Book Post for November, Nonfiction Books

Tags

diets cw, follow ozymandias271 for more sad gays, neurodivergence, polyamory, science side of tumblr, sex positivity

Game Changer: A Memoir of Disruptive Love: A memoir by Franklin Veaux, author of More than Two, about his marriage to an obligate monogamous person while being obligate poly. If you are like “wow, that seems like an incredibly horrible idea,” you are far more sensible than anyone in this book, who universally seem to be under the impression that this situation can be managed by coming up with a bunch of rules about Franklin’s dates with other people. (No “I love you”s! No sleeping in their bed! His wife for years gives him, a grown man, a curfew.) Naturally this entire situation is very painful for Franklin, his wife, and all of Franklin’s other partners. Somehow this relationship, which in any sensible world would have ended after the third date, managed to stay together for eighteen years. Eighteen years! That is definitely an impressive feat of endurance if nothing else.

Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide To Caring for Self While Caring for Others: I really wanted to like this book. I think the concept of “trauma stewardship” is really interesting and important: the author reframes trauma exposure responses (the mental health consequences often faced by people who help others– whether people or animals– cope with highly traumatic situations) as trauma stewardship, the entire conversation about how we come to do the work, how we’re affected by it, and how we make sense of it. I think it’s a really interesting move to understand helpers’ relationship to trauma as stewardship, as taking a valuable thing which has been entrusted to us and which we have responsibility for but which ultimately does not belong to us. Unfortunately, I have a limited tolerance for woo, and after the sixth or seventh comment about the wisdom of Native Americans I checked out. So it did not really live up to its potential from my perspective.

The Myth of Sex Addiction: I really, really wanted to like this book. And to be fair some of its arguments are effective. Probably the most effective argument in the book is a case study of a college student and evangelical Christian who identified as a sex addict because he felt like he couldn’t control his masturbation no matter what he did and it was causing him serious distress. He masturbated twice a month. That, I think, is the best argument I’ve ever heard that some cases of sex addiction are best treated with sex positivity and destigmatization, not attempting to get the patient to reduce their masturbation to zero times a month.

I also find it plausible that the diagnosis of sex addiction is, as it were, gynecentric. That is, “sex addiction” doesn’t just pathologize unusual but harmless behavior such as BDSM; it pathologizes behavior that, for whatever cultural or biological reason, is far more common in men than in women (a desire for anonymous sex, enjoying sex outside of a relationship context, seeing sex workers, daily masturbation to pornography).

Unfortunately, The Myth of Sex Addiction itself has an addiction to gee-whiz clickbait-headline thirty-undergraduates-from-an-Intro-Psych-class this-is-never-going-to-replicate psychology studies. It tells us that these studies are Just How Men Are,  because of Biology and Evolution, without ever doing any sort of cross-cultural analysis or acknowledging that its sample is WEIRD. It repeatedly cites the SurveyFail guy, who years later has still not managed to work out that women don’t jerk off to fade-to-black romance novels.

The Myth of Sex Addiction very confidently claims that women don’t have fetishes. I think this is a bizarrely confident claim to make after you’ve spent five pages mustering the evidence that women are less likely to masturbate and to approve of porn and non-PIV sex. Maybe they do have fetishes and they just have no idea? Also, the definition of fetish is actually androcentric. My research suggests that men don’t have fetishes, because while it is very common for women to dream of being ravished by a cowboy, almost no men dream of being ravished by a cowgirl. In fact, the entire genre of cowgirl-ravishment books appears to be aimed at lesbians.

As always when I read books about mental illness that don’t come from a social-model perspective, I think the social model would make this guy’s life so much easier. Yes, it is possible for the same mental trait to be an illness if it causes you distress or difficulty functioning, and a quirk if it doesn’t. The fact that I don’t experience any negative consequences from my hypersexuality doesn’t mean anything one way or the other about whether it’s a mental illness; it just means that my environment accommodates me.

Utopia for Realists: I am honestly pretty surprised by this book, because I didn’t expect anyone to be so slavish in following Silicon Valley political orthodoxy. Guaranteed basic income, shorter work weeks, randomistas in foreign aid, open borders… it honestly surprised me that there wasn’t a chapter on fixing the housing crisis by building more houses. Anyway, it was all pretty boring for me, because I live here and am already familiar with the arguments for and against a guaranteed basic income and open borders, but if you are curious what Your New Tech Overlords think about things there are really far worse books you can read.

The Joy of Gay Sex: A evocation of gay male life circa 2009 cleverly disguised as a sex advice book. The sex advice itself is mostly not very interesting, assuming you have some idea of the mechanics of anal sex. The little essays about HIV, chosen families, monogamy, and all the other details of gay life build up a rich tapestry that really helps you intuitively understand what it’s like to be a (certain kind of) gay man. The sections on the Internet were particularly interesting to me, because they were written pre-Grindr; the gay Internet as described in the book is both recognizable and distinctly less convenient than the present Internet. My one complaint is the underrepresentation of the gay and bisexual men of my acquaintance (where are the furries? where are the anime nerds?) but I suppose that they don’t really hang out at gay bars so perhaps the author never had a chance to meet them.

Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche: I am leery of giving a positive review of this book, because it is written by a journalist, and it is very possible the author is misunderstanding all the research because he doesn’t have a background in the field. Perhaps Scott Alexander or Sarah Constantin or someone could fact-check it for me.

Until it is fact-checked by someone I trust on psychiatry, my tentative opinion is that this book is very plausible. Essentially, the thesis is that certain things (trauma, mental distress, psychosis) are universal, but we tend to express symptoms of those things depending on what’s floating in the cultural “symptom pool.” A psychotic person who grows up in America will think the CIA is mind-controlling them; a psychotic person who grows up in a developing country will think demons are talking to them. A person in severe emotional distress in the United States may be anorexic or self-harm; a person in severe emotional distress in Indonesia may commit a mass assault. (Caveats: it does occasionally happen that people pick up symptoms that aren’t usual for their culture; anorexia is probably not caused by the “thin ideal”, and in fact one of the strongest pieces of evidence for anorexia as a culture-bound syndrome is the existence of societies with a thin ideal and very very low rate of anorexia.) When a syndrome only exists in another culture, it is called a “culture-bound syndrome.” When a syndrome only exists in the Anglosphere, it is called “how people work.” Because the DSM is seen as authoritative, we export our local symptom pool around the world.

I am personally interested in the prospect of cultivating the symptom pool to reduce distress in mentally ill people. Through careful messaging, could we remove harmful symptoms like anorexia, somatization which results in chronic pain, and running amok and replace them with less harmful expressions of distress like snapping a rubber band against your wrist or cutting off your hair? I imagine how much future schizophrenics could be helped by a hundred million dollars directed towards PSAs about people who have a positive relationship with their voices and representation of people with nice voices in popular culture. Sadly, the book does not explore this concept.

The last chapter was annoying. While it established that pharmaceutical companies increased the rate of antidepressant prescription in Japan by raising awareness of depression, it did not provide any evidence that this actually increased the rate of emotional distress in Japan. Would one assume from the Viagra marketing campaign that before Viagra no one had ever had erectile dysfunction?

Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People: I agree with the main thesis of this book: I think that sexism, homophobia, and other oppression-related cognitive biases affect how we interpret biological data and lead to inaccurate conclusions. I appreciated Joan Roughgarden pointing out that commonly used terms like “female mimic” and “cuckoldry” can lead scientists to assume one explanation has to be true (that the animal is pretending to be female, that the female is passing off offspring from an extra-pair copulation as the male’s) when they haven’t collected the data to justify the assumption.

Some of her criticisms seem quite valid to me. For example, it does seem implausible that if humans can tell apart with the naked eye females and female mimic males of a species with sharp eyesight, then the male (who has an evolutionary reason to be good at telling these things apart) does not. Perhaps the female mimic male assists the male somehow: helping him defend his territory or allowing him to signal that he won’t attack the female. It also seems implausible that male seabirds never notice extra-pair copulations occurring in public, and thus we should look for alternate explanations in which the female having extra-pair copulations improves the male’s reproductive success somehow. Maybe extra-pair copulations reduce the risk of another male committing infanticide if the female’s partner dies.

However, I think Roughgarden has a bad habit of presenting her interpretations as settled science, when in reality they’re just interpretations. We would have to do a lot more detailed ecological work to decide whether her conclusions are accurate. And every time she says “this interpretation has an unfortunate oppressive implication” as an argument against a particular interpretation of the data, I want to cringe. That is not what science is supposed to do. You can’t decide the truth by saying what’s most convenient to your ideology.

Roughgarden writes mostly about the potential adaptive benefits of genetic diversity in humans, which makes me really curious about her opinions about the adaptive benefits of neurodiversity in humans. I agree with her hypothesis that many genetic impairments would not be as common as they are if the genes didn’t pose some fitness benefit, the way that people who are heterozygous for sickle-cell anemia genes are protected against malaria. However, she once again fails to consider alternate hypotheses. Many genetic impairments, for example, are very common in Ashkenazi Jews, who have a relatively small effective population size and thus are particularly susceptible to genetic drift. There is no reason to suppose that those impairments have an adaptive benefit.

[this review talks about rape]

Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All: Probably my least favorite of Jaclyn Friedman’s books so far. I mean, anticapitalism aside, she’s right about everything. Reproductive justice does need to include not just the right to contraception and abortion but the right to start a family, have adequate perinatal care, and not be shackled to the bed while giving birth. Sex work stigma does harm women who aren’t sex workers and combating it is a vital part of sex-positive activism. The de facto legalization of rape of Native American women on reservations is horrifying. While level of vaginal arousal is completely uncorrelated with level of self-reported arousal, reporting this as “women don’t know what they want, are all secretly bisexuals who like fucking bonobos” both is sexist and misrepresents the science. While there are personal decisions that affect sex-negative cisheteropatriarcy, like volunteering for a rape crisis center or choosing not to be an asshole to people whose sex lives you disapprove of, whether or not you flash their boobs and say “wooooo!” is not one of them, either on a “this is empowering!” or a “this is objectifying!” level.

I continue to highly recommend Yes Means Yes, and maybe if any of those statements is surprising to you consider checking out Unscrewed.

I was very annoyed at the chapter on masculinity. Jaclyn Friedman is, in fact, a decent person who comes to the correct conclusion that male gender norms both hurt men and cause men to hurt others and that both aspects should be recognized. But goddamn does she feel like she needs to signal that she is still a Woke Feminist who engages in Fashionable Misandry. Is it really necessary to make fun of men who internalize oppositionally sexist norms to the point that they can’t buy female-branded products? Do you have to put in that paragraph about how the harm male gender roles cause to women ought to be enough to get men to be feminists, but okay if we have to we can talk about the harm it causes to men? Notably, Friedman does not do that in the chapter on how sex work stigma hurts non-sex-workers, which I can’t help but figure is related to the fact that Friedman is a woman and is not a sex worker.

[the next book is about dieting]

Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight: I realize that no one knows why weight set points are going up, but I wish there had been more discussion of various hypotheses. Instead, the author basically goes with “dieting causes weight set points to rise!”, which is one plausible hypothesis but also seems really convenient for the book about how you should stop dieting.

The advice for practicing Health at Every Size is as follows:

1. Stop hating yourself and your body. Find supportive people who won’t talk about how you need to lose weight. Practice reframing your negative thoughts about your body, food, and exercise.
2. Eat delicious food. Pay attention when you eat. Eat when hungry; stop when full. If you find yourself eating to manage an emotion, use a different self-care technique while practicing self-compassion (it is perfectly natural to use food to manage your emotions if you don’t have another way to do so).
3. Integrate movement into your daily life. Eat a variety of food, mostly plants, almost all unprocessed food, 100% food you enjoy. Get enough sleep. Manage your stress.
4. If you have a hard time with the food advice in #3: learn to cook, check out community-supported agriculture programs, eat in a peaceful and loving environment, slow down, and pay attention to presentation.

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Book Post for November, Parenting and Fiction Books

Tags

diane duane, elizabeth bear, emily st. john mandel, georgette heyer, mary renault, parenting

The Nursing Mother’s Companion: Look, in six months I will tell you which of these breastfeeding books I liked the best. This one has individual survival guides for various stages of breastfeeding, covering concerns such as mastitis and nursing strikes that occur at various ages, which seems very useful and a clear improvement on how scattered they are in many nursing books.

Precious Little Sleep: The Complete Baby Sleep Guide for Modern Parents: Highly recommended; evidence-based and extraordinarily complete. I appreciate that the author characterizes both “cry-it-out” and “no-cry” methods of sleep parenting as right for some parents and some babies; this seems to me to be consistent with the research. (No, cry-it-out will not ruin your attachment with your baby, nor will no-cry methods prevent your child from developing independence.)

Newborn sleep is generally all over the place and there’s not much point to sleep training before the child is about two to four months old. Use lots of soothing techniques and try not to let your newborn stay awake too long, lest they get overtired; it’s also a good idea to establish a bedtime routine you can build on when the child is older.

People who aren’t newborns have sleep associations. Your sleep association might be the sound of white noise, reading a bit, having a cup of tea or warm milk, your blanket, or your partner on the other side of the bed. If your sleep association isn’t present, you’ll often have a hard time falling asleep. Unlike adults, babies wake up all the time in the night, so they need their sleep associations to fall asleep every time they wake up. If your baby’s sleep association is thirty minutes of being bounced on an exercise ball, then nobody is going to get a lot of sleep. It’s even worse if you, like many parents, rock your baby to sleep and then leave them in the crib. Imagine how you’d feel if you fell asleep in your bedroom, full of your sleep associations, and then suddenly woke up in a crib. You’d probably cry too.

Useful soothing tools to help babies sleep include white noise, swaddling, pacifiers, baby swings, and managing your child’s schedule so they consistently sleep at the same times each day, when they are neither not sleepy nor overtired. These should mostly be phased out by six months; white noise can be used throughout the first year, and schedule management is useful throughout life.

The easiest time to teach a baby to sleep on their own is when they are two to four months old. The second easiest time is right now; it gets harder the older the baby is. Start with bedtime; set yourself up for success by choosing a bedtime when the child is tired but not overtired, going through a quiet and soothing bedtime routine, and making the room be very very dark.

“No-cry” methods (a misnomer; they usually involve some crying) include:

• Providing lots of soothing in ways you can live with that don’t involve you waking up all the time
• Experimenting with seeing if the child will fall asleep on their own if you leave them alone in their crib for ten or twenty minutes.
• Soothing your child fully to sleep using whatever method works best for you, then waking them a little when you put them in bed.
• Gradually weaning your child from whatever you’re doing that helps them fall asleep.

The “cry-it-out” method is basically just leaving your kid in a safe and comfortable place to sleep and then not returning until they fall asleep. The author recommends full extinction (not checking on the child) as a quicker and more effective method, although parents often prefer checking on the child at regular intervals as it seems more loving.

The book also covers night waking, night eating, weaning your child from sleep soothing techniques, common causes of sleep setbacks both medical and nonmedical, and sleep in older children. It’s good. Check it out.

Your Orgasmic Pregnancy: Little Sex Secrets Every Hot Mama Should Know: A pamphlet’s worth of information stretched out into a book through lots and lots of padding, most of it entirely unrelated to sex (did you know that doing prenatal yoga is good for you?). There is some misinformation: the book claims that masochism is entirely off-limits during pregnancy, when in reality many forms of masochism are perfectly safe. It would be really useful if they had spent less time trying to pitch me on prenatal yoga and more time talking to kink-aware obstreticians to provide an actually useful resource. That said, the list of pregnancy sex positions is genuinely useful, and they had several pretty cool ideas for pregnancy-themed roleplay.

Siblings Without Rivalry: How To Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too: The correct techniques for dealing with sibling rivalry are surprisingly similar to the correct techniques for metamour management. Acknowledge and accept that your partners might have negative feelings about each other, and don’t try to tell them their feelings are wrong or bad. Don’t compare your partners, saying that one is more romantic and the other is funnier. Make it clear that you love each of your partners as unique people with whom you have a unique relationship, and you do not have a hierarchy. Spread your time among them based on your needs (and, in the case of partners, the seriousness of your relationship– presumably it is relatively rare to have a secondary relationship with one’s offspring). If they start arguing with each other, listen to both sides respectfully but don’t get in the middle; leave them to resolve it themselves. However, one advantage of partners is that they are adults and can be generally trusted not to hit each other on the head with a toy truck, while children have no such guarantee.

Instead of dismissing a child’s negative feelings about a sibling, acknowledge the feelings:

• Put the child’s feelings into words (“you’re furious!”).
• Express what the child might wish (“sometimes you want your sibling to go away”).
• Help children channel their feelings into creative or expressive outlets (e.g. art).
• Stop hurtful behavior. Show how angry feelings can be expressed safely. Don’t attack the attacker.

Alternatives to comparing children:

• Acknowledge what you see or feel (“you put away your blocks and your truck. It’s a pleasure to look at this room”) without favorably comparing the child to another child.
• Describe the problem (“you didn’t do your homework”) without unfavorably comparing the child to another child.

Instead of worrying about treating children equally:

• Focus on each child’s individual needs (e.g. give more food to a child that is very hungry).
• Show children how they’re loved uniquely (“in the whole wide world there’s no one else like you’).
• Give time based on the child’s needs (“your sister needs help with tying her shoes right now”).
• Acknowledge the abilities of disabled children.

When one child bullies another:

• Don’t focus on the aggressor. Attend to the injured party.
• Don’t put one child in the role of “bully”. Acknowledge their ability to be kind and control themselves and correct others or the child themself when they describe the child as a bully.
• Don’t put one child in the role of “victim”. Show them how to stand up for themself (“I bet you can make an even scarier face back) and correct others or the child themself when they characterize the child as weak or helpless.

