Pliable Privilege, pt. 02

Continuing from pt. 01, the notion of privilege took an unexpected turn for me recently when the prospect inevitability of demographic collapse came back onto my radar. I scoffed at the demographer’s crystal ball earlier not because I disagree with the assessments or numbers but because, like so many aspects of the collapse of industrial civilization, demographic collapse lies squarely beyond anyone’s control. My questions in reply are basically Yeah? And? So? Do a search on demographic collapse and it will reveal a significant number of reports, with reporters themselves (including the worst contemporary media whore and glory hound who shall forever remain unnamed at this site) freaking out and losing their collective minds, on the hows, whys, wheres, and whens population will crash. The most immediate worrisome aspect is anticipated inversion of the youngest being the most numerous, the usual state of affairs, to the oldest being the most numerous and flatly unsupportable by the young. This has been the basic warning about Social Security for decades already: too few paying in, too many granted benefits. See also this documentary film being prepared for imminent release. I suspect supporting annotations will appear in time.

Probably not fair to call capitalism and its support structures a Ponzi scheme (latecomers to the scheme supporting earlier entrants), but the desire to perpetuate historical demographic distributions (as opposed to what? yielding to the drift of history?) is clearly part of the perpetual growth mentality. Traditionally, prior to the 20th century in the West, when the vast majority of people participated in agrarian and/or subsistence economies instead of the money economy, children were desirable not least because they provided free labor until they were grown, were positioned to take over family farms and businesses, and cared for oldsters when that time came. Intergenerational continuity and stability were maintained and it was generally accepted that each generation would supplant the previous through the seasons of life. The money economy destroyed most of that. Many young adult children now exercise their options (privilege) and break away as soon as possible (as I did) in search of economic opportunity in cities and form their own families (or don’t, as I didn’t). Estrangement and abandonment may not be complete, but families being spread across the continent certainly limits extended family cohesion to holidays and occasional visits. Oldsters (in the affluent West anyway) are now typically shuttled off to (euphemism alert) retirement homes to be warehoused prior to dying. Easier to pay someone to perform that service than to do it oneself, apparently. So if older people are currently privileged over the young (in some ways at least), that condition is being reversed because, dammit, children are in short supply yet needed desperately to keep growth on track.

Demographers point to a number of factors that have conspired to create the crisis (one of many interlocking crises some intellectuals have begun calling the polycrisis). The two main factors are declining fertility and reproductive choice. My suspicion is that the toxic environment, one result of centuries of industrial activity with plastics and drugs now found in human bodies where they don’t belong, accounts for many fertility issues. Add to that poor food quality (i.e., malnutrition, not just poor diets) and it’s easy to understand why healthy pregnancies might be more difficult in the 21st century than before. I’m not qualified to support that assessment, so take it for what it’s worth. Reproductive choice, another recently acquired female privilege (in historical terms), is a function of several things: financial independence, educational attainment, and availability of birth control. Accordingly, more women are choosing either to defer having children while they establish careers or choose not to have children at all. (Men make those choices, too.) Delays unexpectedly leave lots of women unable to have children for failure to find a suitable mate or having spent their best reproductive years doing other things. As I understand it, these correlations are borne out in some harrowing statistics. As the polycrisis deepens, a philosophical choice not to bring children into the world (just to suffer and die young) is also a motivation to remain childless.

Pliable Privilege, pt. 01

Buzzwords circulating heavily in the public sphere these days include equality, equity, inclusion, representation, diversity, pluralism, multiculturalism, and privilege. How they are defined, understood, and implemented are contentious issues that never seem to resolve. Indeed, looking back on decade after decade of activism undertaken to address various social scourges, limited progress has been made, which amounts to tinkering around the edges. The underlying bigotry (opinion, motivation, activity) has never really been eradicated, though it may be diminished somewhat through attrition. Sexism and racism in particular (classics in an expanding universe of -isms) continue to rage despite surface features taking on salutary aspects. Continued activism use the buzzwords above (and others) as bludgeons to win rhetorical battles — frequently attacks on language itself through neologism, redefinition, and reclamation — without really addressing the stains on our souls that perpetuate problematic thinking (as though anyone ever had a lock on RightThink). Violence (application of actual force, not just mean or emphatic words) is the tool of choice deployed by those convinced their agenda is more important than general societal health and wellbeing. Is violence sometimes appropriate in pursuit of social justice? Yes, in some circumstances, probably so. Is this a call for violent protest? No.

