians might choose, then tested that theory. The results are so accurate the whole process seems like it was run in reverse.

The authors propose that gays and lesbians both prize “task independence,” i.e., potentially homophobic bosses not breathing down their necks. Both groups further prize “social perceptiveness,” which could be seen as actually applying one’s social skills instead of keeping them in reserve.

The bothersome point in the paper is entertaining the idea that gay males’ and lesbians’ job choices are a puzzle. I can’t take that puzzlement seriously. It amounts to wilful blindness on the part of gay-money researchers, who reach for ever-more-bizarre and counterintuitive explanations for the jobs gays and lesbians do. They’re just not willing to admit that gay men are too sensitive to duke it out with straight guys on the job (my terminology). Oddly, they’re also not willing to admit that a lot of dykes are diesels who are perfectly fine repairing such engines. Everything is dressed up as discrimination or some kind of youthful trauma (see below).

Tilcsik et al. helpfully quote some other research that shows discrimination is not a plausible explanation for gay and lesbian job choices. That’s as plain as the nose on your face, or the acute accent in András Tilcsik’s name.

Running through a set of statistical surveys, what jobs did the authors identify as typical of gay men and lesbians? You’ll never guess!

Shocker.

Meanwhile, leftist gay publications (tautological) continue to lie about the legitimate gay and lesbian community. A glorified blog of some kind claimed that gays’ near-invariant choice to enter untroublesome cultural occupations or quiet office work instead of shipping out to the oil rig is straightforwardly the result of bullying in school.

No.

Gays are temperamentally different from heterosexualists, save for the uncounted few gay boys who were masculine from birth (and, for example, always liked football). I have read what I believe is all the research on that topic and have asked scientists directly, yet nobody has an estimate of the percentage of young gay boys who are, in effect, straight-acting. That’s how rare they are.

Of course the rest of these boys are going to become, say, stewardesses or actresses. Getting called a fag in high school, which would now get the harasser booted out of that school, has no bearing on anything. Indeed, faggy young gay boys can really fuck up straight boys’ lives by untruthfully squealing to the principal that the real boys called them a name. It’s the maladaptives who have the power now.

Apple will now forestall implementation of its threat to inspect your private photographs and text messages, and eavesdrop on your Siri commands, for suspected kiddie porn. The entire infrastructure is wrong in principle, but critics of Apple’s plans have their own ideas of what “principle” might entail, and it always means “make sure my political enemies are harmed but my allies are protected.”

It was particularly risible to read that Apple’s surveillance mechanisms might be reused by some kind of authoritarian or repressive régime. Apple already is one of those. Its authoritarianism merely pleases the political biases of the far-left Apple press. [continue with: Apple already is a repressive régime →]

Hey, Retard! is what the game-changing E‑mail software from Basecamp is not called. Its name is just Hey.

The great Jason Fried of Basecamp, author of so many bestsellers on usability and the futility of meetings at the office, charges you a hundred bucks for the worst E‑mail software in three decades. Hey.com is the IBM PCjr of electronic mail. [continue with: Simpletons and slow children now have their own E‑mail software →]

Shawn “Toxic” Smith will bill you 200 bucks an hour for men’s therapy. (No less than that fee – for philosophical reasons, he states.)

Relationship Repair

I offer solution-focused couples therapy to eliminate hurtful, destructive patterns and create a loving and supportive relationship.

I dared to E‑mail Smith regarding an unrelated issue. He replied by calling me names and musing that a certain flavour of burden he imputes I am dealing with is my entire fault. He’s the hurtful one, yet I am deemed to engage in destructive patterns.

I infer that Smith will take your money and fake like he is nice and caring in the Frank Mackey manner, all the while shit-talking you behind your back. He’s willing to malign gay men he’s never met, so I put little past him. In no respect is this tolerable behaviour from any kind of analyst, let alone one who uses the title Dr. and boasts he is licensed.

Though I was only ever a listener, I recall better treatment from call-in shows on AM radio in the ’90s. Shawn T. Smith is indeed toxic, hurtful, and destructive, and he is a danger to any man seeking his help.

The ecosystem elliptically orbiting Jack the Perfume Nationalist has become what it beheld – liberals. A crowd of underachievers, these artists’ vice is nothing so déclassé as heroin or as trailer-park as fentanyl. It is psychopathic cruelty.

As I have explained at length over my decades online (a corpus far in excess of anything the TPN demimonde has produced in totum), what I have called downtown progressives decide to inflict opprobrium and ostracism on an unworthy, then justify their mobbing as the very least he deserves.

A downtown progressive is a liberal in Jack’s nomenclature. Like André the Giant, Jack’s got a posse, and I’ve had them mob me the way BLM and antifa (and black guys on the subway) have done.