When children are fighting:

1. Acknowledge the children’s anger towards each other.
2. Listen to all sides with respect.
3. Show appreciation for the difficulty of the problem.
4. Express faith in the children’s ability to solve the problem.
5. Leave the room.
6. If the children appear to be hurting each other, describe the situation, set your limit, and separate the children.
7. For recurring or serious problems, you may wish to hold a parent-guided family meeting, in which you hear all sides and their rebuttals, brainstorm solutions as a family, and pick a solution everyone can live with.

Infant Massage: A very annoying amount of this book is devoted to the fallacious argument that cuddling babies is very important for their mental and physical health and therefore you should devote fifteen minutes a day to a massage. To be clear, cuddling babies is very important to their mental and physical health; a baby deprived of cuddles may get sick, have lifelong developmental disabilities, or even die. That is why parents and alloparents feel a natural, instinctive desire to cuddle babies. Outside of very exceptional circumstances– a Romanian orphanage under Ceausescu, a neonatal intensive care unit, or strictly following the advice of a quack parenting book that thinks you should avoid cuddling your child so you can tame their innate sinfulness or avoid rewarding negative behavior– you will instinctively give your baby enough cuddles that they develop properly.

(Note that most neonatal intensive care units practice “kangaroo care,” in which the baby regularly spends skin-to-skin time with the parents, and if your NICU does not you should absolutely throw a fit until they start practicing the standard of care.)

But on the other hand massage is a nice thing to do with your baby, and I have no objection to the instructions, including chapters on adjusting your infant massage for premature babies, babies with special needs, and toddlers. Might be useful for parents who want to try massaging their babies.

—

Fire From Heaven: The first book in Mary Renault’s the Alexander Trilogy, focusing on Alexander’s early life. Much less enjoyable than the Persian Boy, because she keeps interrupting all the gay romance with this boring “battles” stuff. Why are there battles in my book about Alexander the Great? That is definitely not what I am reading the series for. However, the Persian Boy is sadly light on Ptolemy (Alexander’s half-brother and future ruler of Egypt, not the astronomer), who is an absolute delight. And Bagoas is not exactly what one would call a “reliable narrator” about Hephaiston, which means that Fire From Heaven is the only book in the Alexander Trilogy with any amount of Hephaiston content at all, which is tragic, because Hephaiston is the best.

Mary Renault outdoes herself with the extremely euphemistic sex scenes in this one; I actually had to flip back and reread a few pages before I worked out that “some time later a mother fox walked by with her cubs” was Alexander and Hephaiston losing their virginity to each other.

An Apprentice to Elves: I read this series because it provides me with gay Vikings telepathically bonded to wolves. This book is not, in fact, about the gay Viking telepathically bonded to a wolf; it is about his daughter Alfgyfa who is apprenticed to the svartalfar (the elves of the title). I mean, it is a fine book, but I have expectations and they were not met. I did appreciate Fargrimr, who is probably one of my favorite trans male characters in fiction, and his complete incomprehension about why the not!Romans kept calling him a girl. “Uh, I’m obviously a man, have you ever seen a woman be a jarl?” In general, from a worldbuilding perspective, I appreciate a society that has culturally accepted roles for LGBT+ people that are weird. (“Oh, sure, you can be gay, as long as you telepathically bond with a wolf first. Oh, sure, you can be a trans guy as long as you dad needs an heir, but if you have six brothers you’re shit out of luck.”) It just feels more realistic than societies which are completely perfect and accepting and everyone talks like they have a Tumblr.

A Civil Contract: I regret the decade and a half of my life I wasted not reading Georgette Heyer. If you’re the sort of person who has worn out your copy of Pride and Prejudice and mourns that there is only so much Austen in the world, you should pick up this book. The protagonist Adam is in love with Julia, a beautiful but very silly woman. His father dies and he discovers his father has run up enormous gambling debts; the only way to preserve his family fortune is to marry Jenny, a heiress, who is plain and practical and sensible. Naturally he falls in love with Jenny and then takes five chapters to work out that he’s in love with her. It contains all the Austen goodness: a gently mocking and ironic narrative, absolutely ridiculous mothers and fathers, and a truly delightful snarky little sister. Also, at one point there is Serious Dramatic Tension about whether one guy’s investments are going to pay off. It’s great. Highly recommended.

Station Eleven: An excellent post-apocalyptic novel, in which 99% of humanity dies of a pandemic. The protagonists are a traveling theater/music troupe who visit post-apocalyptic settlements and perform Shakespeare and symphonies for them, because (as the slogan on their wagons reads) “survival is insufficient.” Unlike most post-apocalyptic novels I’ve read, the plot does not derail halfway through to be about some group of survivors fighting a war with some other group of survivors. It is consistently about rebuilding civilization all the way through. I never once had to skip past a loving three-page description of someone’s gun. I think this is an excellent decision on the part of the author and more post-apocalyptic novels should follow her example.

When I reached the end of the book I discovered this was actually Literature, because there were discussion questions in the back. In retrospect, this makes sense of the otherwise puzzling decision to devote multiple chapters to a pre-apocalypse boring middle-aged actor having affairs. However, as chapters about boring actors having affairs go, it was fairly tolerable and the rest of the book was very enjoyable.

Uptown Local and Other Interventions: A short story collection by Diane Duane. I particularly enjoyed The Fix (in which Duane actually manages to pull off starting a story with a dream sequence) and Uptown Local (set in the Young Wizards verse; even for the Young Wizards universe, has a particularly high level of the spirit of Secular Solstice). A good book to read if you’re a Duane fan.

The Door Into Fire: I thought it was just a Young Wizards thing that the villain is entropy, but apparently Diane Duane’s grudge against entropy shows up in all her books. Since she used to write for Scooby Doo, does this mean that there’s a long-lost episode where Freddie unmasks the villain and reveals that he is the second law of thermodynamics?

Mostly a fairly bland and forgettable epic fantasy novel, although I appreciated the detail that everyone is bisexual and polyamorous and this is just totally normal. I was bracing myself when a jealousy plotline happened, but it honestly felt like it was written by someone who actually understands how polyamory works and that in a poly context jealousy reflects underlying relationship problems and unmet needs, not the fact that you are in Twoo Wuv.

Warning for people considering starting the series: the last book has literally been delayed longer than I’ve been alive.

Book Post for October

Tags

follow ozymandias271 for more sad gays, neil gaiman, neurodivergence, parenting, racism

Creating Your Perfect Family Size: How To Make An Informed Decision About Having A Baby: I hoped that this book would, like, give me information about how many children I should have, but instead it was just a long list of different things people think about when they have kids. You mean people who for religious reasons don’t use birth control generally have a lot of kids? I had no idea!

The Breastfeeding Book: Everything You Need To Know About Breastfeeding Your Child From Birth Through Weaning: I continue to have difficulties reviewing the practical advice in breastfeeding books, on account of I have never breastfed. It is inaccurate about the things breastfeeding books are always inaccurate about (yes, some people can’t produce sufficient milk; no, breastfeeding does not have all those benefits you’re claiming it does; yes, parents should be concerned about the iron levels of their exclusively breastfed six-month-olds). However, I appreciate the Sears’s characteristic kindness and empathy, and I wish their commitment to never making parents feel guilty for being unable to do something would extend to the parent blogosphere. I also really liked the chapter on how non-breastfeeding parents can help with breastfeeding, both through supporting the breastfeeding parent (cleaning, shooing away busybodies, giving them time for themselves) and through nurturing the baby (through babywearing, playing, and singing).

Norse Mythology: Neil Gaiman is always at his best when telling short stories, and this is essentially a collection of short stories, covering the major Norse myths. Grand, heroic, and with a sly sense of humor. Gaiman loves mythology and it shines out from every page of this wonderful book. Excellent for reading out loud.

Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life: An excellent introduction to the practice of mindfulness meditation. Unfortunately, I only figured out halfway through that it was not actually intended for me, it was intended for mentally well people who want to try meditation, and Jon Kabat-Zinn has a completely different book for us crazies. Oh well.

The New Jim Crow: I feel like I am literally the last person to jump on this bandwagon but THIS IS AN AMAZING BOOK YOU SHOULD READ IT, especially if you have any interest at all in anti-racism and/or libertarianism. I started the book being like “well, mass incarceration is pretty bad, but it seems like a bit much to claim it is literally a racial caste system like Jim Crow” and ended it “welp, I guess mass incarceration is a racial caste system like Jim Crow.”

One point I found particularly insightful was her argument that to end mass incarceration you will need to enlist poor white people and middle-class-and-above black people by explaining to them how ending mass incarceration will benefit them. Poor white people receive the psychological wage of whiteness, which (in our colorblind society) has changed from “I might be poor but at least I’m not an [n word]” to “I might be poor but at least I’m not a criminal.” Middle-class-and-above black people receive benefits such as affirmative action, which ultimately uphold the system by promoting the pretense of colorblindness; if a black man can be President, it must be the fault of individual black people that they keep going to prison. To enlist these groups, a movement to end mass incarceration must explain why it is offering a better deal than the one currently on offer.

I hadn’t realized before how much we cut off people with criminal records from society. People who have committed felonies are not allowed in public housing or to get food stamps. In many states, they can’t vote or serve on juries; in many other states, they can get their right to vote back, but it’s an expensive process with many fees (this is not a poll tax because of reasons). There is massive discrimination against people with criminal records; making it illegal merely shifts the discrimination to black men more generally. Getting a job is often a requirement if you’re on parole. Since various bits of the government don’t talk to each other, people on parole can wind up with literally 100% of their wages being garnished, meaning that licit work is a money-losing proposition. Parolees are also often required not to talk to people with felony records; apparently no one who made this rule thought about the fact that in many neighborhoods a third of adult men have a felony record.Honestly, if I had to put up with all that shit I would probably commit crimes too.

One of the most striking points was the comparison between drunk driving and smoking crack cocaine, both of which were criminalized at about the same time. Drunk driving literally kills people, while smoking crack only rarely harms people other than yourself. The vast majority of people who drive drunk are white men, while crack is usually smoked by black people. Naturally, drunk driving is punished with a misdemeanor conviction, a week or two in jail, mandatory alcohol treatment, maybe your license getting suspended. Smoking crack, conversely, is punished with literally years in prison.

To highlight the scope of the problem: to get the number of people imprisoned down to even 1970s levels, which were already elevated, four out of every five prisoners would need to be released. This would involve perhaps a million people losing their jobs, many of whom are in rural districts that play an outsize role in elections (particularly since imprisoned people count for population size even though they can’t vote).

The argument that gangsta rap is a modern-day minstrel show is interesting. Like minstrel shows, gangsta rap portrays stereotypes of black people aimed at a white audience, although black people often enjoy them in part because it is a major source of black celebrities.

Out of the Darkened Room: When a Parent is Depressed: Protecting the Children and Strengthening the Family: By far the most valuable part of this book for me was the stories about children of depressed parents. Most people who mention that their parents were depressed are people who are fucked up about it. If your dad was depressed for most of your childhood and you’re fine, you don’t generally bring up your dad’s depression very often. But if you were traumatized by it, it comes up a lot. So it’s really easy for depressed people (me) to conclude that depressed people are universally shitty parents who fuck up their kids. And it was really comforting for me to read pages and pages of stories about mentally ill parents whose children were fine. In spite of having a parent who attempted suicide, had manic episodes, or lay in bed all day crying, the kids were happy, got good grades, had friendships, got into good colleges, and generally had perfectly reasonable childhoods.

The steps for parenting well while depressed were:

1. Discussing depression openly with one’s spouse and other loved ones.
2. Learning about depression and resilience.
3. Addressing the children’s needs (for relationships outside the family, success away from home, reflection on and understanding of what they’ve gone through).
4. Planning how to talk to the children.
5. Having a family meeting with the children.
6. Continuing to openly discuss issues of mental illness and the children’s response.

In general, resilient children are realistic about what they’re dealing with (understanding that mental illness will recur and they can recognize it), are aware of and can articulate strategies for offsetting the effects of mental illness on themselves, and believe their actions make a difference and take action based on that understanding.

Note that while the book title says “depression”, it actually covers all mood disorders.

Smart Parenting for Smart Kids: Nurturing Your Child’s True Potential: grrrrrraaaaarrrrrrggghhh

Large sections of this book are not, in fact, “how to help your gifted child with the struggles of being gifted”, but instead “how to help your twice exceptional child with the struggles of being twice exceptional.” That would be great– as a former 2E kid myself I’m all for advice about helping us– except that the authors seem to have no idea that disabled gifted children exist. Clearly, infodumping, impairments in perspective taking, and difficulty making eye contact are just part of being gifted, not a sign that your child has autism at all!

Much of the advice provided in this book seems, to my mind, decent. However, it is interspersed with mind-bogglingly awful advice, particularly on social skills. For example, parents are encouraged to tell children who read at recess that they’re part of the school community (fine) and ignoring community members is rude (what? no it isn’t!). At no point is it mentioned that children might read at recess because they’re being bullied or as a way of managing their emotions during an overstimulating school day. Parents are also told to tell children that correcting teachers who teach incorrect facts is rude (even though it is literally the teacher’s job to teach things that are true). Parents are told to tell children to lie and pretend they like sports even when they don’t to avoid making other children feel bad.

All the goals here are reasonable. Reading at recess is not a very good way of making friends. Correcting the teacher in public is likely not to work as well as talking to them after class. It’s important to be tactful (“sports aren’t really my thing”) instead of blunt and rude (“sports are stupid and boring”). But for children with social impairments (whether subclinical or clinical) it is particularly important to give accurate reasons for your advice. It is not true that you have to hide what you’re interested in to have friends, or that correcting powerful people is always wrong, or that it is rude to ignore people you don’t like or who mistreat you if they happen to be a member of some broadly-defined “community”. While these might cause effective behavior in the short run, in the long run they will cause extremely ineffective behavior: pretending to be someone you’re not, letting your boss make a dumb decision rather than correcting her, tolerating mistreatment or even abuse. With children with social impairments you must tell the truth.

I remain deeply puzzled at the number of times parenting books tell me not to do my children’s homework for them. People, if it has occurred to you to make your kids’ dioramas for them because all the other parents make their kids’ dioramas for them and you don’t want your kid’s to look like it was made by a child (because it was), you are too fucking invested in your kid’s dioramas.

I recommend skipping this book and instead reading Mind in the Making.

Against Equality: Queer Revolution Not Mere Inclusion: This was an uncomfortable read in the best way; it really challenged a lot of my viewpoints and I’m not sure what I believe. Against Equality is an anthology of essays centered around the claim that LGB rights activism actually winds up reinforcing oppressive institutions: the military, the prison-industrial complex, and marriage. On one hand, I’m pretty sympathetic to the idea that it shouldn’t be particularly high priority to advocate for queers to also be able to commit war crimes, murder brown people, and suffer lifelong trauma. Like, why are you advocating for our full inclusion in doing something that no one should be doing in the first place? And it seems like the resources directed towards gay marriage and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell could have been directed towards abolishing marriage and giving queer people in poverty more non-shooting-related options so the military isn’t their only way out. (Also, HIV healthcare access. The state of access to HIV-related health care is a disgrace.)

On the other hand, there is no requirement that every queer in the world agree with the political opinions of me, Ozy. Even if I choose not to donate towards or advocate for queer inclusion in the military, other queer people think joining the military is a noble sacrifice for the sake of their country, and it really isn’t that reasonable for me to object to their activism because of our shared non-normative gender identity. There are actual, practical, material benefits to military and marriage equality: I have friends whose literal physical safety depends on the legality of same-sex marriage. Why are we, the oppressed people, the ones who have to sacrifice for the sake of ending an oppressive institution.? Straight people first! It smacks of privilege, which was an annoying trend throughout this book (particularly when they talked shit about the rich white cis gay boys at the HRC– guys, choosing to become a performance artist does not magically take away your class privilege). Frankly, some of the concerns people have in this book are even more privileged than the ones they’re criticizing: arts funding? Really?

The HRC could quite reasonably object that they are the Campaigning In Favor Of Gay Legal Equality organization and DADT was obviously an example of gay people not being legally equal. While advocating for economic justice, the rights of sex offenders, open borders, and prison reform is great, none of them are gay legal equality, and the HRC should stay within its area of competence. Anyway, the natural extension of “money is better spent on homeless shelters for queer youth than pro-gay-marriage campaigning” is “money is better spent on African public health than on anything even remotely related to queer people,” so you know.

The weakest section is about marriage, partially through no fault of its own (at the time the book was published it was not clear that legal gay marriage would also help improve attitudes towards LGB people in general). The strongest section is about the prison-industrial complex, mostly because it outlines a mechanism through which hate crime laws strengthen prisons (they put people in prison for longer, mandatory minimums are still bad if you’re woke). I’d particularly like to highlight the excellent section on sex offender registries, false accusations of Satanic ritual abuse, and other abuses directed at people accused of being sex offenders.

The Persian Boy: Tragic gay romance novel about Alexander the Great and his extremely Slytherin boyfriend, the Persian eunuch Bagoas. If this summary makes you want to buy the book, you should. Reading the Persian Boy felt somewhat invasive, like someone had taken my id and spread it across the pages for anyone to see; given that I read it for the first time in middle school, this is probably because it made my id.

The Persian Boy is really an absurdly sexy book given that all the sex scenes are like this:

He really wanted love from me. I could not credit such fortune; nobody ever had before. In the past, I had taken pride in giving pleasure, since it was my skill; never had I known what it was to take delight in it. He was not quite so ignorant as I had supposed; it was just that what he knew had been very simple. He was a quick learner, though. All I taught him that night, he thought that by some happy harmony of our souls, we were discovering together. So, indeed, it seemed at last even to me.