Buzzwords stand in for what we may think we want as a society. But there’s built-in tension between competition and cooperation, or alternatively, individual and society (see the start of this multipart blog post) and all the social units that nest between. Each has its own desires (known in politics by the quaint term special interests), which don’t usually combine to form just societies despite mythology to that effect (e.g., the invisible hand). Rather, competition results in winners and losers even when the playing field is fair, which isn’t often. To address what is sometimes understood (or misunderstood, hard to know) as structural inequity, activists advocate privileging disenfranchised groups. Competence and merit are often sacrificed in the process. Various forms of criminal and sociopathic maneuvering also keep a sizeable portion of the population (the disenfranchised) in a perpetual and unnecessary state of desperation. That’s the class struggle.

So here’s my beef: if privilege (earned or unearned) is categorically bad because it’s been concentrated in a narrow class (who then position themselves to retain and/or grow it), why do activists seek to redistribute privilege by bestowing it on the downtrodden? Isn’t that a recipe for destroying ambition? If the game instead becomes about deploying one or more identifiers of oppression to claim privilege rather than working diligently to achieve a legitimate goal, such as acquiring skill or understanding, why bother to try hard? Shortcuts magically appear and inherent laziness is incentivized. Result: the emergent dynamic flattens valuable, nay necessary, competence hierarchies. In it’s communist formulation, social justice is achieved by making everyone equally precarious and miserable. Socialism fares somewhat better. Ideologues throughout history have wrecked societies (and their members) by redistributing or demolishing privilege forcibly while hypocritically retaining privilege for themselves. Ideology never seems to work out as theorized, though the current state of affairs (radical inequality) is arguably no more just.

More to unpack in further installments.

Nowhere Left to Go

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has reset its doomsday clock ten seconds closer to midnight (figuratively, nuclear Armageddon), bringing the world closest to catastrophe in its history. Bizarrely, its statement published today points squarely at Russia as the culprit but fails to mention the participation of the United States and other NATO countries in the conflict. Seems to me a rather unethical deployment of distinctly one-sided rhetoric. With the clock poised so close to midnight, there’s nearly nowhere left to reset the clock until the bombs fly. In contrast, two of the blogs I read that are openly critical of provocations and escalation against Russia, not by Russia, are Bracing Views (on my blogroll) and Caitlin Johnstone (not on my blogroll). Neither minces words, and both either suggest or say openly that U.S. leadership are the bad guys indulging in nuclear brinkmanship. Many more example of that ongoing debate are available. Judge for yourself whose characterizations are more accurate and useful.

Although armed conflict at one scale or another, one time or another, is inescapable given mankind’s violent nature, it takes no subtle morality or highfalutin ethics to be default antiwar, whereas U.S. leadership is uniformly prowar. Can’t know for sure what the motivations are, but the usual suspects include fear of appearing weak (um, it’s actually that fear that’s weak, dummies) and the profit motive (war is a racket). Neither convinces me in the slightest that squandering lives, energy, and lucre make war worth contemplating except in extremis. Military action (and its logistical support such as the U.S. is providing to Ukraine) should only be undertaken with the gravest regret and reluctance. Instead, war is glorified and valorized. Fools rush in ….

No need to think hard on this subject, no matter where one gets information and reporting (alternately, disinformation and misreporting). Also doesn’t ultimately matter who are the good guys or the bad guys. What needs to happen in all directions and by all parties is deescalation and diplomacy. Name calling, scapegoating, and finger pointing might soothe some that they’re on the right side of history. The bad side of history will be when nuclear powers go MAD, at which point no one can stake any moral high ground.

Hyperanalysis, Intervention, and Micromanagement

A bunch of unrelated things I have been reading and hearing suddenly and rather unexpectedly came together synthetically. The profusion is too great to provide a handy set of links, and backstage analytics indicate that almost no one follows the links I provide anyway, so this will be free form.

Hyperanalysis

As I have previously blogged, peering (or staring) too intently at a physical object or subject of inquiry tends to result in the object or subject being examined at the wrong resolution. An obtuse way of restating this is that one can’t study the cosmos under a microscope or cell biology through a telescope. The common mistake is to study minutia and fail to perceive the whole, rarely the reverse. Iain McGilchrist suggests that hyperanalysis is a hallmark of an imbalance in brain lateralization, where the left brain (the Emissary) takes primacy over the right brain (the Master). Others building on McGilchrist’s thesis have theorized that human culture and styles of cognition have swung in and out of proper balance periodically throughout history. One theory used portraiture to support how depiction of the human face can be either humanistic or clinical in orientation. What artists perceive then produce divergent aesthetics where the eyes and mouth in particular suggest different ways of encountering the world. Using art to develop theories of psychohistory fits well with one of the preoccupations of this blog, namely, the nature of consciousness.