The art podcaster’s vice is mislabelling an ardent supporter a vexing adversary (in their argot, a “hater”) and pillorying him directly. And, in Jack’s case and his brother’s, passive-aggressively writing me up on Twitter. Jack is ringleader of the tormentors.

These guys are all underachievers. I would expect something resembling class solidarity from a cohort all of which listens to Aimée Thérèse, the fastest talker this side of Eminem.

• Jack has simply not figured out how to monetize his brilliance and works a front-desk job dealing with neoliberal yuppies he loathes. On Canada Day a decade ago, I listened to an Adam Carolla episode in which he was explicitly coached and schooled about how to make money in podcasting. Deservedly or not, who’s the millionaire now?

  Umpteen straightforward options are available so that Jack can bring in a hundred grand a year and pursue the intellectual leisure he and everyone else agree is his birthright. He’s doing none of it.

• The latest defamer, a 49th-stater with the facial laxities of the visible depressive, can’t get his upstairs neighbour to stop blasting rap music and just barely upgraded himself to office lady, a position I had held in the previous century.

  

  This little man ruined my day today. He, like Jack, calls himself a Christian, or at least they allow Trans Regret Snoopy to believe same.

• The mastermind behind the second-best art podcast, Ghost Jail, works a 9‑to‑5, as do the passel of Barret(t)s in this circle. Even Jack’s brother is surrounded by cubefraus on all sides. A boisterous fan is purgatorially consigned to a health-food co‑op. Then there’s that insurance adjuster.

Of course they’re frustrated. But the scenario here is the same as Jack’s: I’m right about everything, and another thing I’m right about is you guys have decayed into a liberal mob who can’t wait to express the bottomless hatred that springs from the frustrations of your stunted careers.

I don’t initiate shit. I show up pre-blocked on Twitter. (Jack’s lies about forgiveness and generosity in this regard gall still.) On luckier days I can actually talk to these men. One of them hasn’t turned on me yet (Zion is still to fall). The rest have.

In their view (the view of the liberal), I deserve it. I deserve so much more.

The psychopathy of the TPN-adjacent underachiever is far worse than pulling a Heath Ledger and leaving a beautiful corpse. While amassing unique works of art, building them up episodically in formats that can be destroyed in a flash, these wayward manchildren put a whole lot of day-to-day effort into nastiness and cruelty.

This distributed gang warfare by skinnyfat podcasters brandishing Bijan like a sigil is something they’re quite proud of. In their Walter Mitty– or Billy Liar–redolent imaginings, they really would harangue me in person. They really would take it to the next level.

Overall, this is the wrong way to be a tortured artist, and these are life choices you can unmake on a dime. Since that’s how much you’re basically making on what has become your life’s work, take the advice.

Skill-testing question for TPN acolytes

Is your first response to this posting to lash out even more?

Lydia Perović (no relation) interviews a mainstay of this Weblog, Russell Smith, and gets everything wrong that could be gotten wrong, from facts to copy to mondegreens to ‘apostrophes and ‘quotation marks’.

The YA is largely targeted at young girls. And I know this form my son; there are now a lot of middle grade books aimed at boys. But now we’re moving into the YA phase. There’s almost none I can find. I’m reading him old, really problematic adventure books that he absolutely loves. Biggles. This is so English. Biggles is a series of stories about a First World War pilot and adventurer, written by a British army officer in the air force of the time. He wrote them in 1920s 30s, 40s, and it’s all upper class British “fighting the Hun and the Bosch” and daring-do adventuring and getting out of scrapes and escaping from behind German lines and it’s classist and xenophobic and tremendously exciting for a 12-yo boy. There are all kinds of stereotypes about ‘silly Frenchmen’ and ‘uptight Germans’ but it’s intra-European so it’s fine.

Is an inability to publish correct type and copy another reason why literature is dying? (Is such a death deserved, even merciful?)

Perović and Smith operate in a world where Reality Hunger was never written. Of no surprise whatsoever were Perović’s absent questions on plagiarism.

Boomers by Helen Andrews (Penguin, 2020) shows how little value now resides in signing a book deal with Penguin (even well before 2020). This thing was not fact-checked or in any sense vigorously edited. [continue with: This just in: Publishing still moribund →]

• Initial discussion ☞

• May–June 2021 updates: “Shut up and take my money” ☞

• The Perfume Nationalist Fragrance Collection ☞

• Psychopathic, underachieving savants become what they beheld ☞

May–June 2021 updates:

• When not blubbering on an hermaphrodite’s shoulder, here’s how the Perfume Nationalist explains what a kind and generous guy he is online. (All copy-edited.)

  • Open invitation for anyone to simply talk to me instead of posting unwell-seeming threads of screenshots arguing with a Black Lodge version of me they’ve made up and projected the various unrelated strains and tensions of life in 2020 onto.