(That is the entire scene.)

Like, that is definitely a sexy passage, it’s just that it is missing such normal aspects of sexy passages as “more than ten sentences” and “a reference to genitals” and “literally any idea of what the protagonists are doing.”

Be sure to read the afterword, in which Mary Renault is wonderfully snarky about all her sources.

The Health Hazards of Homosexuality: What The Medical and Psychological Research Reveals: I don’t recommend reading this book but it was definitely worth my ten dollars for the following paragraph–

The name of the website Feministing makes obvious reference to the practice of “fisting” (insertion of one’s hand into a partner’s rectum or vagina). The website’s banner shows a naked female form with hand upraised in the insertion position.

And also this passage, discussing the DSM’s change to the ‘paraphilia’ definitions so they can only be diagnosed if there is impairment in social or vocational functioning or if the patient experiences distress:

(Was the famous coprophiliac Adolf Hitler’s daily functioning impaired due to this practice, or did he continue to hold down his job – at least for a time?)

Also, it seems to me that if you’re going to spend all that time concern-trolling about the children you shouldn’t take creepy photos of teenagers at gay pride and illustrate your book with them. (I mean, did they consent to being in the homophobe book?)

Intersectionality: Key Concepts: I am the sort of person who buys books about intersectionality to read for fun and I was bored by this book. It’s basically all about the definition of intersectionality? Which, okay, fine, there are lots of people who are confused about that point, but surely you could knock out the definition in one chapter and then spend the rest of the time on an intersectional analysis of prison or agriculture or sex or something actually interesting.

All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting: Definitely a parenting must-read. Children make parents unhappy: they take away sleep, make it harder to engage in flow (one of the most pleasant human experiences), force you to spend large amounts of time with a person who doesn’t understand niceties like “clothes” and “not screaming,” reduce your freedom, make it harder to advance in your job, and aren’t even that fun– studies consistently show that interacting with children is generally less enjoyable than e.g. folding the laundry. Childrearing particularly tends to worsen marital satisfaction, in part because women tend to do more childcare, especially boring childcare (like toothbrushing, not playing catch) and watching the children while doing other tasks. (Interestingly, fathers experience more work/life conflict than mothers, perhaps because they want to feel like evolved parents.) Childrearing leads to social isolation and lack of sex, neither of which are exactly good for a marriage.

Parents feel like they must engage in “concerted cultivation,” driving their children from extracurricular activity to extracurricular activity, entertaining them when they’re bored, hoping to make them well-rounded adults; this is stressful and unpleasant. If you don’t do this, you feel like a bad parent who is dooming your child to never get into college and who will probably get kidnapped when you tell them to go play in the front yard. In the American colonial era, children made an economic contribution to the household from a fairly young age (even five-year-olds can pick weeds) and were mostly ignored before then. Now children are useless from a family perspective; their work is about improving themselves. The new uselessness of children is particularly grating on adolescents, who developmentally want to start contributing to society. This is part of the reason why parenting adolescents makes people really really unhappy. (Another part is that they keep getting into stupid fights about their children’s hair or music taste. Parents of adolescents: the research suggests you will be a lot happier if you commit not to fight with your child about anything other than issues of morality or safety, on which adolescents are generally much more likely to listen to their parents.)

Then why do we raise kids? (Other than a combination of ignorance, optimism, and the fact that in most states one cannot drop the child off at a safe haven once they are older than a few weeks.) Young children can yank parents out of their preoccupations, inhibitions and routines, allowing them to be more present in the moment rather than wrapped up in their anxieties and achievements. Young children can connect you to the physical world and encourage you to ask deep questions. And they offer an opportunity to give love without any return. While the experiencing self typically doesn’t enjoy parenting, the remembering self does; our relationships with our children are among the most important relationships in our lives, and being a parent consistently increases one’s sense of meaning. In the stories people tell about themselves, being a parent plays an important role.

Book Post for September

Tags

diets cw, disney descendants, god bothering, neoreactionaries cw, neurodivergence, parenting, pregnancy cw

When I was depressed, I read a lot of books and didn’t write reviews of them and now there is Too Much Backlog and I won’t ever get around to it. So you guys are just going to have to imagine what I thought of Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-Of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life. (Not a big fan.)

Damaged Goods: New Perspectives On Christian Purity: I am a terrible audience for this book because I am very interested in both purity culture and sex-positive feminism and thus nothing she has to say is new to me. “Saving your first kiss until your wedding day is bad! Instead, you should try to figure out when you’re emotionally ready for kissing. It is bad when social pressure makes people ashamed of their decisions to kiss people or not to kiss people.” I mean, I agree and I suspect it will make a lot of people’s lives better if they believed this book, but I don’t feel like I got any new or interesting insight.

Mal’s Spell Book 2: This is the first piece of Descendants expanded universe material that I enjoyed as much as I enjoyed the original movie. (If this sentence doesn’t thrill and excite you, skip to the next review.) The premise is that the villain kids use Mal’s spellbook to write notes to each other, presumably in class. I was particularly charmed by Jay and Evie’s attempts to give Carlos romantic advice (at one point Jay is like “ASK. HER. OUT” which to be honest is also what I feel when I am giving romantic advice). I also enjoyed the excerpts from Auradon etiquette books which Mal pasted into the book and commented on (“apparently you are supposed to eat bananas with a fork? is that a thing?” “how would I know, I only just found out what comes in the peels”). Unfortunately, the second half of the book takes place during the plot of the movie, which both is kind of boring and makes the conceit of the book somewhat implausible. (Why are they passing notes in Mal’s apartment? Surely they can just talk.)

Fuck Love: One Shrink’s Sensible Advice for Lasting Relationships: I actually gave up on this book half of the way through. I bought it because it had a truly amazing title. I had vaguely hoped the content would be about debunking the myth of the soulmate and encouraging people to marry people they’re compatible with even if that person isn’t their One True Love. Sadly, this is not the case. The actual content doesn’t seem to be bad, it is just targeted at a very different group of people than me. All of the first four chapters are different ways of saying “don’t meet someone hot and charming and let that blind you to the fact that they’re kind of a terrible person.” I, who have never dated a charming person in my life unless you could “charmingly awkward,” feel I am not the target audience for this advice. Also, at one point it advised that men cut their hair which I feel is a crime against male beauty.

Note that it does include a brief passage bashing people with borderline personality disorder. And the author’s a shrink? This is why it’s so hard to find a good therapist.

Postpartum depression and anxiety: a self-help guide for mothers: Did you know that postpartum depression is very common and not your fault or a sign that you’re a bad mother? Did you know that mild cases of depression can be treated with self-care, exercise, eating good food, getting enough sleep, and talking to your support system, but in severe cases you may need therapy and medication? Did you know that to help depressed people it is best to be supportive and nonjudgmental and to encourage them to develop a routine and to take care of themselves physically and mentally? If any of these facts sound novel to you, maybe you should pick up this book. Otherwise, skip it.

This Isn’t What I Expected: Overcoming Postpartum Depression: This book might be useful to read if you expect to have postpartum depression, even if you’ve been depressed before. It addresses a lot of postpartum-depression-specific concerns, such as coping with common postpartum stressors, dealing with your grief that parenthood isn’t what you expected and resolving your concerns about turning into your mother. There are a variety of helpful CBTish worksheets. I expect to be referring to this often when I have postpartum depression. While it says it is intended for postpartum depression, in reality it covers a variety of postpartum conditions, such as postpartum OCD, postpartum anxiety, postpartum trauma, and postpartum stress syndrome. Sadly, postpartum psychosis is mostly addressed in terms of “you probably don’t have it” and “if you do you should go to the hospital.”

Honestly, this book made me feel like I have so much of a handle on postpartum depression. They devoted pages and pages to no-fucking-shit stuff like “you cannot take care of a baby while depressed on your own” and “it is important to be able to talk to people about your depression” and “you need to have lower standards for yourself while depressed.” But when I think about it if it’s someone’s first time being depressed then they might not know this stuff! I am clearly an expert depressed person and going to do great.

Origins: How The Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives: A combination memoir and pop science book, the author discusses her pregnancy while reviewing fetal origins research. As always, much of this research probably won’t replicate and should be taken with a grain of salt; the author has a little bit of a tendency to write about salacious rat research without providing the caveat that rats are not human beings and many such studies fail to generalize. Nevertheless, much of the advice– about weight gain, stress, alcohol consumption, exercise, and so on and so forth– seems reasonable and solid, and she more-or-less manages to write about the actually important things without going into “well no one can PROVE hair dye doesn’t hurt your baby!” nonsense.

[The next two reviews discuss dieting.]

Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works: I actually have a very healthy relationship with food (I got almost a perfect score on their intuitive eater quiz, and the one thing I got dinged on was something they explicitly said later in the book is okay.) So I enjoyed this book a lot because it was full of neuroses I don’t have. For once I get to feel like the sane person who doesn’t crave chocolate cake, eat sixteen different things because chocolate cake is Forbidden and Not Allowed, continue to want chocolate cake, and then finally end up eating it anyway.

I have practiced intuitive eating for most of my adult life, although it is only in the past few years I knew to call it “intuitive eating” rather than “common sense.” My weight is consistently in the normal range, and over the course of my pregnancy I’ve gained the recommended number of pounds without tracking calories. (Only a third of pregnant people gain within the recommended weight range.) On the other hand, I might simply be the sort of person whose weight regulation happens to function properly, in which case I’d maintain a weight set point no matter what I did and no one should listen to me.

The ten principles of intuitive eating are as follows:

1. Reject the diet mentality (commit to never dieting again, and refuse to allow others to comment on what, when, or how much you eat or what your body looks like)
2. Honor your hunger (notice when you are becoming peckish and eat)
3. Make peace with food (allow yourself to eat anything that sounds appealing, without guilt)
4. Challenge the food police (replace negative self-talk about food, your body, or your diet with positive self-talk)
5. Feel your fullness (notice when you are moderately full, and stop eating; don’t feel like you have to finish everything on your plate)
6. Discover the satisfaction factor (eat pleasurable food; if you don’t love it, don’t eat it, and if you do love it, savor it)
7. Cope with your emotions without food (develop ways of self-soothing and distraction that don’t involve eating)
8. Respect your body (don’t insult your appearance; accept your body; stop weighing yourself; buy flattering clothes; allow yourself to be touched)
9. Exercise (find a way to exercise that is fun and feels good; build opportunities for activity into your everyday life; include strength training and stretching)
10. Honor your health with gentle nutrition (practice variety, moderation, and balance in your eating; eat whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and dairy; eat protein, carbohydrates, and fat; drink enough water; incorporate play foods into your eating, allowing some of your eating to be for health and some for physical pleasure)

Raising A Healthy, Happy Eater: A Stage-by-Stage Guide To Setting Your Child On The Path To Adventurous Eating: Basically the same thing as Ellyn Satter’s Child of Mine, and I honestly recommend that book instead. However, the authors do provide some interesting advice about causes of pickiness. Some toddler picky eating is caused by the child being incorrectly positioned in a high chair. Really look at how your child is sitting and imagine how much your muscles would be straining, and if it looks at all uncomfortable change it. Some picky eating is caused by poor development of gross, fine, and oral motor skills or of the sensory systems. To fix it, offer opportunities to develop those skills.

[The next review is about the Red Pill.]

Saving a Low Sex Marriage: A Man’s Guide To Dread, Seduction, and the Long Game: I spent six dollars on this book and honestly I think it was the most entertained I’ve ever been for six dollars.

This book can be roughly summarized as Horrible Rapey Misogynist Gives Reasonable Marriage Advice. It honestly gives me whiplash. There’s actually a lot of good stuff here! One page explains that you should accept “nos” gracefully and if you whine about how your partner won’t fuck you then they’re unlikely to want to fuck you. The next page declares that men get literally nothing out of marriage unless they are allowed to fuck their wives regardless of their wives’ opinion on the matter, and that it is evil man-hating feminism that men are no longer allowed to rape their wives. One page informs you of the startling redpill truth that your wife is more likely to want to fuck you senseless if you lift weights, dress well, and have your shit together socially, financially, and parentally. The next page explains that this is because you are scaring your wife into thinking you might leave her, because literally the only reason a well-dressed fit man who has his shit together is sexy is that someone else might fuck him. Also, preselection only works on women, because they are Mysterious Incomprehensible Woman Creatures. Please ignore the entire industry of advertising.

It is correctly pointed out that if you have set a boundary, and your partner continues to ignore your boundary, then the next step is to spend more time away from them and pay less attention to them, while continuing to be affectionate and interested in their lives. Then the author says that literally the only boundary you should bother to do this for is a “hard no” for sex (basically, a “no” that means your wife doesn’t want to have sex with you, rather than a “no” which means that she does but the circumstances aren’t right). You should not do that for things like your wife yelling at you, insulting you, or being disrespectful. (“My wife has to want to have sex with me” is not even a real boundary. You can’t set boundaries about other people’s sexual desires! Aaaaagh.)

One thing which is actually a useful concept from this book is the idea of covert contracts. Basically, a covert contract is when you make up a contract with another person inside your head: “if I do the dishes then you’ll fuck me,” “if I help you move then you’ll help me move,” “if I do something that makes me miserable then you’ll be proud of me,” “if I never disagree with you then you won’t ever be mad at me.” The other person only fulfills their end of these contracts by chance, because (a) they have no fucking idea that this contract even exists and (b) you gave them no chance to say “hey, wait, I don’t agree to this deal.” Instead, you should only do nice things you actually want to do for their own sake, and if you doing something is conditional on other people doing something you should make that clear to them. I think this is a super-useful idea which should be rescued from Misogynyland.

I do think it is probably true that many cases of someone’s partner no longer fucking them without any sort of explanation are caused by that partner becoming unattractive, and that marriage counselling is uniquely awful at addressing this situation, because it’s considered rude to admit you kind of find your husband ugly. Not sure what a good solution is.

Book Post for April, Not About Parenting

Tags

american politics is the best reality show, diane duane, god bothering, history side of tumblr, lingua latina, ozy blog post, rape tw, rationality, science side of tumblr, sex work, there is no justice and there is no judge

Eros and Thanatos: A pair of philosophical dialogues about love and sex, starring a family of Roman reconstructionist pagans. If this sounds like your sort of thing, it probably is. In the first, Catullus (a closeted gay man who believes that Love Conquers All) debates homosexuality with Germanicus (a Stoic who believes sex is only for procreation), Lydia (a Catholic), Sheila (a basically normal person), Ali (a postmodernist feminist) and Juvenal (the sort of edgelord who goes about saying that everything is violence and power). In the second, Juvenal, Germanicus, and Catullus debate whether murder is ever morally acceptable, along with Caligula (an atheist) and Brutus (a Buddhist).

Motel of the Mysteries: From the Body Ritual Among The Nacirema school of parody, the premise is that two thousand years from now an archaeologist finds a buried motel and concludes that this was a place of sacred mysteries. The book discusses The Great Altar (a television), the ceremonial burial cap (a shower cap), and the sacred collar (a toilet seat). Funny and pointed.

Sexual Authenticity: An Intimate Reflection on Homosexuality and Catholicism: This is a very frustrating book. I thought I would really enjoy it because I love her blog– even when I disagree she’s always insightful– but this book occasionally veered towards something I agree with and then felt like it came from Cloudcuckooland. People who have casual sex are all sex addicts! You can tell, because they deny that they’re sex addicts, and addicts always deny their addiction. Obviously. Nevertheless, Selmys’s conversion story is really interesting. She gets catechized early on by a Druid.

Sexual Authenticity: More Reflections: I find this book much less frustrating than the former book, and even agree with it in some places.

Selmys uses the Roman emperors as a framing to talk about the etiology of homosexuality. Of the first fifteen Roman emperors, only one was completely heterosexual. Even assuming that some were slandered by their detractors, at least half the emperors had some level of same-sex attraction. This seems strange from a perspective in which only three percent of the population is LGB, and startling even if you assume Roman emperors carried the gay gene, since many early Emperors were not related. She uses it as a framework to talk about different causes of homosexuality: for instance, Julius Caesar might have been an opportunistic bisexual, Tiberius a sex addict, Caligula a sexual assault victim, Nero a very feminine man forced into an ultra-masculine role in an ultra-masculine society by an overbearing mother, Hadrian a normal well-balanced person who happened to be in love with a man, Elegabalus a trans woman. Even given the many similarities between Roman emperors, there’s a lot of diversity in sexual behavior and motivation and what it means to call someone gay or bisexual.

Selmys’s observations on ex-gays seem to match up with my own observations of bihacking. Some people experience a sudden change in sexuality, but it’s not common and there’s no way to cause it; most people can, with a lot of hard work, transform themselves from Kinsey 0s and 6s to Kinsey 1s and 5s, but this does not actually offer a realistic hope of a relationship. Selmys claims that sudden orientation shifts are often caused by falling in love, which isn’t true in my experience, and I am curious what the difference is.

Selmys had a really interesting perspective on how having a lot of kids affects the experience of a parent of a disabled child. If you have one kid, all your hopes and dreams are on that kid. When your child is diagnosed with a disability, you have to grieve all the experiences you won’t have: if your child uses a wheelchair, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to play football; if your child is intellectually disabled, it’s harder to share the pleasures of science with them. But if you have more than one kid, then you can still have those experiences with your other kids, and it’s easier to recognize how good your disabled child is as themselves. I am not sure if I agree, but I think it’s interesting to think about.