Intervention

Armed with a precise appreciation of some small aspect of a whole, often abstracted and idealized independently from easily observed fact in actuality, some make the leap that human activity can be acted upon confidently with entirely foreseeable outcomes. Thus, incautious decision-makers intervene to correct, adjust, or game areas within their concern and control. The applicable aphorism that restrains cautious people is “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” Perhaps the Dunning-Kruger Effect helps to explain (at least in part) why actors plunge forward despite ample evidence that outcomes don’t adhere reliably to planning. Indeed, the rise and fall of many institutions demonstrate the fallibility of interventions in dynamic systems. Just ask the Federal Reserve. Periodic recourse to warfare is also characterized as a breakdown of peaceful stratagems accompanied by a fog where clarity of purpose is lost. Faced with deteriorating conditions, the demand that something be done, not nothing, also testifies to human frailty and frequent refusal to accept unknown contingency or inevitability.

Micromanagement

When ideology truly misfires, strenuous interventions take the form of tyranny in an attempt to force resistant outcomes into predetermined channels. Too many awful examples of abject failure on that account to mention. Small-scale tyranny might be better recognized as micromanagement. Control freaks adopt that behavior out of any number of motivations, such as distrust of others’ competence, inability to delegate or share responsibility, and hero syndrome. Ironically, the targets of control are often petty and do not contribute meaningfully to enhanced behavior or function. Rather, they focus on a subsidiary metric as a proxy for overall health, wellbeing, and effectiveness.

As people encounter ideologies and learn to systematize, they are especially prone to using incomplete understandings of complex systems and then seizing upon one intervention or another to attempt to solve problems. This is not limited to students in the early years of college who discover a supposed Rosetta stone for fixing ills but rather includes any reform political candidate or newly minted CEO with a mandate to remove corruption, dead weight, or inefficiency. This is also the domain of specialists, experts, and academics who have concentrated their efforts in a narrow subfield and feel confident generalizing that acquired skill and applied knowledge outside the area of focus. Of course, it’s warranted to rely on brain surgeons for brain surgery and car mechanics for automotive repairs. But no one expects them to offer advice on intractable social problems, correct historical wrongs, or develop a centered philosophy of anything. Indeed, institutions and societies are so complex and inherently unsteerable that, despite many futile attempts, no one has ever developed a comprehensive understanding sufficient to engineer programs that lead anywhere remotely in the vicinity of utopia. Yet with an abundance of confidence, agitators and activists — sometime quite young but unafraid to instruct their elders — seek to implement their ideological designs, by force if necessary, to enact desired change. Maybe those changes are considered humble baby steps toward improved social justice and greater equity, tinkering around the edges perhaps, but I doubt most ambitions are so constrained. While that energy is absolutely necessary in a pluralistic society to avoid cynicism and stagnation, it often becomes a victim of its own success when radicals gain power and impose orthodoxies that are ultimately self-defeating and thus short lived. History is full of movements, civil wars, and revolutions that demonstrate the point. Dystopian fiction also forewarns how tyrannies develop out of misguided application of ideology and power.

I probably haven’t described any too well the power law that coalesced in my thinking. Nor do I pretend to have solutions for anything. As I’ve often written, given the myriad problems global civilization now faces, it’s well nigh impossible to know what to wish for with much clarity since deliverance from one set of problems often exacerbates others. World systems theorists try to piece together various dynamics into a coherent unified theory, and I admire the effort to understand how the world really works, but I still subscribe to the precautionary principle when it comes to implementing globe-spanning programs.

Reality Check (redux)

/rant on

The previous time I was prompted to blog under this title was regarding the deplorable state of public education in the U.S., handily summarized at Gin and Tacos (formerly on my blogroll). The blogger there is admirable in many respects, but he has turned his attention away from blogging toward podcasting and professional writing with the ambition of becoming a political pundit. (I have disclaimed any desire on my part to be a pundit. Gawd … kill me first.) I check in at Gin and Tacos rarely anymore, politics not really being my focus. However, going back to reread the linked blog post, his excoriation of U.S. public education holds up. Systemic rot has since graduated into institutions of higher learning. Their mission statements, crafted in fine, unvarying academese, may exhibit unchanged idealism but the open secret is that the academy has become a network of brainwashing centers for vulnerable young adults. See this blog post on that subject. What prompts this new reality check is the ongoing buildup of truly awful news, but especially James Howard Kunstler’s recent blog post “The Four Fuckeries” over at Clusterfuck Nation, published somewhat in advance of his annual year-end-summary-and-predictions post. Kunstler pulls no punches, delivering assessments of activities in the public interest that have gone so abysmally wrong it beggars the imagination. I won’t summarize; go read for yourself.