  • If you’re blocked and someone tells me you’re cool or want to be unblocked I’ll do it.

    Well established as a lie at this point, but let’s continue.

    But most people prefer the excitement of being blocked so they’ll have a little plotline for their group chats to discuss.

  • This is my block philosophy:

    • You favo[u]rite egregiously bad tweets about me
    • You normalize psychotic stalker behavior by encouraging people who do that
    • Antagonistic Reply Guy with annoying tone

    These are just mass blocks of spider nests. I don’t recall most blocked individuals.

  • If you have ever, and I mean ever, selected a stranger online to negatively focus on or spend a minute of your day trying to “own” or “expose” or “bullycide” instead of focus[s]ing on things and people you like, your priorities are fucked and you’re wrong about your entire life.

    (Another would-be fan: “I haven’t mentioned the Perfume Nationalist in like half a year. Why did he block me again, like, just recently? Very healthy to keep a mental Rolodex of everybody who has ever called you fat on the Internet and nurture grudges against them.”)

  • I unblock literally anyone who asks but most people prefer the giggly drama/feeling like they’re part of something important.

  • Love that people pretend it’s noble and brave to engage with random anon antagonistic reply-people instead of banishing them to the shadow realm forever because it’s really easy to read whether people are good or bad on here.

  • “These tweets are protected”: This person is a baby who’s addicted to Twitter but won’t even properly participate in it, gotcha. There’s literally no reason to post anything if you have your account locked. Get out of the kiddie pool, LURKERS.

• Jack’s shockingly inarticulate brother (he at least recognizes same) is now making fun of the term eldergay, coined by DataLounge but known to these two only through me.

• These fellas have been uniformly awful to me. But I still have the iMessages I had exchanged with Jack, in which I wrote “Thinking of you” when he had posted on Twitter how unwell he was feeling.

  I was going to PayPal Jack a hundred bucks (“Quoth Fry: ‘Shut up and take my money’ ”), but I knew he would just refuse my money, and that he and his brother would laugh about it on his show.

• I spend all day telling people how Jack instigated podcasting’s parthenogenesis of culture. He brought an entire subgenre, the art podcast, into being (indeed in the shadow of Joe Frank – true no matter what the masterminds behind Ghost Jail do to me for pointing it out).

  But he and his friends are overall quite vile. One strains to separate art from artist.

Now they’re just fucking with me

Jack knows well I have a 330-page handwritten Thirtysomething episode guide and have told him the only episode I would ever want to appear on is that one.

Are Jack’s cussedness, grudge-cherishing, and biliousness contributing factors here?

If Camille Paglia ever writes to the Perfume Nationalist, it will have been of my doing

After a second-tier gay podcast actually received a reply E‑mail from Paglia, I assumed that, after 20-odd years of her being online, mailing the professor directly was finally tolerated. (In the olden days, one could not even fax-o-gram Camille Paglia.)

Acolyte builds entire hundred-episode podcast series around your work

I’m not that acolyte, though I have been a fan since Day 1. I am referring to Texan gay bear Jack Mason, better known as the Perfume Nationalist. For that is the title of his shockingly original podcast, which pairs transgressive or simply ill-appreciated artworks (typically movies) with the one thing middle-class ladies in offices have a “performative allergy” against, perfume.

On seemingly every episode, Jack explains how you were right about everything, and, in interviews, describes how you offer a means of interpreting culture that celebrates beauty and life. You’ll love his diatribes against the 2010s and against liberals, whom he blames for every censorious moral panic we’ve had to live through.

Of course he adores Liz Taylor and soap operas. (The Perfume Nationalist theme song is the one from Knots Landing.) By championing a Live Laugh Love™ philosophy, not only has Jack managed to Pied Piper a flock of beautiful straight guys to his art podcast (all of whom now buy and wear perfume!), he has instigated an entire subgenre of flanker art podcasts, to use a term from the fragrance biz.

There’s nobody like him. And none of it would have happened without you and your œuvre and your moxie. Indeed, his various avatars and user IDs have included your name or face…. (Do drop him a line – it would be the highlight of his day if not year!)

You quite fairly do not appear on podcasts, to the chagrin of impish Soviet-American author Michael Malice, who considers you the biggest possible get. But please allow this fan to suggest that you start listening to the Perfume Nationalist podcast, viz while driving or suchlike. A relevant recent episode unites all these masterpieces by or [e]voking Elizabeth Taylor: Passion, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and (wait for it) Boom! and Secret Ceremony.

I will continue to cover TPN

Web sites do not discuss the Perfume Nationalist. Anyone who Googles this signature enterprise in the domain of the art podcast (indeed the progenitor of same) will find my discussion of TPN. Coverage will continue until morale improves.