Interim Errantry: Three Tales of the Young Wizards: An excellent three-novella collection. It’s nice to get a little breather and see what Kit and Nita are up to when they aren’t saving Earth. Interim Errantry is as weird as any other Young Wizards book: my attempts to explain the plots to Topher involved a lot of “Jack O’Lanterns are apparently sapient”, “and then the tree alien decides to become a Christmas tree”, and “and then through a series of misunderstandings an alien concludes that Nita and Kit are going to engage in the Impregnation Ritual on Valentine’s Day and the prelude to this involves eating one candy heart each day.”

Science fantasy is a genre close to my heart. I love urban fantasy that takes full advantage of the fact that it takes place in our reality and therefore has moons and aliens.

Also, I’m not sure if this is just me, but there were definitely more references to boners and porn than I’m used to in the Young Wizards series. The freedom of self-publishing? Changing standards in YA books?

Borderline (The Arcadia Project Book 1): The fey exist. All genius artwork comes from collaborations between humans and their fey soulmates, called “Echoes”. (The soulmate does not have to be a romantic soulmate.) The Arcadia Project, which employs solely crazy people, manages the fey/human interactions.

Our protagonist has borderline personality disorder and it’s amazing. Nothing I love more than a book about a borderline who totally has insight into the awful things she does and keeps doing them anyway. I liked how it realistically wrote her both as sympathetic and as kind of an awful person, but not as some kind of chaotic evil monster– just someone who has the same empathy and compassion as anyone else, but who sometimes does bad things on impulse. I really liked how the protagonist had recovered from suicidality but was still obviously mentally ill and had a life that sucked because, yeah, not being suicidal anymore doesn’t necessarily mean your life is great. And there was DBT in the book! The protagonist talks about her reason mind and her emotion mind, and one of the other characters is someone who literally severed her reason mind from her emotion mind with magic! I would have appreciated more use of skills, but then the protagonist is (canonically) not very cooperative with therapy. So I guess it makes sense.

 

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High: Wow, it’s like the book Nonviolent Communication, but without the weird and creepy implication that if you do everything right then people will do what you want.

The key piece of advice is that you should focus on what you actually want and doing things that will achieve the goal you actually want, instead of giving into the temptation to instead achieve the goals “no one ever criticizes me” or “the person I’m talking to is punished” or “my sense of self-righteousness is justified” or similar. Do not assume that it’s impossible to get a deal both sides will be okay with: this is often possible!

Before you can succeed at a crucial conversation, you have to separate out what’s actually going on from the story you’re telling yourself is going on about how you are an innocent victim, or the other person is a horrible monster, or you are completely incapable of improving the situation. Try looking at the objective facts of the situation and separating them from your interpretations of what’s going on. Ask yourself about your role in the problem, why a reasonable and rational person would do what the other person is doing, and what you should do to move towards what you want.

The first step in a crucial conversation is to notice when people feel unsafe. When people feel unsafe, they will usually turn to silence or violence: on one hand, selectively showing your true opinions, avoiding important issues, or even withdrawing from the conversation altogether; on the other hand, forcing your views on others, labeling and stereotyping people, or insulting and threatening people. When these happen, the conversation has gone off the rails. Even noticing unsafe conversations can be a huge step towards improving conversations, but you can also work on making it safer. You do that through: apologizing when appropriate; using a contrast statement which addresses others’ concerns that you don’t respect them or have a malicious intent and then clarifies your respectfulness and intent; and finding a mutual purpose, a goal both sides share. You do that through CRIB (this book is as fond of acronyms as DBT is): committing to find a mutual purpose; recognizing why the person you’re talking to wants the things they want; inventing a mutual purpose, perhaps by agreeing that everyone wants the relationship to be strong or the business to succeed; and brainstorming new strategies that serve everyone.

Once everyone is safe, you want to find out other people’s perspectives and share your own. To share your own perspectives, use STATE: share a factual description of the situation from your perspective; tell the story you’ve told yourself about those facts; and ask for the other person’s perspective. While doing this, talk tentatively, saying things softly and in a way that implies you want other people to correct you, and encourage other people to share their own views, no matter how controversial. To encourage other people to share their perspectives, use AMPP: ask to hear people’s concerns; mirror other people’s feelings; paraphrase what you’re hearing; and if they really won’t share their opinions with you at all, prime by saying tentatively what you think the other person’s perspective might be. If it turns out you and the other person disagree, start with an area of agreement; build on what the other person is saying by suggesting that they might have overlooked something; and compare positions, suggesting that you differ and not that one of you is wrong, when you really can’t reach consensus.

When it comes time to make the decision, you should follow an appropriate decision-making procedure: for instance, the boss has the final say in a corporation, but in most marriages decisions are made by consensus. When decisions are made, you should always be clear about who is responsible, what exactly they’re supposed to do, when they’re supposed to do it by, and what the followup will be.

The Myth of the Rational Voter: Voters are systematically biased: for instance, compared to the consensus of economists, they tend to underestimate the usefulness of markets and the economic benefits of trade with foreigners. Voters are wrong even about obvious empirical issues: for instance, voters tend to vastly overestimate the percentage of the budget devoted to foreign aid. Voters care about trivia about politicians (Dan Quayle’s feud with a television character) at the expense of practical issues (who is their senator); while voters swiftly punish transgressions they hear about, these transgressions are generally things like “said a racist slur” or “cheated on his dying wife” rather than things like “caused the incarceration of millions of people for relatively small crimes” or “destroyed the entire economy”. The worst part is that voters are altruistic, so instead of voting based on their pocketbooks (which, presumably, would incentivize politicians to have a good economy for most of their voters) they vote based on what they think is good for the country (which incentivizes politicians to give voters things the voters think are a good idea, whether it is or not).  All this means that voters vote for and receive terrible policy.

Honestly, it’s kind of remarkable to me how democratic governments wind up with their current level of low-variance mediocrity. This happens every time I read something about society. Like, it’s really remarkable how well our society works given that every individual element of it is a constantly-falling-apart shitshow. I have no explanation for this state of affairs.

Weirdly, Caplan models the situation as “there are benefits to having biased opinions (less effort researching right opinions, signalling group membership, not having to admit you’re wrong), there are costs to having biased opinions (you are wrong about things and that hurts you), since any voter has an astronomically small chance of flipping the election it is rational for them to buy way more bias than they would for things affecting their personal life.” While I think that’s correct for some situations, other biases, such as the availability heuristic, clearly don’t seem to fit this model. Like, I really don’t think parents are hysterical about children playing outside because they’re obtaining a certain amount of signalling that they’re good parents at the cost of a certain amount of parenting effort, I think they’re legitimately just mistaken about the chance their children will be kidnapped. And I suspect similar arguments apply to voters as well.

Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction: I am impressed by the consistent high quality of the “very short introduction” series and wish I could subscribe to a program where they mail me a random one each month and then I get to learn about mathematics or nothingness or logic or something each month.

The most interesting thing I learned from this book is that some people, including Flynn himself, believe the Flynn effect is due to increased familiarity with standardized tests in general and intelligence tests in specific. For instance, in the 1930s, an IQ test was probably the first standardized test a person had ever taken, while I took about two standardized tests a year for twelve years while attending a school system which was widely criticized for primarily teaching me how to be good at taking tests. It’s no wonder that I’d have a higher IQ score. In this case, the Flynn effect means that changing IQ scores provide us little to no information about whether and how people’s IQ scores are changing over time.

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think: This is a pretty good introduction to the YIMBY position on housing. Various regulations– including rent control and zoning– make it more difficult and less profitable to build more homes, so we have fewer homes than we need. The idea that homes are an “investment” which always increases in price also increases the price of housing for people who don’t own their own homes. As a result, people live further from work (leading to unpleasant commutes and lots of pollution) or move to cities with cheaper housing but fewer jobs. This is bad, because dense locations provide a lot of benefits to people– ranging from higher productivity to a cleaner environment to better restaurants.

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How The Law Is Used To Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful: I originally thought I was a ooey-gooey soft-on-crime liberal, and then I read this book, and discovered I was an ooey-gooey soft-on-crime liberal except for crimes committed by presidents. When Glenn Greenwald remarked that under international law torture is punished with the death penalty, I thought “yep, actually, I totally support executing George W Bush.”

Unfortunately, my tough-on-crime stance is not shared by most people. In fact, under the name of “unifying the country” and “looking forward not backward”, presidents have managed to get away with absurd violations of national and international law: from Nixon’s multiple felonies to Bush’s surveillance and torture. Of course, this is not actually how the rule of law ought to work: the most basic principle of our government is that it is a government of laws not men, which is to say that if you commit a crime you should be punished, even if you are the president. (Especially if you are the president!) Claims that “public policy takes precedence over the rule of law”. Of course, there are many incentives for any given president to pull this shit: if they punish their predecessors for felonies and war crimes, maybe they’ll be punished for their own felonies and war crimes! All this is combined with a massive expansion of incarceration, meaning a poor black person gets more time in jail for smoking pot than a president does for violating international law.

Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement from Stonewall to SlutWalk: The real lesson of this book is that Margo St. James, the founder of COYOTE and the St. James Infirmary, is a stone-cold badass. Margo St. James became a sex worker after she was accused of doing sex work because she was a beatnik and hosted lots of different men in her apartment, and obviously the only reason one would have men stay over is doing sex work. Her conviction meant that she couldn’t find a job other than doing sex work. She founded COYOTE, one of the first sex workers’ rights organizations, a year after J Edgar Hoover died “because we wanted to make sure he was really dead”. COYOTE’s shenanigans included awarding a giant keyhole to the Vice Cop of the Year and holding loiter-ins at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Their largest victory was when Judge Marie-Victoire dismissed almost forty sex workers’ cases on the grounds of sex discrimination, since the police had not arrested the clients. (The assistant district attorney for vice crimes said there was no reason to arrest men because “the customer is not involved with the commercial exploitation of sex, at least not on an ongoing basis.”) St. James also climbed Pike’s Peak to prove that sex workers aren’t diseased. Today, he St. James Infirmary commits to doing research that sex workers feel matters to them: for instance, it performed the first medical research on the foot problems caused by working all night in hooker heels.

I also appreciated the following slogans from a protest of Playboy Bunny clubs which only paid their workers in tips, without any salary: “don’t be a bunny, work for money” and “women should be obscene and not heard.”

In 34 states, doing full service sex work while being HIV positive is a felony, regardless of whether transmission occurred or what the actual risk profile of the sex act is. No HIV-positive client has ever been prosecuted.

The unsung heroes of this book are public health workers and activists, many of whom regularly break laws to help their sex worker clients: from giving out clean needles and crack kits, breaking trafficking laws to help underage sex workers find shelter and necessities, giving out birth control and post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV without prescriptions, or letting people know when the police are a few blocks away.

[content warning: rape]

Bang: The advice in this book is mostly reasonable. The author, however, is a goddamn misogynist.

As an example: Roosh says that you should do things because you want to do them, not in a desperate attempt to please a particular woman. This is great advice; I agree that if you’re buying someone a drink, it should be because you like them and want them to be happy, not because you’re desperately seeking their approval. His next sentence says that if he buys women drinks, it’s not a form of supplication, it’s to loosen them up so they’ll fuck him.

This is merely one example of a larger problem. Roosh seems to view sex not as something that people do together because it’s fun but as a competition between men and women in which men try to obtain sex and women try to deny it. He views a woman saying no to sex as an ordinary, normal part of the process of having sex with her; his writing clearly seems to imply that he expects a woman to say “no” to sex three or four times the first time he has sex with her. It is nice that he does not suggest physically forcing a woman into sex. He does, however, suggest ignoring her nos (for instance, responding to “we’re going too fast” with “yeah, I agree” but continuing to do whatever you’re doing) and responding to an outright “no” by stopping for a few minutes and then doing the thing again.

Of course, perhaps some women are saying “no” in the hopes that Roosh will override her “no”. (As I’ve always said, I think such ridiculous behavior should be punished by those women not getting to have sex until they learn better.) And of course some people say no to sex and then change their mind and say yes, although early on in a relationship you should probably check in and see if they’re sure. But a lot of the women he’d be using that strategy on are people who are scared, inexperienced, unsure, not good at setting boundaries. They might be frightened that if they don’t comply he will hurt them; he’s given them no reason to think otherwise. It is scary to be alone and naked, often in a house that isn’t your own, with a person who is larger and stronger than you. Is this the sort of thing you’re comfortable doing with a sexual partner?

Even from a purely selfish level, I can’t imagine that this is a great way to obtain sex. Like… surely you want to have sex with someone who wants to have sex with you? What benefit does having sex with a reluctant person have over masturbation? They make very good Fleshlights these days, you know. And it certainly makes the rest of Roosh’s pickup advice questionable. If he’s so good at seducing women, how come he has to pressure people who don’t want sex with him into sex? Surely they should be throwing their dripping panties at his head?

I think a lot of pickup stuff can be really useful for shy men. It can be hard to think of something to say to strangers, so knowing basically what you’re going to say can make it easier to break the ice and come off as charming and fun. A lot of pickup stuff isn’t the Magic Secret To Obtaining Sex, it’s just a basically reasonable thing to say while flirting, and that can serve as a magic feather to build confidence so you actually hit on people. And by relying on other people’s lines for a while you can develop a sense of what works and what doesn’t and eventually learn to flirt without the lines. But there has got to be a book written by a man with less awful and disgusting views about sexuality.

[content warning: rape, suicide]

The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented A Story of Martyrdom: A depressing amount of this book is based on word games about the meaning of the word “persecution”. You see, it only counts as persecution if the government intended to oppress Christians. The actual state of affairs was that Christians were widely thought of as very strange and rumored to be incestuous and cannibals, were occasionally oppressed by local governors, and sometimes were executed because the Emperor passed a law that said that everyone had to sacrifice to him or be executed, intended to figure out who his political enemies were, but that accidentally harmed Christians. I found this sort of argument-by-definition extremely pedantic. I also found the tie-ins to current culture war stuff really annoying: I can figure out for myself the connections between Christian ideals of martyrdom and Rick Santorum’s idea that Christians are persecuted today, thank you.

That said, it’s still an interesting read for the historical facts. Many so-called martyrdom stories are, in fact, fiction: there are historical inaccuracies and lurid plotlines that make the most sense if they were popular novels intended to amuse the reader. Many bear a striking similarity to Greek romance novels popular at the time. They have plots like “a Christian who has taken a vow of celibacy is forced to marry a vestal virgin, whom he converts to Christianity; they are arrested for trying to convert people, where the vestal virgin is sentenced to work at a brothel; an escaped lion does not harm her but instead kills the men attempting to rape her.” This is salacious enough that it is probably fiction and not a thing that actually happened.

Voluntary martyrdom was apparently quite common in the early church. We have several early Christian writers condemning it as heresy and the sin of suicide; this was probably political, because the Christians we would today consider non-heretical often escaped or recanted their Christianity, and there was a group of heretics, the Donatists, who had confessed to being Christian but were not executed for one reason or another. The non-Donatists have an obvious reason to condemn voluntary martyrdom. One of the stories we have about early Christians is that they went to a regional governor to try to be martyred, except the governor refused and instead told them that if they wanted to die there were cliffs to throw themselves off and ropes to hang themselves on.

The Christians were really confusing to the Romans. Roman polytheism was syncretic; it literally did not make sense to them that worshipping one god meant not being allowed to worship the emperor either. Many Christians were deliberately stubborn and difficult: for instance, one Christian responded to all questions, including his name, with “I am a Christian.” Many Christians said they respected God alone, which was both incomprehensible and probably seditious from a Roman perspective, since Roman society was based on hierarchies of respect.

 

Book Post for March

Tags

csa tw, ozy blog post, parenting, pregnancy cw

Dude, You’re Gonna Be A Dad: All I want is a book I can give to my husband that focuses on his experience of the pregnancy. Instead, I get this sexist pile of bullcrap.

A truly astonishing percentage of this book is devoted to Dealing With Women And Their Incomprehensible Woman Feelings. Of course you, a man, do not have any feelings you need to talk about! You are a manly man! You care about football! And sex! And drinking! The most striking thing about all of this is that it isn’t clear to me that this book expects men to actually get any say in their relationships whatsoever. If you don’t want to go shopping for the birth announcement or participate in a baby shower or go to the doctors’ appointments, why not just say that? Like, first of all, some men like baby showers? And, second of all, if you despise baby showers that much, why not tell your wife? It is just this horrifying vision of a world where people are constantly forced to have their most intimate relationship with someone they can’t talk to and don’t particularly like.

While I too agree that large breasts are very nice, an advice book shouldn’t go hubba hubba about how big one’s wife’s breasts are more than, say, twice. And if your wife is literally producing your child, then it seems to me that you should do your fair share of chores without having to be bribed with sex to do so. And in a pregnancy book, I think it is wildly inappropriate to talk about the process of birth and associated medical procedures as if they are so disgusting men cannot possibly be expected to deal with them. If you can’t handle knowing what an episiotomy is, maybe you shouldn’t have a partner who might get one.

The Book of New Family Traditions: How To Create Great Rituals for Holidays and Everyday: I think that it’s problematic to refer to things as being neurotypical; after all, both neurodivergent and neurotypical people are very diverse, and it’s a mistake to assume that “unlike me” is the same thing as “NT”. Still, this book is aggressively neurotypical. A lot of the things the author considers to be Fun I would consider to be incredibly overstimulating and they would make me want to hide in a corner and cry.