At some point, I realized when linking to my own past blog posts that perhaps too many include the word wrong in the title. By that, I don’t mean merely incorrect or bad or unfortunate but rather purpose-built for comprehensive damage that mere incompetence could not accomplish or explain. Some may believe the severity of damage is the simple product of lies compounding lies, coverups compounding coverups, and crimes compounding crimes. That may well be true in part. But there is far too much evidence of Manichean manipulation and heedless damn-the-torpedoes-full-steam-ahead garbage decision-making to waive off widespread institutional corruptions as mere conspiracy. Thus, Kunstler’s choice of the term fuckeries. Having already reviewed the unmitigated disaster of public education, let me instead turn to other examples.

Everyday Heroes

This blog has never been obliged to observe every passing holiday or comment on celebrity deaths or public events via press release, public statement, command performance, ritual oversharing, or other characterization more closely associated with institutions and public figures who cannot keep from thrusting themselves wantonly onto the public despite having nothing of value to say. The chattering class maintains noise levels handily, so no need to add my voice to that cacophonous chorus. To wit, the recent Thanksgiving holiday prompts each of us every year to take stock anew and identify some area(s) of contentedness and gratitude, which can be challenging considering many Americans feel abandoned, betrayed, or worse as human history and civilization lurch despotically toward their end states. However, one overheard statement of gratitude this year made a strong impression on me, and as is my wont, I couldn’t help but to connect a variety of disparate ideas. Let me digress, starting with music.

Decades ago, the London Philharmonic under Jorge Mester recorded a collection of fanfares commissioned during WWII. American composers represented include (in no particular order) Henry Cowell, Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, Morton Gould, Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thomson, and Walter Piston. None of their respective fanfares has entered the standard repertoire. However, the sole composer whose stirring fanfare has become legitimate and instantly recognizable Americana is Aaron Copland. His fanfare celebrates no famous figure or fighting force but rather the common man. Copland’s choice to valorize the common man was a masterstroke and the music possesses appealing directness and simplicity that are unexpectedly difficult to capture in music. Far more, um, common is elaborate, noisy, surface detail that fails to please the ear nearly so well as Copland’s stately fanfare. Indeed, the album is called Twenty Fanfares for the Common Man even though that title only applies to Copland’s entry.

The holiday comment that stuck with me was a son’s gratitude for the enduring example set by his father, a common man. Whether one is disposed to embrace or repudiate the patriarchy, there can be no doubt that a father’s role within a family and community is unique. (So, too, is the mother’s. Relax, it’s not a competition; both are important and necessary.) The father-protector and father-knows-best phase of early childhood is echoed in the humorous observation that a dog sees its master as a god. Sadly, the my-dad-can-beat-up-your-dad taunt lives on, transmuted in … superhero flicks. As most of us enter adulthood, coming to terms with the shortcomings of one or both parents (nobody’s perfect …) is part of the maturation process: establishing one’s own life and identity independent yet somehow continuous from those of one’s parents. So it’s not unusual to find young men in particular striking out on their own, distancing from and disapproving of their fathers (sometimes sharply) but later circling back to reflect and reconcile. How many of us can honestly express unalloyed admiration for our fathers and their character examples? I suspect frustration when feet of clay are revealed is more typical.

Eight Billion Day

According to some estimates, historical trends bring us to 8 Billion Day (human population) today (November 15, 2022), despite a slowing birthrate. Took only 11 years to add the next billion from 7 Billion Day and only 4 years to add the half billion from 7.5 Billion Day. That doesn’t look to me like deceleration; perhaps the last 3 years of Covid pandemic is the hinge of the trend reversal. Previous milestones are 1 billion in 1804, 2 billion in 1930, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, and 6 billion in 1998. Projections are 9 billion in 2037 and 10 billion in 2058. Whereas past numbers are fixed, the future is IMO quite unlikely to produce those numbers on schedule if at all. Factors are many and unpredictable, such as the rise in excess deaths a/k/a all-cause mortality already being reported (but quietly lest panic ensue).