Nevertheless, there are a lot of really cool ideas for holidays and rituals, if you can pick through the ones that wouldn’t work for you. A few I particularly liked: A mom bonded with her son, a college student who liked World of Warcraft, by playing with him, and eventually organized a birthday party for him in WoW with his guild; celebrating A A Milne’s birthday with small children who like Winnie the Pooh; reading a poem each day with your kids during April; a dad who brings his child’s stuffed animal with him on work trips and photographs the stuffed animal doing various fun things; giving a Miss Frizzle Award each month to the family member who has learned the most things through making the most mistakes.

The Game Theorist’s Guide to Parenting: How The Science of Strategic Thinking Can Help You Deal With The Toughest Negotiators You Know– Your Kids: Less a parenting advice book, more an introduction to game theory that happens to use parenting as a hook. Still pretty interesting.

The traditional “I cut, you choose” is provably optimal if there are only two people involved. Traditional turn-taking is often suboptimal because going first is way better than going second: for instance, if you’re picking players on a team. “Balanced alternation” (Alice, Bob, Bob, Alice, Bob, Alice, Alice, Bob) is superior. If children are arguing over something, try an auction! The book recommends chore auctions, because children might have different amounts of money, but it seems to me that “you can’t buy control of the remote control if you’re saving up money for a new bike” is in fact an important economics lesson of its own. Not sure what the best way to deal with older children having larger allowances is, though. If you credibly follow through on threats, it’ll be less likely that you’ll have to follow through on threats. Majority rule works best for voting if there are only two options; if there are more options, Random Dictator (in which a single person is randomly selected to make the decision) is best over time, because families are generally small enough that everyone will be able to take a turn to be dictator.

No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way To Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind: The one phrase repeated throughout this book is “connect, then redirect.” Connecting with your child first calms them, improves your relationship, and might improve your child’s brain. To connect with your child, first get below their eye level, then touch them, give them a nod, or otherwise nonverbally communicate your empathy. Acknowledge their feelings verbally, then listen to what your child says, instead of lecturing or trying to convince her not to feel what she feels. Once you’ve listened, reflect back her emotions to her (“you seem really disappointed about not getting to go to the party”). Throughout the process, try to have an attitude of curiosity about why your child is behaving as they are. And don’t catastrophize about what your child’s misbehavior means for the rest of their life.

Wait until both you and your child are calm to redirect; your child is not in a place for learning, and you aren’t in a place for teaching, when either of you is overemotional. (I think they chose “redirect” because it rhymes, because honestly what they’re calling redirection doesn’t seem like redirection to me.) Redirection is inherently flexible: the important thing is not to stick to rules, but instead to ask yourself how best to teach the child what you want them to teach. It’s important to be consistent but not rigid: if the household policy is that homework is done before fun, but the child’s grandparents came over, maybe homework can wait for after dinner.

The skills you probably want to build through discipline are insight into oneself, empathy with others, and the ability to repair harms caused. Therefore, ask the child about his feelings to build insight and about other people’s feelings to build empathy. (It’s important to ask rather than lecturing. As you can no doubt remember from your own childhood, children zone out during lectures.) To build the ability to repair harms, ask the child what they think should happen afterward. You can also ask them for ideas about how to prevent problems in the future. Try neutrally describing situations: “you said you were prepared for the test, but you got a D, what happened?” Always accept your child’s emotions, even as you limit their behavior. Emphasize what you do want your children to do (“put on your shoes”) rather than what you don’t (“stop messing around!”). Whenever possible, say a yes with conditions rather than an outright no: “we can read a story tomorrow night”, not “no more stories.” Playfulness, silliness, and humor can defuse conflicts.

Loose Parts: Inspiring Play In Young Children: The premise of this book is that to encourage freeform play with kids, you should give them toys that can be used in a lot of different ways. This book then proceeds to have pictures of literally every such toy in existence. It is literally 90% picture. I don’t object to pictures per se, and some of the pictures are very prettily shot, but I am a very verbal person who gets bored easily by the umpteenth picture of pinecones.

A random sample of things photographed in the book, to give you an idea: bouncy balls; buckets; boxes; fabric; metal washers; rocks; pipe cleaners; seeds; pots and pans; bottlecaps; colored paper; necklaces.

The Wonder Weeks: The Wonder Weeks claims that whenever your infant is really fussy it is because they are learning a new skill. I have no idea if this is technically speaking “true”, but it certainly sounds hella useful for parents to believe. It is a huge pain in the ass when infants are fussy, but parents like their infants learning new skills, and you can reframe the situation by going “oh yes! She’ll probably be able to lift her head up/talk/walk/whatever soon!” Since infants are constantly learning things, it is a bit hard to prove this framing wrong.

Suggested activities for newborns: lots snuggling.

Suggested activities for week five: lots snuggling; have ‘conversations’ with your baby; show her things she finds interesting.

Suggested activities for week eight: let baby play with her hands and feet, possibly naked, possibly securely tying a ribbon to a hand or foot; chat with baby; bathe with baby; bring baby interesting objects; if the baby can lift her head up, gently pull her up so she’s sitting supported with you. Toys: anything that dangles overhead; anything that can be swiped at or touched; a mobile that moves or is musical; cuddly toys; a music box.

Suggested activities for week twelve: let your baby feel different fabrics; gently bounce the baby; sway baby side to side like a pendulum; slide the baby down your body; lift the baby up slowly above your head then lower her down, perhaps making airplane noises; pretend to nibble the baby; put the baby on your knee and bounce her. Toys: rattles; rocking chairs; dolls with realistic faces; bells; toys that make sounds; wobbly toys that bounce back when hit.

Suggested activities for week nineteen: narrate your life to the baby; look at brightly colored pictures together; sing songs; play peek-a-boo and one-little-piggy; show the baby a mirror; say “I’m going to [dramatic pause] pinch your [body part]” and then do so. Toys: crackly paper; mirror; photographs or pictures of other babies or objects or animals she recognizes by name; CD with children’s songs; toy vehicle with wheels that really turn; screw-top container with rice in it; household items such as a measuring cup or colander in the bath; activity center; ball with gripping notches and a bell inside; plastic or inflatable rattle.

Suggested activities for week 26: peek-a-boo and variations, hiding yourself or her; hide toys under a blanket or in the bathtub; look at picture books together; whisper to her; letting her drop things from her high chair; songs where you move the child as you sing; standing the baby on her head; letting her ‘fly’ around the room; supporting her as she sits or stands; swimming (only if supervised closely); going to a children’s farm together. Toys: a cupboard full of interesting things like empty toilet paper rolls, empty boxes, a pan, keys, and plastic plates; toy pianos; toy telephones; drums; squeaky toys; cuddly toys that make noise when turned upside down; toy cars with rotating wheels and openable doors; things to fill and empty out in the bath; CD with children’s songs; picture books; photo books; wooden blocks; balls; wooden spoons; boxes; empty egg cartons; wooden spoons; cups that nest or stack.

Suggested activities for week 37: taking baby outside; allowing him to press doorbells, flip light switches, etc.; let baby watch himself as you dress or undress him; name things; ask your baby to do things for you like handing you something; patty cake; let baby imitate what you’re doing; put baby in front of a mirror; chase; hide-and-seek (make sure the baby sees you disappear). Toys: things that open and close like doors and drawers; pans with lids; alarm clocks; magazines and newspapers to tear; plastic plates, cups, silverware; cushions and duvets to crawl on and over; boxes and buckets that are larger than he is; toy cars; posters with distinct pictures; picture books; baby pools; blocks, especially if large; sand, water, pebbles, and plastic tools; swings; dolls with realistic faces; things he can move (handles, knobs); things that move by themselves (shadows, branches); containers; balls of all sizes.

Suggested activities for week 46: pattycake; itsy bitsy spider; row row row your boat; let baby ‘help’ you do housework; let baby ‘groom’ himself; let baby feed himself with a spoon; let baby cooperate in dressing himself, and name the parts as you dress him; touch and name parts of your baby’s anatomy; point to and name things; put a toy under a cup and watch him look for it; wrap a plaything in crinkly paper and watch him unwrap it. Toys: toy cars; wooden trains with stations and bridges; drum (or pots and pans!) to beat on; dolls with toy bottles; books with animal pictures; balls of all sizes; giant plastic beads; mirrors; plastic figures of people or animals; primo blocks; bicycles, cars, or trucks he can sit on and move around himself; stuffed animals, especially if it makes music if you squeeze it; sandbox with bucket and spade.

Suggested activities for week 55: give the doll a bath; let the baby help unpack groceries, do dishes, or do other housework; hide an object that’s playing a sound and let the baby find it; put a toy under one cup, switch the locations of the cups, and let him find it. Toys: dolls with strollers and beds; farmhouse with farm animals and fences; tea set (unbreakable); wooden train with tracks; cars and garage; pots, pans, and wooden spoons; telephone; Primo blocks; bicycle, car, toy horse, or engine he can sit on; push-along wagon; rocking horse; stackable containers; rod with stackable rings; colored sponges; box with differently shaped blocks and holes; mop, hand broom, dustpan and brush; large sheets of paper and markers; books with animals or cars and tractors; musical instruments; CD with simple stories.

Suggested activities for week 64: various physical antics; playing outdoors; asking the child to point to objects or body parts; movement songs like Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes or If You’re Happy and You Know It; silliness; cartoons like Sesame Street; peek-a-boo; hide-and-seek; ‘helping’ cook, vacuum, or do the dishes, or pretending ot do so. Toys: jungle gym and slide; balls; books; sandbox; tea set; puzzles; plastic bottles; cleaning utensils; toy vacuums; toys on a string; Sesame Street; cartoons.

Suggested activities for week 75: silliness; play wrestling and other physical play; drawing; trying to stand on his head or balance on one foot; drawing; blowing bubbles; jumping; balancing on a short wall; tickling; playing outside; playing with other children; ball games; ghost games; twirling around until dizzy; feeding the dog; tag; hide-and-seek; reading stories. Toys: cars and garage; clay; children’s TV; children’s books; trinkets that belong together; toy airport; drawing on paper; sand and water; push car; plastic chair; ball; bicycle; stuffed animals, dolls, teddy bears; stickers; sandbox; digging in the yard; Sesame Street; music; slide; colored pencils; blowing bubbles; trains; swings; rocking horse; puzzles.

Do Chocolate Lovers Have Sweeter Babies?: The Surprising Science of Pregnancy: This cites a lot of psychological experiments that have that sort of “gee whiz” quality that makes me think they’ll fail to replicate. Many of the cited studies are on rats, and things that apply to rat babies have a remarkable tendency to not generalize to human babies. She also cites Satoshi Kanazawa, He Who Gives All Other Evolutionary Psychologists A Bad Name. So if you’re looking for a science-based pregnancy I’d recommend Debunking the Bump or Expecting Better and skipping this one.

Anyway, the actionable advice from this book is as follows:

• Don’t eat food that makes you feel nauseous in early pregnancy.
• The expectant father may get mood swings, nausea, fatigue, food cravings or aversions, or bloat; if so, rejoice, as this is a sign of attachment and emotional responsiveness to the baby. (Also, now he gets to suffer as much as you do.)
• Eat a generally healthy diet: leafy greens, eggs, fruit, fish, nuts, beans, whole grains, soy, and a little fat and dairy, but not to excess.
• In particular: Eat fish.
• Avoid consuming an excessive amount of vitamins.
• Gain between twenty-five and thirty-five pounds.
• Have sex.
• Tell the father the baby looks like him, even if it doesn’t.
• Read books to and play music to the baby in utero; they will find those books and music comforting when they leave.
• Moderate stress and exercise are good for the fetus, but high levels of stress and exercise are bad.
• Eat a chocolate bar each day.
• Squat during childbirth if you can.
• Stimulate your breasts to induce labor.
• Spend the first hour after birth with the baby pressed against your chest.
• Don’t bathe right after childbirth.
• Get ample support during childbirth.
• Take pictures of your baby’s smiling face and then look at it as often as possible.
• Give your baby ample love and nurturing, even to the point of spoiling her.
• Breast-feed.
• While breast-feeding, try to have moderate stress in your life.

No Regrets Parenting: Turning Long Days and Short Years Into Cherished Moments With Your Kids: No Regrets Parenting consists mostly of a series of ideas about how to spend time with your children if you are a busy person, as many parents are. For instance, you can host sleepovers; if you’re working weekends, you can take your kids to the office with you and let them play at the office. To bond with a teenager, you can teach them to drive and then help them apply to college. You can have family traditions, like a taco night and family movie night. You can have family dinners together every night. Most of the suggestions are not particularly groundbreaking, but it’s nice to have them all in one place.

Playful Parenting: An Exciting New Approach To Raising Children That Will Help You Nurture Close Connections, Solve Behavioral Problems, and Encourage Confidence: Based on the author’s experience as a father and play therapist, this is an extensive guide to playing with children. I find it extraordinarily reassuring that there are how-to books for these things.

Playful Parenting argues that children’s misbehavior is often caused by disconnection, and creating a sense of connection can cause them to behave better. The best way to do this is through the language of children– play. Play also allows children to work through their feelings and conflicts in their lives. We may stigmatize certain kinds of play– disapproving of roughhousing, violent play, or play we deem sexist. But these allow kids to feel a sense of connection and work through their feelings too: for instance, wrestling can allow kids to explore themes of aggression, anger, isolation, or strength. So try to respect your children’s play and engage in it wholeheartedly. For instance, the author played Barbies reluctantly with his daughter, thinking that they were boring and stupid and sexist, before he realized that this was basically saying to his daughter “your interests are boring and stupid and sexist.” He then played with more enthusiasm. The author suggests that wrestling and other physical play are excellent ways to engage with kids, as is pretending to be stupid (for instance, putting a sock on your head, then on your hand, then on your shoulder, before you put it on your foot). Play can stop misbehavior in its tracks by turning the misbehavior into a game.

[content warning: child sexual abuse]

Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex: A must-read for any sex-positive American. Levine’s thesis is that, as a culture, Americans are hysterical about the sexuality of minors, and this causes a great deal of harm. Although her book is nearly fifteen years old, the trends she discusses have not changed as far as I can tell.

For instance, consider child on child sexual abuse. Although child on child sexual abuse is a real thing (and one of my few critiques of Levine’s book is that I think she fails to engage with the harm it can cause), social workers and scholars have concluded without evidence that sexual play and ordinary roughhousing are really sexual abuse. Sexual play might not be “just curiosity”– many children experience sexual pleasure, which they may wish to consensually explore with other children. We simply do not have enough information to know what is normal and what is abnormal sexual play, as well as whether abnormal but consensual sexual play causes any harm. In the absence of this evidence, children are being branded as sexual offenders and placed in treatment that is far more appropriate to actual abusers (for instance, it characterizes the child’s insistence that they have not done anything wrong as “denial”).

Even if it’s not branded as child-on-child sexual abuse, Levine points out that our attitude towards children’s sexuality is fucked up in a lot of different ways. For instance, she describes a parenting advice columnist who, when asked what to do when the parent catches two five-year-old boys looking at and touching each other’s penises, says to tell them there’s nothing wrong with their bodies but that their bodies are private so they shouldn’t show them to each other. Levine asks, “surely, if we want to teach our children about privacy, the correct thing to do would be to say ‘excuse me’ and close the door?” There is simply no concept that children might have privacy from parents or the ability to make decisions about their own bodies.

The situation is worse for teenagers, who pretty much always want sex more than children do. Levine’s criticisms of abstinence-only education are familiar, but she goes farther than that. Levine questions the usefulness of statutory rape law, pointing out that the line is drawn differently in different places, and yet most Americans don’t even know whether their state is a sex-under-eighteen-is-illegal state or a sex-under-sixteen-is-illegal state. She points out that many adults who had sex with adults as teenagers consider it a positive experience, and essentially no one considers actual rape to be a positive experience. And getting the courts involved can worsen an already bad situation.

Levine argues that teenagers should generally be expected to engage in outercourse, rather than intercourse. However, even comprehensive sex education (Levine calls it “abstinence-plus”) provides little to no education about what outercourse might mean, almost never mentioning such activities as phone sex, sharing porn, frottage, or use of sex toys. Many people condemn cybersex, even though it’s objectively speaking the safest form of sex a teenager might engage in: there’s no STI or pregnancy risk, and real life doesn’t come with a block function. But cybersex combines the terrifying Teen Sexuality with the terrifying Internet, so it’s doomed.

Book Post for February, Part Two: Books About Parenting

Tags

ozy blog post, parenting, this is a prussian education system hateblog

Experimenting With Babies: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform On Your Kid: Exactly what it says on the tin! If you would like to replicate a bunch of developmental psychology experiments on infants with your very own infant, this book will explain to you how! All the experiments were selected for being easily doable in the home and posing no risk to the child. Important note: buy a copy while you’re pregnant, as many of the experiments are best performed on newborns.

The Baby Book: Since there is very little evidence about most decisions parents make about babies, I feel perfectly free to make my decision based on my own preferences and values. Attachment parenting, I think, is in line with my values: it hews closely to the way people raised children in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness; it emphasizes closeness and support; it doesn’t involve letting your child cry it out, which personally I feel like would make my heart shatter in two. Whether or not Dr. Sears’s advice is right for most people, I definitely think it’s right for me.

I don’t understand why the attachment parenting blogosphere is such a cesspit. Dr. Sears emphasizes that the most important thing any baby needs is happy parents and that parents know their own baby best, so if advice goes against your own parental intuition throw out the advice. Even the much-despised advice about being a stay-at-home mother is primarily motivated by concern for the mother: raising a baby is very stressful and combining it with a full-time job can make moms miserable and unable to enjoy their babies. I think Dr. Sears both doesn’t think enough about his class privilege and doesn’t recognize that some mothers legitimately prioritize career success or would go insane only talking to people whose age is measured in months, but I think it comes from a good place.

And yet all the attachment parenting blogosphere is like “h o n e s t l y if you’re not breastfeeding your child until three and you’re not using handmade cloth diapers and you don’t cosleep until the child decides to leave your bed on their own you’re basically abusing them l b q h.” There are people feeling guilty that cosleeping isn’t the right choice for them! This is absurd. How do people take such a kind and compassionate book and transform it into an opportunity to beat up on other mothers for doing it wrong?

The Other Baby Book: A Natural Approach To Baby’s First Year: Okay, now I understand where the guilt comes from.

This was pitched to me as “amazing hatereading material” and it was, in fact, amazing. I learned all about how you can prevent the adverse consequences of vaccines by giving your child megadoses of vitamin C and homeopathic preparations. And how formula is basically POISON. And pretty much every object I’ve ever bought is also POISON, full of dangerous and unpronounceable chemicals. And that “a person—a loving, calm, skilled, experienced person who was with the laboring woman, breathing with her, talking to her, being quiet with her, supporting her” is an acceptable substitute for fetal monitoring. And the important baby bonding of elimination communication (look, it’s fine if you personally feel that elimination communication helps you bond with your baby, but my opinion is that we live in the 21st century in which there is such a thing as a disposable diaper). And that epidurals hurt your baby (no, they don’t). And in general that we should trust Nature. To be honest, Nature invented the concept of parasitoids, I think she’s a terrible fucking mother.

Apparently “woman is the birth power source.” I have no idea what this means but to be honest I sort of want to make “the birth power source” my pregnancy tag.

Brain Rules for Baby: How To Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five: This book I like!

Prenatal stimulation is really cool and I feel sad about how much pseudoscience has given it a bad reputation. Your baby can learn things before they’re born! They can recognize Dr. Seuss books, or lullabies, or soap opera jingles, or their dad’s voice. And familiar sounds are likely to be comforting! It does not make your child a genius, but it doesn’t have to make your child a genius to be nifty.

Apparently one third to one half of new parents experience as much marital distress as couples who are currently in therapy trying to save their relationship. The biggest causes are sleep deprivation, social isolation, an uneven division of labor (usually in heterosexual couples favoring the man), and postpartum depression. To prevent this, practice empathy and ensure that you are doing your fair share of the chores (which will probably feel like you are doing an unfairly large share of the chores).

To increase children’s intelligence: breastfeed; talk to your baby a lot; encourage imaginative play, possibly using the Tools of the Mind classroom techniques which increase executive function; praise effort, not IQ. I think the last piece of advice was poorly phrased in the book: they imply that you should just switch out “you did well on that math test, you’re really smart” with “you did well on that math test, you worked really hard.” Of course, if your kid didn’t work hard at all, they’re going to be totally aware that you’re bullshitting them. So you should probably just say “good job” about the math test and instead praise their soccer performance, where they keep tripping over their own feet but also keep showing up to practice.

To increase children’s happiness: practice a demanding but responsive parenting style (support, warmth, and acceptance, combined with high standards and strictly enforced rules); be comfortable with your own emotions, including negative ones; be attuned to your children’s emotions; teach children to label their own emotions; validate and don’t judge emotions, but teach children about unacceptable behavioral responses to emotions and view crises as an opportunity to teach self-regulation skills; if your child is throwing a tantrum about not having a cookie, say something like “I bet you wish you could have another cookie. If I could, I would wave a magic wand and make all the carrots taste like cookies.” The advice here is pretty similar to How To Talk So Kids Will Listen (And Listen So Kids Will Talk).

To encourage self-control and altruism: create reasonable, clear rules; praise when the rules are followed and the absence of bad behavior; be warm and accepting when enforcing rules; when punishing, be swift and consistent, use real punishments, and remind your child that you love and accept them; whenever possible, use natural consequences or withdrawal of parental attention; provide an explanation for all rules during warnings, praise, and punishment; don’t spank.

I have two complaints about this book. First, autism is described as a single condition caused by a deficit in theory of mind, even though the evidence suggests that theory of mind deficits are not universal in autism. Second, the author explicitly claims that their advice might not apply to single parents, gay parents, or blended families because research has mostly been done on parents who are heterosexual married couples. I’m not sure why your parents being gay would mean that one should instead be harsh and unaccepting when enforcing rules, but okay.

Caring For Your Baby And Young Child: Birth To Age 5: Extremely complete, fairly mainstream, not a lot to say about it.

I must say I have a grudge against the American Academy of Pediatrics on the cosleeping thing. If you control properly for confounders, sleeping in a nursery is only a little less dangerous than safe cosleeping. And yet the AAP is all like “you should NEVER EVER EVER cosleep even if it is the ONLY WAY to get a good night’s sleep and even if you are afraid that YOU WILL KILL YOUR CHILD IN A CAR ACCIDENT DUE TO SLEEP DEPRIVATION OTHERWISE”, and their book is not only doesn’t address concerns about nurseries but also is like “here’s some advice about how to decorate your kid’s nursery.” Bleh. I can’t help but think that this is a class thing.

The guide to improving your child’s brain health includes the statement that you should avoid subjecting your child to psychological or physical traumas. Thanks, AAP. I never would have guessed.

Montessori From The Start: The Child At Home, From Birth To Age Three: What is it with parenting books and taking umbrage about totally random things? This book objects to disposable diapers and playpens. Like, honestly, lots of children use disposable diapers, and yet they all wind up toilet trained eventually anyway, so I don’t see any reason to stress about it. More seriously, Montessori from the Start also objects to pretend play, which is cognitively important for the development of small children.

I like the Montessori attitude of respecting children’s autonomy and giving them responsibility. I think that this book is exactly correct that toddlers are capable of handling a lot more than people think they are, if parents are patient and willing to teach. The book gives many practical suggestions of activities that allow one’s toddler a sense of independence and self-reliance, such as teaching the toddler to make their own snack.

The Expectant Father: The Ultimate Guide for Dads-To-Be: I was hoping for a book something along the lines of The Birth Partner, but for the entire pregnancy– a calm, patient book aimed not at the pregnant person but at the pregnant person’s support network. Unfortunately, that is not this book. This book is very definitely aimed at men. The sections about How You Might Be Feeling This Month include lots of information about what your masculinity is doing. Maybe you are feeling more masculine because you impregnated a woman! Maybe you are feeling less masculine because you’re experiencing couvade syndrome! Since my husband does not really have a masculinity in the first place, this book was less than helpful.

One thing that was actually good about this book was its extensive advice for deployed fathers feeling connected to the pregnancy. I myself am neither in the military or married to someone who is, but if you are this book might be helpful.

The Baby Owner’s Manual: An extremely cute premise– basically it’s a baby care book written as if it were an operating manual for a car or an electronics device. The advice is mostly boring standard advice you will also find in the American Academy of Pediatrics book. I had hoped it would be laugh-out-loud funny, but unfortunately the authors were insufficiently good at puns to make that happen. Not recommended.

Moebius Noodles: Adventurous Math for the Playground Crowd: A series of games which teach mathematical concepts to children from birth through school-age.  It covers symmetry, numbers, functions, and grids, and provides a variety of games that you can play with children and they can play with each other. While I know literally nothing about mathematical education, it does seem like the suggested activities are fun and would help build mathematical reasoning. Weirdly, it does not include any moebius strips.

Eating Well When You’re Expecting: A guide for nutrition for preconception, pregnant, and breastfeeding parents. This book appears to follow the USDA’s nutritional guidelines. Like all books in the What to Expect series, it is overly conservative about food safety (for instance, it forbids sushi because of the risk of parasite infection) without providing sufficient information to allow the reader to assess what they should eat based on their own risk tolerance. I suggest consulting Expecting Better or Debunking the Bump for food safety information.

Eating Well When You’re Expecting does not contain any information that you cannot find in What To Expect When You’re Expecting, except for a bit more information about various nutrients, some trouble-shooting about how you can get your nutrient needs met if you’re busy or broke or nauseous or at work, and a large number of pregnancy-safe recipes. I would suggest skipping it unless you’re having serious problems getting your vegetable/proteins/grains/whatever servings, in which case it might come in handy.

This is probably my fault for pirating the epub in the first place, but not having a search function is a huge pain in the ass if you’re trying to figure out which food groups peas count as. So if you are planning, like me, to maintain a spreadsheet where you keep track of your servings of Vitamin C foods, it might be worth obtaining an ebook with a search function.

Debunking the Bump: A Mathematician Mom Explodes Myths About Pregnancy: If you liked Expecting Better, you’d like this book, as they are in fact identical.

Debunking the Bump goes through a long list of things that pregnant people are supposed to worry about and tells you which ones are the biggest concerns, and which ones you probably shouldn’t worry about. She considers miscarriage and stillbirth to be an order of magnitude worse than congenital disability, which she considers to be an order of magnitude worse than things which cause minor impairments (very low birth weight), which she considers to be an order of magnitude worse than things which cause statistically detectable impairments (low birth weight). Given this value set (things will probably change if you have different values!), here is a listing of how risky things are in order of how risky they are.

1. Smoking more than ten cigarettes a day.
2. Delaying from age 35 to 36.
3. Smoking less than ten cigarettes a day.
4. Delaying from age 30 to age 31.
5. Delaying from age 25 to age 26.
6. Having a BMI of over 30.
7. Alcohol abuse.
8. Contracting viruses from small children.
9. Lead.
10. [Tied] Not eating oily fish; driving.

Of course, many of these are not actionable: you can’t become younger, and if you are smoking cigarettes while pregnant it is probably because you are a nicotine addict and not because you are unaware that it is very risky. Here is her list of actionable advice:

1. Wash your hands frequently when interacting with small children; avoid baby drool.
2. Cut down on discretionary car trips, wear your seatbelt, and drive cautiously.
3. Eat a daily serving of fish, particularly salmon and mackerel.
4. Eat organic vegetables to avoid organophosphate pesticide residue, particularly green beans and bell peppers.
5. Never ever ever ever ever ever ever eat any kind of meat without microwaving it or thoroughly cooking it first. This includes cold cuts!
6. At your next prenatal checkup, ask for your blood to be tested for lead. If your lead levels are high, take a calcium supplement.

The Shit No One Tells You: A Guide To Surviving Your Baby’s First Year: I really wanted to like this book! It’s a funny memoir by a disabled lesbian about the experience of parenting. I think a lot of parenting books are really, uh, optimistic, and The Shit No One Tells You provides a realistic point of view on how much labor sucks (a lot), whether you will have time to do anything except take care of a baby (no), and how much poop your life will involve (lots, and sometimes preceded by the word ‘projectile’).

But then I got to the chapter on vaccines.

Look, I feel like I’m a tolerant human being. “The research on this subject is overwhelming and confusing and I don’t know what the right thing to do is” is a common feeling. I am even sympathetic to parents who don’t want an autistic child, particularly an autistic child with high support needs. But when you say something like “there are so many anecdotes about children who got vaccines and then the light in their eyes just went out!”… guys, I’m autistic, and I’m a person. The light is still on in my eyes! I understand I am verbal, I don’t require a paid caregiver, and my violent meltdowns are extraordinarily rare, but people with more support needs than I have are still people! It is like finding a worm in the middle of an apple. The rest of the apple might taste really good, but it kind of ruined my whole experience.

Breastfeeding Made Simple: Seven Natural Laws for Nursing Mothers: This book contains medically inaccurate information about formula. In the developing world, breastfeeding is a very important public health intervention: breastfeeding reduces the risk of severe gastrointestinal infections, which can kill; parents who use formula in the developing world can wind up making their baby’s formula with unsafe water or diluting formula to save money. In the developed world, where most people can afford formula and the water is generally pretty safe, breastfeeding is less important: it leads to fewer gastrointestinal infections (which are far less dangerous in the developed world), lower rate of constipation, and probably a higher IQ. Many of the benefits this book claims simply have not been backed up by evidence.

In addition, Breastfeeding Made Simple has an anti-science attitude that upsets me. It’s true that formula was widely adopted, not because it was better, but because it seemed more scientific. And it’s true that some parents, inspired by behaviorism, ignored their babies’ cries and hunger signals. But that does not mean that we have learned that sometimes the wisdom of motherhood matters more than science; it means that science is self-correcting and sometimes makes mistakes, but that we can revise these mistakes. And it doesn’t mean that alternative medicine is an adequate substitute for real medicine.

I don’t mean to criticize this book overall. If you take the alleged benefits of breastfeeding with a grain of salt, it seems like an extraordinarily useful resource for breastfeeding parents, covering many common pitfalls. Babies do not understand the concept of clocks, and so you should generally expect to feed your children on their own schedule, not on yours; formula-fed babies take to a schedule much better, while for breastfed babies scheduling feedings can lead to underfeeding and loss of milk. You should never experience pain worse than a slight tenderness while breastfeeding: if you do, your baby probably has an improper latch-on. To ensure proper latch-on:

1. Hold your baby’s body under your breast and firmly against you; align your baby’s nose to your nipple; allow the baby’s head to tilt slightly back.
2. Lightly bring your baby to the breast (NOT breast to baby), rubbing your nipple along your baby’s face until the baby’s mouth opens.
3. Before the baby has developed head and neck control at four to six weeks, gently push the baby to get the baby to take more of your breast into their mouth.

For the first forty days after your baby is born, you should not expect to do anything except sleep and breastfeed. Clarify this state of affairs with your coparent(s); even though you may be home for parental leave and they are at work, they should still expect to handle all the cooking and cleaning. However, over time, breastfeeding becomes easier than formula feeding; you don’t have to prepare formula in the middle of the night, you can just sleepily stick the baby on your boob.

If your baby has enough stools, they are probably getting enough food. After the first week, the baby should have three to four stools the size of a quarter or more daily. It may help to track your breastfeedings and the baby’s stools on a piece of paper. Your doctor will weigh the baby; if the baby is losing weight, they are not getting enough food. If you are a neurotic wreck, or if you have some reason to believe you might not produce adequate milk, investing in a baby scale allows you to check your child’s weight at home. (This is unnecessary for most parents.)

The easiest way to wean a child is to simply continue to breastfeed until the child decides they no longer want to breastfeed. There are only positive consequences of this; in many hunter-gatherer cultures, children are breastfed until four or five. If that is not possible or desired, a gradual weaning is far superior to an all-at-once weaning; it is far less likely to be painful and to lead to health consequences like mastitis.

Several chapters at the end kindly and compassionately discuss breastfeeding difficulties. I appreciated the reminder that some breastfeeding is always better than no breastfeeding, and the most important aspect of feeding babies is that they get enough food. If you must supplement with formula for health reasons, this is not a failure.

Neurodiversity in the Classroom: Strength-Based Strategies to Help Students With Special Needs Succeed in School and Life: The opening paragraph of this book is about a teacher introducing the author to her students and saying “and these are my slow students”. The author wonders, “doesn’t she know that they can hear her?” As soon as I read that, I knew I would like this book.

It’s no secret that a lot of special education is really bad. “We’re cutting shop, which you like and are good at, so you can spend more time reading, which you hate and are bad at” bad. “This kid with ADHD forgot their homework, so we’re keeping them in from recess to make it up” bad. Neurodiversity in the Classroom argues that, instead, teachers of neurodivergent children should deliberately construct positive niches that build on the children’s skills and strengths. He provides a seven-step process for doing so:

1. Strength Awareness. Teachers and the student know what the student is good at and don’t just think of them as a pile of flaws and disabilities.
2. Positive Role Models. The student is aware of adult role models who have the same neurodivergences they do, including both celebrities and people in the community.
3. Assistive Technologies and Universal Design for Learning. Assistive tech is technology that improves access for disabled people, such as augmented and alternative communication devices, wheelchairs, and large-print and Braille reading materials. Universal design for learning is designing a learning environment that accommodates a wide array of learning differences for both neurotypical and neurodivergent children: for instance, using interactive digital books which provide speech, text, and graphics.
4. Enhanced Human Resources. The use of individuals besides the teacher to help the student, including psychologists, physical therapists, parents, tutors, and other students.
5. Strength-Based Learning Strategies. The teacher should build on the student’s abilities and interests when teaching them; for instance, an intellectually disabled student who loves music can be taught to read through song lyrics.
6. Affirmative Career Aspirations. The student should be aware of careers that they are well-suited to, given their neurodivergence and other abilities. For instance, a student with ADHD might be encouraged to look into jobs that involve novelty and movement, like being a personal trainer.
7. Environmental Modification. An environment should be created that fits the student’s needs. For instance, a teacher might muffle school bells if they have an autistic student with a sensitivity to sound.

The book is full of practical ideas about accommodating neurodivergent people in the classroom. For example, to accommodate a student with ADHD, the teacher might help the student use time-management software, frequently change activities (group work, then individual work, then lecture), provide hands-on learning activities, hold science or physical education classes outdoors, introduce movement breaks into the day, or have the student use a balance ball chair instead of a regular chair.

The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education At Home: A lot of the advice here seems like silly and/or counterproductive ways to educate children. Why would I waste energy teaching my children to be able to name off the English kings in order? Why would you attempt to teach spelling through workbooks instead of teaching it the way every good speller learned to spell– lots of exposure to text and having their misspellings corrected? Why would you primarily teach subjects through having children do readings and then outline their readings? (Why not spaced repetition? Oh, right, they didn’t have that in the Renaissance.) Why are you teaching children to think using formal logic, but not even addressing the skill of reading a study? Where, pray tell, is the evidence base?

Not all of the Well-Trained Mind is bad. Teaching the humanities as a single subject in its historical context seems to me to be a better approach than artificially separating art, music, literature, and history. A great books education still seems to me like a useful way to teach about the development of intellectual thought. But I expect the correct way to do it is just to work through the St. John’s College Great Books list once the kids get into high school, and not bother with all this nonsense about outlining.