Various economists, demographers, and business leaders bemoan that many countries have already fallen below replacement rate, which poses a dramatic reduction in skilled, experienced labor as members of the Baby Boom retire and die off. Worse than that, however, is the recognition that in growth economies (now ubiquitous across the globe), the only way forward is to have a growing population, young people at the bottom supporting old people at the top. It’s a perfect Ponzi setup, replicated many times over in various institutions and destined to fail spectacularly as more women (in particular) are educated and opt out of motherhood entirely in favor of careers. Given that the Covid era has proven to be a baby bust, one can only wonder whether birth rates will spike as fears subside (which produced the Baby Boom after WWII) or population decline will be a permanent feature of society. I offer no predictions. Further, with myriad variables competing for primacy among doomers who forecast dire consequences of human behavior accumulated over several centuries , I admit being at a loss to know what to hope for. More people (and thus, more subsequent suffering) or fewer?

Wrong Things Getting Done Anyway

The difference between right and wrong is obvious to almost everyone by the end of kindergarten. Temptations persist and everyone does things great and small known to be wrong when enticements and advantages outweigh punishments. C’mon, you know you do it. I do, too. Only at the conclusion of a law degree or the start of a political career (funny how those two often coincide) do things get particularly fuzzy. One might add military service to those exceptions except that servicemen are trained not to think, simply do (i.e., follow orders without question). Anyone with functioning ethics and morality also recognizes that in legitimate cases of things getting unavoidably fuzzy in a hypercomplex world, the dividing line often can’t be established clearly. Thus, venturing into the wide, gray, middle area is really a signal that one has probably already gone too far. And yet, demonstrating that human society has not really progressed ethically despite considerable gains in technical prowess, egregiously wrong things are getting done anyway.

The whopper of which nearly everyone is guilty (thus, guilty pleasure) is … the Whopper. C’mon, you know you eat it do it. I know I do. Of course, the irresistible and ubiquitous fast food burger is really only one example of a wide array of foodstuffs known to be unhealthy, cause obesity, and pose long-term health problems. Doesn’t help that, just like Big Tobacco, the food industry knowingly refines their products (processed foods, anyway) to be hyperstimuli impossible to ignore or resist unless one is iron willed or develops an eating disorder. Another hyperstimulus most can’t escape is the smartphone (or a host of other electronic gadgets). C’mon, you know you crave the digital pacifier. I don’t, having managed to avoid that particular trap. For me, electronics are always only tools. However, railing against them with respect to how they distort cognition (as I have) convinces exactly no one, so that argument goes on the deferral pile.

Another giant example not in terms of participation but in terms of effect is the capitalist urge to gather to oneself as much filthy lucre as possible only to sit heartlessly on top of that nasty dragon’s hoard while others suffer in plain sight all around. C’mon, you know you would do it if you could. I know I would — at least up to a point. Periods of gross inequality come and go over the course of history. I won’t make direct comparisons between today and any one of several prior Gilded Ages in the U.S., but it’s no secret that the existence today of several hundy billionaires and an increasing number of mere multibillionaires represents a gross misallocation of financial resources: funneling the productivity of the masses (and fiat dollars whiffed into existence with keystrokes) into the hands of a few. Fake philanthropy to launder reputations fail to convince me that such folks are anything other than miserly Scrooges fixated on maintaining and growing their absurd wealth, influence, and bogus social status at the cost of their very souls. Seriously, who besides sycophants and climbers would want to even be in the same room as one of those people (names withheld)? Maybe better not to answer that question.

Crystallizing the Moment (re-re-redux)

Is militarism the gift that just keeps giving? To war profiteers it is. From an article in Harper’s Magazine (Nov. 2021) entitled “Ad Astra” by Rachel Riederer, I learned a host of truly awful aspects to U.S.-styled militarism. Foremost among them is that time (July 8, 1962) the U.S. detonated a nuke in space to see what would happen. This event, known as Starfish Prime and a part of larger projects Operation Fishbowl and Operation Dominic, occurred toward the end of above-ground nuclear testing, an era that contributed significantly to the Cold War and was fraught with atomic angst (which resurfaced in the 1980s and yet again in the 2020s — as a culture, we repeatedly forget then remember). If I learned about these miserable activities earlier in life, I’ve since suppressed them forgotten; learning of them now is still absolutely horrifying. Another aspect is the existence of the Outer Space Treaty (OST) adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1967. The main objectives of the OST include nonappropriation of celestial bodies (meaning that potential resources in space are a commons to be exploited freely, if not equally) and nonweaponization (meaning that weapons could not be deployed in space). Starfish Prime predated the OST.