Every Book Is A Social Studies Book: How To Meet Standards with Picture Books, K-6: This is pretty much exactly what it says in the title: a bunch of ways to use classic children’s books to teach about social studies topics. (“Let’s use the Sneetches and discuss prejudice!” “Let’s read about Ellis Island, then talk to people we know who are immigrants!”) If this sounds like the sort of thing you’d be interested in, you’d probably be interested in it. It is mildly annoying that one of the suggested lessons is about reducing one’s garbage output, when in reality excessive garbage production is not a particularly urgent environmental issue and it would be much better if they had talked about climate change instead.

Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs: In case you’re wondering, these skills are focus and self-control, perspective-taking, communicating, making connections, critical thinking, taking on challenges, and self-directed engaged learning.

To build focus and self-control: support your child’s interests; play games that encourage executive function, like guessing games, puzzles, sorting games with changing rules, Simon Says, and Do The Opposite Of What Simon Says; have children participate in reading books by repeating refrains or familiar words; for children over the age of two, show them age-appropriate, meaningful, educational, and nonviolent television; no background television; encourage children to play pretend; get children to make plans, follow plans, and then discuss what they accomplished; ensure your child is well-rested and has breaks; model focus, self-control, and taking breaks yourself.

To build perspective-taking: model perspective-taking; teach children collective problem-solving skills, like brainstorming possible solutions and identifying ways to meet everyone involved’s goals; be warm and kind to your children; validate your children’s feelings; talk about feelings– yours and theirs; talk about other people’s points of view in everyday life; encourage playing pretend; when a child does something that hurts others, explain how it hurts others; ask children to try to figure out the goals and motivations of people they know and fictional characters.

To build communication: model a love of language and literature; talk a lot to infants and toddlers; talk about subjects that go beyond the here and now, like what happened in the past and might happen in the future; talk about what your children find interesting; tell stories about your life and ask children to tell stories about theirs; read to children and talk about books with them; play word games; encourage children to write; use cognitively engaging talk and complex words; give children access to many forms of media, including music, art, and the performing arts.

To build the ability to make connections: tell the child about other things that are connected to their passions (e.g. a knight is like a superhero in the past); acknowledge that making mistakes is part of learning; give children open-ended toys like balls and dolls; use spatial words like “above”, “behind”, “below”, etc.; when playing with children, don’t boss them around, but instead ask questions, describe, and point out mathematical concepts; play hide-and-seek and treasure hunts; use math talk in everyday situations, such as giving out cookies; give children chores that involve math; play board games and dominoes, which involve counting; show children optical illusions; give them feedback on the strategies they chose for thinking about problems.

To build critical thinking: encourage your child’s curiosity and interests; let them play; give them accurate and valid information, even if you have to look things up; help children find other experts; teach children how to assess if things are true; talk about television shows and ads to encourage media literacy; when you and your child have a conflict, help them brainstorm ways to resolve the conflict; talk to your children about confounding variables (or someone else will).

To build the ability to take on challenges: model managing your stress, talking to others about stress, and taking time for yourself; don’t protect your child from normal bad experiences; have a warm, caring, and trusting relationship with your child; don’t freak out about your child hurting themself; help them develop coping strategies for stress; have reasonable expectations; have your child come up with a plan for following your rules and meeting your expectations, including a plan for if their first plan doesn’t work; let shy children watch new situations and gradually come to participate; promote your child’s passions; praise effort not ability; teach them that the brain is like a muscle and it gets stronger with use and hard work.

To encourage self-directed and engaged learning: be trustworthy and reliable, providing safety, security, and structure; help children set and work for goals; always include a social, emotional, and intellectual aspect to learning; when a child is recalling a past event, practice a high-elaborative style, in which you ask open-ended questions, show interest, provide feedback to the child, and repeat what the child says; have conversations that explore the past, the future, and fantasy; have children explain what they’re learning; have children strive for their personal best; give children accountability through clear expectations, acknowledging their strengths, and praising effort; create a community of learners.

How To Raise An Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid For Success: You know that thing where people say DARE makes kids use drugs more because it normalizes drug use by telling them about all the other kids who are doing drugs? I don’t know about DARE but that is definitely true of this book for me. Normally, I think that unstructured play is the best thing for children, and my parents gave me plenty of time for it. I know there are a lot of great schools; I’ve met enough people who went to Ivies to be aware that their college experience honestly wasn’t that much different than my own. And I had a full-time mental illness as a teenager which meant that I didn’t do three hours of homework a night or go to fourteen extracurriculars.

But then I read this book and I was like “holy shit, people will judge your child for going to Barnard instead of Stanford? People hire coaches to help their children optimize their college applications? People start trying to get their children into prestigious preschools as soon as they’re born? THERE’S SUCH A THING AS A PRESTIGIOUS PRESCHOOL???????” and now I have tons of anxiety disorder fuel I didn’t before. Thanks! Very helpful.

Also, what is it with old people and the trophy thing? Yes, I got a participation trophy for soccer when I was six. No, I was not somehow deceived into thinking I was good at sports; I was perfectly fucking aware I sucked at sports. No, I don’t think it screwed me up. Can’t we wait for relentless competition until the kids are no longer reading books with pictures in them?

The Happiest Baby on the Block: When babies are born, they are not 100% finished yet. Human babies are far more dependent than nonhuman babies, because we have big heads and narrow hips and if we waited for the babies to actually be finished mothers would be way more likely to die in childbirth. Therefore, babies are likely to be very fussy and bad at self-soothing for the first few months of their life.

The solution is to create an environment that imitates the womb. This is what The Happiest Baby on the Block calls the 5 S’s:

• Swaddling– tightly wrap your baby. You can do this really tightly; most parents wrap far too loosely, for fear of causing damage.
• Side or Stomach– put the baby on their side or their stomach, not their back. (Always put the baby on their back when they sleep, to reduce risk of SIDS.)
• Shhhhhh– Make a loud shushing sound near the baby’s ear. Try to be as loud as the baby’s crying. You can also use a white noise CD.
• Swinging– Rock the baby, put them in a swing, or even stick them on the washing machine. For this one, it’s important to be gentle, because shaking a baby can cause brain damage.
• Sucking– Give the baby something to suck on, such as a pacifier, your finger, or your boob.

The Happiest Toddler on the Block: How To Eliminate Tantrums and Raise a Patient, Respectful, and Cooperative One- to Four-Year-Old: The part of toddlers’ brains that is good at language and logic is immature, and therefore the emotional and impulsive part of their brains is in the driver’s seat. It is best, therefore, to think of yourself not as your child’s boss or as your child’s friend, but as an ambassador from Adult Land to the exotic country of Toddlerlandia, with its strange customs and manners. An ambassador is unfailingly polite and respectful, and they’re willing to negotiate. But when a country is trying to get away with something that is absolutely unconscionable, an ambassador is willing to put her foot down and say “my country will not accept this.”

When a toddler is upset, always begin by echoing what she wants and feels, to make her feel understood, before taking a turn to tell her your important messages. (Of course, if your child is doing something that harms herself or others, always stop her first and then empathize. You don’t her to be hit by a car because you empathized while she was running into the street!) Use language toddlers understand: short phrases, repeated several times, with animated gestures and an expressive tone of voice.

If your child is behaving in an annoying but not dangerous way, first empathize with her, using words she understands. Then offer her a win-win compromise where you both get something you want. If she continues to behave in an annoying way, clap your hands hard and growl “no!” If she still does that, then kindly ignore her until she quiets, checking in every twenty to thirty seconds to empathize again. If your child is harming herself or others, or breaking one of your firm rules, use an appropriate consequence such as a time-out or taking away a privilege.

The best way to combat bad behavior is to prevent it. Therefore, give your child plenty of attention and praise when they’re doing well. Praise is often more likely to be believed if you say it to another person where the toddler can overhear. Offer your child age-appropriate choices (although not with more than two options, which is the most she can handle). Sometimes pretend to be incompetent at things (“do the pants go on your head?”) to make your child laugh and feel confident. Occasionally delay something your child wants for ten or twenty seconds, to give the child practice with patience and teach them that things they want will come if they wait. Help them practice breathing slowly, so they can do it when overwhelmed. Spend special time with them (as little as five minutes) several times a day, and talk to them at night about things they did well over the course of the day. If your child does not have a lovey or transitional object, help her find one. To teach appropriate behavior, tell stories about children who behave in appropriate ways, notice and praise other children who behave appropriately, and role-play troublesome situations when the child is calm.

[content warning: depressing fact about the Holocaust]

Free To Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life: It turns out this whole time Mike Blume and I have been unfairly blaming the Prussians and school was just as bad before then. The 17th century Protestants are going about memorizing little ditties about how if you tell a lie you will go to hell and be tortured for eternity. Not to be outdone, the Catholics were memorizing “What does it mean to resist authority? To resist authority is to rebel against the divine order. What happens to those who do not submit to authority? They will suffer eternal damnation.”

The basic thesis of this book is that children have a natural drive to learn, which schools successfully manage to beat out of them over the course of twelve years. This seems plausible to me. Preschoolers are, after all, known for their incessant questions. Human beings evolved to have an extended childhood because of how much we need to learn. It seems extraordinarily strange that evolution would have us pay all the costs of taking care of a child for ten or fifteen years instead of having new children, and not bother to evolve children a desire to actually learn things as opposed to being dragged into learning kicking and screaming. Other animals learn through play, and children do have a notoriously strong desire to play. We know that extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation dead. And hunter gatherer tribes do not explicitly teach their children; instead, their children play games, imitating the adults, and over time acquire all the skills they need to be successful hunter gatherers. The fact that children have to be forced to learn is very strange, and primarily because for a very long time obedience and respect for authority were far more important virtues to teach children than independence and autonomy. Since, nowadays, independence matters more, it makes sense to shift back to a forager model of learning.

My one point of disagreement is that Free to Learn adheres to a Sudbury school/unschooling model in which children basically do whatever they want. I agree that that is the ideal and it works best for hunter-gatherers. However, hunter gatherers also have thousands of years of social technology, which means that the games children want to play are games which teach them skills useful in a hunter-gatherer society. We have, clearly, wasted our last couple of thousand years of cultural evolution on getting children to memorize things about eternal torture. So in the meantime I think something like Montessori is correct.

That said, time for unstructured play is also very important. Consider Little League versus a game of baseball with your neighbors. Because you have a coach at Little League, you’re probably going to be better at baseball, if for some reason you care about elementary schoolers actually being good at baseball. But if you play with friends you get the same amount of exercise, you’re free from adults, and you get practice resolving conflicts fairly and compromising with others about what you want to do. Kids who really really don’t want to play baseball don’t have to, and there’s an incentive to make playing baseball more fun for kids who suck at it– otherwise, you won’t have enough players to make up the team. And Mom doesn’t have to drive anyone anywhere. It just seems like a better system all around.

Interesting fact: The Baining are apparently the world’s most boring people, and at least one anthropologist quit studying them in disgust at how dull they are. They think that natural things are shameful and that the purpose of human life is work. Almost uniquely among human cultures, they don’t really tell stories; most of their conversation focuses on work and details of daily living. Free to Learn argues this strange behavior is linked to the Baining finding children’s play shameful and discouraging or even punishing it.

Other interesting fact: At Auschwitz, Jewish children played gas chamber.

[content warning: child sexual abuse]

Our Whole Lives: Sexuality Education For Grades K-1: You know how sex-positive feminists are always like “we need comprehensive sex education that goes beyond STIs and putting condoms on a banana. Sex education should talk about pleasure. It should give children an opportunity to think about sexual ethics and their sexual values, without assuming the only way to ethically have sex is to wait until marriage. It should be inclusive of disabled people and LGBT+ people. It should help people set boundaries and teach them to respect other people’s consent.” Well, good news, this exists and it’s called Our Whole Lives.

I particularly liked the abuse education lesson. Child sexual abuse education is very important, but I worry that if you only talk about genitals in the context of abuse, then it winds up treating genitals as bad and wrong and forbidden, which is not the message we want to send. The lesson on abuse begins by talking about healthy things we do for our bodies like exercising and eating vegetables, then talks about how loving touch is another healthy thing we do with our bodies which makes people feel good. Then masturbation is discussed briefly, along the lines of “masturbation is touching your own vulva or penis. Some children do this and other children don’t. Either way it is fine, but masturbation must be done in private.” Then they move to talking about how no one should ever touch you without your consent except in an emergency, and you don’t have to put up with touch that makes you feel angry or afraid. Only after all this context has been laid out do they talk about sexual abuse. I think this gives the message that (a) touch in general and sexuality in specific is a good thing, but (b) some bad people use touch in a way that is hurtful to others. Which I think is the right message to be sending.

Disability is included casually throughout the program: for instance, some of the children in stories are disabled, and the teacher is asked to specifically point out that disabled bodies are also wonderful.

Book Post for February, Part One: Books Not About Parenting

Tags

diets cw, harry potter, not feminism go away, ozy blog post, PRECIOUS sexual energy, there is no justice and there is no judge

Fashionable Nonsense: I have conflicted feelings about this book! It consists mainly of quotes from Continental philosophers about math or science, followed by “this doesn’t actually make any sense”, “this is confusing the scientific concept of chaos with the colloquial meaning of chaos”, “none of these words are real math words”, “they mixed up ‘velocity’ and ‘acceleration'”, and “the reason fluid mechanics are hard to solve is not that people have a misogynist objection to fluid things”. They spend a lot of time bashing Lacan, which I always approve of.

To a certain extent, I feel like it’s not entirely fair to critique postmodernism for being an elaborate series of word games? That’s the thing it is. A bunch of clever people showing off how cool their wordplay is. Now, you can ask a bunch of questions about it like “why do people act like these word games are producing knowledge?” and “why is the government funding people to sit on their asses and play incomprehensible word games with each other?” But I feel like criticizing them for being word games without connection to reality is sort of missing the point.

That said, I completely agree that a cute analogy to some mathematical or scientific concept is not the same as “an argument” or “evidence” and mostly serves to give unwarranted scientific rigor to your half-assed speculations. Indeed, I often feel like shouting this to large segments of the rationalist community.

(Not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with making half-assed speculations– I do it all the time– but it’s bad form to make people feel they are all science-y when they’re not.)

I spent a lot of the chapter on Bruno Latour grousing to myself because, yeah, sure, Latour’s approach to sociology of science neglects that people might believe things because they are true, which is kind of an important part of science. But he can also write a coherent sentence! Sometimes he’s even funny! These things are not true of literally anyone else in the book Fashionable Nonsense (I guess sometimes Irigaray is funny but not, like, intentionally), and I think we should give Latour some credit for that.

Models: Attract Women Through Honesty: Finally, a PUA book that isn’t full of shit.

The basic thesis of Models is that the most important traits for a heterosexual man attempting to attract women are vulnerability and non-neediness. Non-neediness means that you care more about your opinion of you than people’s opinion of you in general and her opinion of you in specific. Vulnerability means that you are open about your tragic backstory, weird hobbies, embarrassing tastes, and other things that people might judge you for. These go together, because if a woman is like “ew! He likes bugling!” you’re not like “how can I survive if a woman does not approve of me?????” you’re like “*shrug* her loss.”

I think this is broadly accurate in terms of dating advice, although I really want to expand it to also apply to romances aimed at women. Vulnerability is right, but I feel like there are a lot of things you can say about Edward Cullen but “not needy” is not one of them. Maybe “at least one of not-neediness or murder”? When I brought this up on Tumblr people were like “Ozy, romance novels are different from real life”, which is true. But I think the primary difference is that some things which are bad in real life, like stalking and a history of committing murder, can be romantic in stories because you know that it is not going to end with Bella feeling creeped out and uncomfortable that she’s being stalked or with Edward Cullen murdering Bella Swan. I don’t think it’s true that women are attracted to needy men but understand that in real life there are negative consequences that don’t exist in fiction. There is clearly something different going on here and I want to understand it.

My favorite story from this book is when the author goes out with one of his player buddies to try to figure out The Secret Of Women. His player buddy gets drunk and starts shouting “can I pee in your butt?” at every attractive woman who walks by. Most of them are horrified, but one of them starts talking to him about rimjobs, and they go home together. A week later, the author tries saying “can I pee in your butt?” to women. He does not get laid.

The moral of the story is that subtext matters more than text, and if your subtext is “I like saying gross shit because I think it’s funny, that is who I am, I don’t care whether you laugh or flee in horror”, that is attractive, and if your subtext is “I have unlocked the magic secret to pussy, please fuck me now”, that is not.

Models argues that when someone rejects you, they’re actually doing you a favor. For instance, a lot of men complain about women rejecting them for being short. But if she rejects you for being short, she is either not attracted to you or extremely shallow. Why do you want to date a shallow person who’s not attracted to you? You should be grateful they kicked themselves out of your dating pool so you don’t have to. This is basically abundance mindset. It is really really hard to get people who can’t get laid to have abundance mindset, and I hope Models’s framing would actually work.

Women can be divided into the categories receptive, unreceptive, and neutral. Unreceptive women have boyfriends, are moving out of the country tomorrow, have taken a vow of celibacy, are lesbians, don’t share your interests, don’t share your values, think you’re ugly, etc. If you’re not certain if a woman is unreceptive, ask her out and then you’ll know. It is best to assume that you are never ever ever ever ever going to change the mind of an unreceptive woman; even if you can, it’s not worth the effort. Shrug it off and move on.  Receptive women initiate with you or enthusiastically reciprocate your flirting. If you have a receptive woman, you escalate and move things forward.