Considering how long this madness has been going on, I paused to wonder whether 45’s creation of the Space Force wasn’t another example of a chief executive inadvertently crystallizing the moment (now the fourth in a series of blog posts). It was risible at the time, but that might have been naïveté on my part, as the article mentioned above suggests. The question for me was never whether the U.S. should deploy weapons and fighters in space (unequivocal “no!”) but whether it’s inevitable that the U.S. (or another country) does it anyway in defiance of the OST. Such a deployment would be a giant boondoggle, adding to the crazy portion of national resources already devoted to “defense.” Given the maniacal direction the military-industrial complex has been pointed for many decades, along with foolish investment in whiz-bang hypercomplexity (e.g., orbital communications and surveillance), I get that the U.S. has assets in place to protect. However, those assets are fragile and highly vulnerable to interference and attack should someone get it in their heads to move in earnest against the U.S. Furthermore, it should be obvious to anyone paying even a little attention that the leviathan humans created (i.e., industrial civilization) is creaking and groaning under its own weight and momentum and cannot be sustained much longer. Extending armed conflict into the final frontier, as it were, just might be the last, insane hurrah of leaders and despots behaving like boys with toys, unconcerned with the damage done by their actions.

On a darkly humorous note, I saw that Caitlin Johnstone named the various branches of the U.S. war machine armed services:

• Army
• Navy
• Air Force
• Marines
• Coast Guard
• Space Force
• Mainstream Media

As part of patriotic concerts every summer, I perform some version of the Armed Forces Salute/Medley, an audience favorite. Thus far, no one (so far as I know) has arranged a new version including a tune for the Space Force. I suggest the main title theme from Star Wars should be appropriated adopted unapologetically. No suggestion for the mainstream media, whose inclusion wouldn’t work for jingoistic audiences.

Update: I was just a few days early. The Space Force now has an official song:

Strong Female Lead

For this blog post, let me offer short and long versions of the assertion and argument, of which one of Caitlin Johnstone’s many aphorisms is the short one:

Short version: Modern mainstream feminism is just one big celebration of the idea that women can murder, predate, oppress, and exploit for power and profit just as well as any man.

Long version: Depicting strength in terms of quintessential masculine characteristics is ruining (fictional) storytelling. (Offenders in contemporary cinema and streaming will go unnamed, but examples abound now that the strong-female-lead meme has overwhelmed characters, plots, and stories. Gawd, I tire of it.) One could survey the past few decades to identify ostensibly strong women basically behaving like asshole men just to — what? — show that it can be done? Is this somehow better than misogynist depictions of characters using feminine wiles (euphemism alert) to get what they want? These options coexist today, plus some mixture of the two. However, the main reason the strong female lead fails as storytelling — punching, fighting, and shooting toe-to-toe with men — is that it bears little resemblance to reality.

In sports (combat sports especially), men and women are simply not equally equipped for reasons physiological, not ideological. Running, jumping, throwing, swinging, and punching in any sport where speed and power are principal attributes favors male physiology. Exceptions under extraordinary conditions (i.e., ultradistance running) only demonstrate the rule. Sure, a well-trained and -conditioned female in her prime can beat and/or defeat an untrained and poorly conditioned male. If one of those MMA females came after me, I’d be toast because I’m entirely untrained and I’m well beyond the age of a cage fighter. But that’s not what’s usually depicted onscreen. Instead, it’s one badass going up against another badass, trading blows until a victor emerges. If the female is understood as the righteous one, she is typically shown victorious despite the egregious mismatch.

Nonadherence to reality can be entertaining, I suppose, which might explain why the past two decades have delivered so many overpowered superheroes and strong female leads, both of which are quickly becoming jokes and producing backlash. Do others share my concern that, as fiction bleeds into reality, credulous women might be influenced by what they see onscreen to engage recklessly in fights with men (or for that matter, other women)? Undoubtedly, a gallant or chivalrous man would take a few shots before fighting back, but if not felled quickly, my expectation is that the fight is far more likely to go very badly for the female. Moreover, what sort of message does it communicate to have females engaging in violence and inflicting their will on others, whether in the service of justice or otherwise? That’s the patriarchy in a nutshell. Rebranding matriarchal social norms in terms of negative male characteristics, even for entertainment purposes, serves no one particularly well. I wonder if hindsight will prompt the questions “what on Earth were we thinking?” Considering how human culture is stuck in permanent adolescence, I rather doubt it.