Neutral women aren’t really sure whether they’re receptive to you or not yet; they’re a tentative yes. For most men, most women are neutral when they first meet them. A lot of men assume the right thing to do with neutral women is to avoid offending them by sticking to boring jokes and talking about the weather. This is completely wrong. The longer a woman stays neutral, the more likely it is that she will become unreceptive, because you are boring. In fact, the goal is to get neutral women to become receptive or unreceptive as quickly as possible, through expressing your non-neediness and vulnerability. That way, if she doesn’t like what you’re selling, you don’t have to waste any more time on her, and if she does, then you’re not going to have fucked it up by talking about the weather instead.

There are three important factors in getting laid. Your lifestyle, status, and looks affect what percentage of women are initially receptive to you.  Your boldness, extroversion, and willingness to actually fucking ask women out affect how many women you meet in the first place. Your charisma, flirting ability, and “game” affect what percentage of neutral women become receptive. Models argues that all men who have problems with women have problems in at least one area; most have problems with two, and a few unlucky people have problems with all three.

Lifestyle. The most important principle of lifestyle is that like attracts like. If you want to attract well-educated and successful women with strong opinions on wine, putting your cap on backwards and saying “BROOOOOOOOOOO” a lot will not help. If your heart only beats for metalheads, Sisters of Mercy and Edgar Allen Poe is probably not the right choice. This also applies on a belief level: if you believe that women don’t enjoy sex or that women are all evil, guess what kind of women you’re going to attract. That said, there are also things you can do that will improve romantic success for basically everyone, such as proper grooming, wearing clothes that signal your personality and actually fit, exercising, weight loss, adopting masculine body language and vocal tones, finding unique hobbies that you like, and developing and confidently stating your opinions. (He doesn’t say this, but I would suggest only doing this if they fit with your honest, non-needy, vulnerable self. But I think most guys are not like “my best self is a person who wears clothes that don’t fit!”, they just don’t know how to buy clothes.)

In this section, Models claims that men in general tend to care more about objective indicators of beauty such as waist-to-hip ratio, boob size, and facial symmetry than about subjective indicators like what a woman’s self-presentation is signalling. Typical mind fallacy about this issue, he proposes, is what explains the popularity of weightlifting, complaining about your height, and penis pills. Is that true? Man, other people’s brains are extremely weird.

Approach Anxiety. Lots of men are afraid of things like talking to women, flirting with women, kissing women, and having sex with women. They will generally rationalize why, actually, they shouldn’t approach women: they might say that all women are shallow and terrible (which is silly, because it is far more likely that you are screwed up than that hundreds of thousands of people are all screwed up in exactly the same way), or that they don’t really care about getting a date, or that they need to learn more before they can start. You have to identify your patterns and do the things you’re anxious about anyway; it can help to tell someone who’ll ride your ass about it. He also recommends limiting porn and masturbation so that you’re so horny you’ll ignore your anxiety. Practice accepting your anxiety, recognizing that it’s normal, reframing it as the nervous excitement of being about to do something high-stakes that you’re good at, and not even bothering to hide it from women you’re attracted to. Do exposure therapy to your fear: begin by doing things you’re a little nervous of repeatedly until you are no longer nervous, then try something a little harder. Always err on the side of boldness: boldness polarizes women and turns those “maybes” into “yes” or “no”. Finally, when you are doing something unusual like asking a strange woman you just met out on a date, always acknowledge that it is unusual: for instance, you might say “excuse me, this is kind of random, but I thought you were cute and wanted to say hi.”

Flirting. Models claims that men always communicate literally and don’t do subtext. I have talked to several men in my life [citation needed] and this is absolutely not true. However, I can definitely buy that men who suck at flirting and are buying this book Models are bad at subtext. Anyway, flirting is all about subtext. The difference between teasing and insults is whether the subtext is “I like you so much I trust that you will understand I don’t really mean this” or “I hate you.”

Lots of men are afraid of being creepy when flirting. No one ever manages to 100% avoid creeping out anyone; there are always awkward situations and miscommunications. It happens, and it is not the end of the world. Creepiness is behaving in a way that makes women feel insecure sexually. You can do this by escalating too fast or by having a subtext that isn’t matched to your text (you’re asking her about the book she’s reading and staring at her tits).

When in doubt, the best pickup line is “Hey, I thought you were cute and wanted to say hi.” Don’t bother about worrying about trying to get women not to flake on you; if a woman really wants to sleep with you, she’ll make it happen. If Brad Pitt asked her out, she wouldn’t forget. Avoid movie dates and dinner dates; instead try museums, concerts, walks in interesting places, dance classes, nightclubs or grabbing a drink somewhere, as fits your style. Find a venue close to your house. Try to do multiple things on a date; it builds a sense of getting to know the person. There’s also a lot of stuff about flirting, signals women give, etc. but this review is already a million words long so I am not going into it.

The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption: Evangelical Christians made up an entirely fictional orphan crisis and then decided it was really important that they all adopt children to help end this orphan crisis that they just made up. Naturally, basic economics continues to apply: if you have millions of dollars’ worth of demand for orphans, the supply will magically appear. Parents in many developing countries put their children in orphanages because they cannot afford to feed them but continue to visit and be involved in their children’s lives; these children are often adopted. Many parents in developing countries don’t understand the Western idea of adoption and instead round it to local concepts, such as “being sent to live with a rich relative to be educated and eventually bring money back to your family.” Occasionally children are just stolen.

Domestic adoptions are also horrifying. Many crisis pregnancy centers don’t just coerce women into not having abortions; they also coerce women into giving their children up for adoption. Some actively lie to birth mothers, claiming that their open adoption is legally enforceable when it isn’t or that they can’t take the adoption back because they already signed the paperwork when in reality they could. Others tell women that they are incompetent mothers who will hurt their babies unless they give them up for adoption, or that single parenting is always wrong.

Utah is one of the most ‘pro-adoption’ states in the country. What this means is that, by virtue of consenting to sex, an unmarried man is considered to be aware that he might conceive a child who might be put up for adoption and his silence is assumed to be consent. A birth father does not have to be notified that his child exists; he has to figure it out himself and then fight for the right to take care of his own biological child. If the woman gives birth in Utah, Utahan law applies, and some adoption agencies will move the birth mother to Utah so that the birth father doesn’t have to be notified.

Part of the problem, I think, is that there are a lot of people who want to adopt babies (both infertile people and evangelical Christians who believe in the entirely fictional orphan crisis). But there aren’t a lot of people who want to go through nine months of pregnancy and then not take care of a baby afterward; most people either want to not go through the pregnancy at all (and thus have an abortion) or raise their child. Of course, foster care

Normally, I am not viscerally moved by ineffective altruism. But every time I saw a dollar sign in this book it upset me. $65,000 per child to bring a child from the Ukraine to meet prospective adoptive families equals 19 children dead of malaria. $8,000 per child for adoption fees equals two more dead children.

[The next item talks about the Holocaust.]

Quiverfull: Inside The Christian Patriarchy Movement: Not a lot of new information for me, but then I’ve been interested in Quiverfull stuff for a couple of years and have a lot of ex-Quiverfull friends and so on.

One of the theologians who really created the idea of God not wanting you to use birth control was also a Holocaust denier. Then he read one of his Holocaust denial books explaining that the gas chambers were too small to kill as many people as the Allies reported had died. Then it occurred to him that many Jewish people were children. So he made a gas-chamber-sized space with couches and cushions, called together his children, told them to stand in the mock gas chamber, noticed that they fit, and started crying. He then spent much of the rest of his life writing books debunking Holocaust denialism.

Doug Phillips, one of the more famous Quiverfull writers, is a Jewish convert to evangelical Christianity. Between this and Milo Yiannopolous pissing off the Daily Stormer [link goes to Neo-Nazi website], I have to ask: is there literally any intellectual movement that doesn’t have a Jewish person writing for it?

[The next item contains material about dieting and weight loss.]

Nutrition: A Very Short Introduction: Wow! Nutrition makes a lot more sense than I thought it did! For instance, I previously know that abdominal fat had more negative health consequences than fat on your butt and thighs does, but apparently there is a reason! Butt and thigh fat evolved for fat storage and is metabolically inactive, while abdominal fat evolved to maintain body temperature and as such is metabolically more active, stimulating the production of glucose (whether or not it is needed) and hormones that antagonize the action of insulin. The entire book is like this: explanations for facts you previously knew about but didn’t know there was an explanation for.

In terms of actionable advice, this book recommends eating lots of vegetables and fruits, not eating a lot of processed food or restaurant meals, exercising regularly, avoiding fad diets, and avoiding excessive consumption of alcohol. Which everybody knew about already, but on the other hand if a Very Short Introduction to Nutrition book was full of facts people didn’t know about I would be concerned about the effectiveness of our public health education programs.

I wish this book would have addressed in more detail the subject of why it is so difficult for people to maintain weight loss. The author briefly mentions that an appropriate diet for weight loss maintenance is the same as a sensible diet for people who have been thin all along, but I feel like this fails to answer important questions like how come my husband and I are both eating absurd quantities of post-Valentine’s on-sale candy and yet he’s the only one with a belly.

[Here there be spoilers for Shoebox Project.]

Shoebox Project: Like all the best Marauders fic, it is stealth tragedy. Not, of course, that anything about Shoebox Project is sad: Shoebox Project is commendably fluffy, happy, light, full of witty conversations and shenanigans, and completely missing anything approaching a ‘plot’. But every so often James mentions that he wants to have tons of gross old-person sex with Lily and he probably won’t even think it’s gross because that’s how much he loves her, and then you have to put the fanfic down and sob because of your overwhelming feelings about every one of the Marauders.

(A lot of people are mistaken about this, because the movies inexplicably cast reasonably-aged people to play James and Lily, but James and Lily were only 21 when they died.)

I appreciate that the pranking is treated as being fairly morally ambiguous, and that Remus is shown as having ethical qualms about it but going along because he has a hard time standing up to his friends.

Honestly, Shoebox Project probably has my favorite Peter Pettigrew ever. He feels like he’s stupider and less charming than all his friends (and that’s kind of true), he feels like none of his friends feel very much motivation to hang around with him and just do it out of inertia (and that’s kind of true), and he feels utterly neglected now that they’ve graduated from school (and that’s absolutely true). And he doesn’t even have an explanation for why everyone is neglecting him, because he doesn’t know about the Order of the Phoenix, and he certainly doesn’t know that Remus and Sirius are banging and too busy being wrapped up in new relationship energy to talk to anyone. He becomes a Death Eater because they pay attention to him and they validate his loneliness and they offer an explanation for his problems that isn’t “I’m kind of a terrible human being.” Very relatable. Someone give Peter Pettigrew a hug.

Shoebox Project is famously unfinished, but I actually feel like the ending is a satisfying ending? I mean, you can tell they didn’t intend it to be the ending, but having Peter Pettigrew’s start of darkness as the last chapter is actually a nice resolution. Shoebox Project is about the fun, fluffy part of the Marauders’ lives, and Peter Pettigrew starting to go evil is where you can draw the line and go “yep, it’s over now.”

God, remember pre-Racefail when there was a ton of Discourse about how we need to Write Men Like They’re Men and so we got a bunch of characters being Realistically Misogynist and calling each other girls all the time? Good times, good times. Feels super-weird reading it when I’m more used to reading modern fanfiction in which Remus and Sirius are more likely to have a conversation about how asexuals need to be included in the Wizard Gay-Straight Alliance.

Epistemic Closure Challenge Thread #1

Tags

god bothering, ozy blog post

Today is the official start of the challenge!

People who are not participants are welcome to comment to give book recommendations, talk about what other people are reading, or talk about books that they’ve read recently that they disagree with.

Since it is The First One, I haven’t read any books specifically for the challenge yet, but here are my thoughts about the books I’ve read in November that I disagree with:

The Abolition of Man: In Which C S Lewis Discovers The Orthogonality Thesis.

I agree with C S Lewis that minds can be made valuing all sorts of things, and that it is important to create minds which value the sorts of things we value. Lewis’s vision, interestingly, was about genetic engineering and conditioning of a generation of humans, who would then proceed to genetically engineer and condition future generations to follow their values, rather than about Friendly AI. I am less concerned than Lewis is about the former, because I believe that human brains are not actually all that plastic; humans creating minds out of human raw material are likely to create something that is not absurdly evil.

I think Lewis undervalues humans who aren’t moral realists; he argues that without moral realism there is no reason to care more about benevolence to all humankind than about, say, chocolate. But there is a quite obvious reason why I would value benevolence to all humankind over chocolate, which is that I want to. Oddly, this contradicts something he talks about earlier in the book. He points out (quite rightly) that all the logical arguments in the world about the importance of sacrificing the few for the many won’t keep someone– even a moral realist– from fleeing the line of battle. What keeps them from fleeing is emotions: a cultivated sense of courage, loyalty to one’s friends, patriotism, and self-sacrifice. Having a different idea of metaethics does not cause someone to stop being ethical, because metaethics wasn’t the thing that was making you behave ethically in the first place.

Lewis is quite right that it is vicious to ‘debunk’ poetic language expressing the emotions associated with events. But I haven’t noticed very much of that; as I recall my school years, there was a good deal of effort put into cultivating particular virtues (e.g. benevolence, respect for diversity, patriotism), which I highly approve of. Maybe it was more of a problem in the inter-war period after World War II (thanks, Evan)?

Disagreement: I am not Christian or moral realist.

Amends: One of my new favorite books.

A novel about six people going through a reality TV rehab. The thing I love about it is that it’s funny; the entire book is wonderful crazy-person gallows humor which doesn’t shy away from the harm caused by crazy people to ourselves and others. There were shenanigans. More books about mental illness need to have shenanigans in them.

I particularly appreciated the character of Sharptooth, a NEET otherkin SJW. As a former NEET SJW, I very much appreciate this positive representation. Eve Tushnet doesn’t quite get all the shibboleths right. For instance, she has Sharptooth feel guilty about saying that someone who identified as a homoromantic demisexual is ‘really’ gay (realistic!) but has her mention the person’s nonbinary gender identity at the same time (antis do this, but SJWs usually recognize that gender and sexuality are different things). Nevertheless, Sharptooth was written with a great deal of compassion and also very relatable.

My other favorite character is J Malachi MacCool, a writer for First Things. I mean, he’s not actually a writer for First Things, but he is a writer for a magazine that is suspiciously similar to First Things. He is self-consciously traditional from the tweed jacket with the leather elbow patches on down, and described as “an Anglo-Catholic, by which he meant that he liked evensong and sherry”. He is adorably relatable.

Disagreement: I am not Christian.

Lead Me Not: A gay romance novel about a fundamentalist Christian who believes that homosexuality is a choice and decides to prove it by making a documentary about his choice to be gay. In a SHOCKING turn of events which ABSOLUTELY NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED, it turns out that he’s actually gay and then he lives happily ever after with his boyfriend who is a Christian from an affirming church and we all learn that God Loves Gay People.

Super-cute inspirational romance, full of angsty gay men and tropes and Jesus. If this is the sort of thing you like, you will probably like it.

I was mildly annoyed that I have a better understanding than the protagonist of the anti-gay Biblical arguments (he mentioned Leviticus but not Romans! he doesn’t talk about the difference between moral and ceremonial law!).

Disagreement: I think that a careful study of Scripture and Tradition would lead one to approximately Eve Tushnet’s opinion on gay people. I am still not Christian.

General Notes: I think my biggest problem in the challenge is going to be finding books I disagree with that aren’t about Jesus, particularly since my husband is a former atheist blogger and thus our collective Kindle is full of, like, Plantinga and Craig. Also because I am trying to pick books that look interesting and for better or for worse I am interested in Jesus.

So what are your thoughts on starting? Having a hard time thinking of books to read? Looking forward to anything in particular?

Book Post for October

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Inferno: The premise of this book (modern retelling of Dante’s Inferno starring a science fiction writer who spends the first half convinced he’s been put in a theme park made by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens) is cute. Unfortunately, it doesn’t live up to its excellent premise.

Many of the sins in this book are related to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s political opinions. For instance, an anti-nuclear-power protestor was placed with the violently profligate (i.e. polluters) for not letting fossil fuels be replaced with better electricity, and a teacher was placed with the fortune tellers for diagnosing a child with dyslexia and thus cursing him to not being able to learn to read. I understand that when I read a modern retelling of Dante’s Inferno, I am signing up to be preached at by the authors. However, the vast majority of human sins– as shocking as it may seem to certain people on Twitter– have absolutely no relationship to the culture war whatsoever. When keen observation of human foibles are replaced with editorials about the evil of People Who Don’t Agree With Niven and Pournelle About Things, I feel rather cheated.

I understand that they had to deal with the canonical existence of a sodomite circle of Hell somehow, but I don’t feel like making it the Circle of Depraved Bisexuals was exactly what I would go for.

Also there was a very unfair Take That to Kurt Vonnegut.

Time Will Run Back: Now this is an absolutely delightful book. Set after the USSR has taken over the world, the novel is about the son of the USSR’s leader, who decides that there simply must be a better way to go about things and ends up slowly discovering Austrian economics. I now want an entire genre of books where the conflict takes place in the form of Socratic dialogues about economics and the big suspense is whether they will manage to figure out how stock markets work in time. Caveats, of course, that Austrian economics is not technically speaking ‘true’, but in my completely unbiased opinion that is entirely made up for by the following exchange:

“Well, you know what Bolshekov is calling [our reinvention of Austrian economics] in his propaganda!”

“What is he calling it?”

“He says it’s nothing but a brazen revival of capitalism!”

Peter hit the ceiling. “The dirty son of a Trotsky!”

My one critique is that the author, with a little bit more worldbuilding, could have come up with much more clever use of language. With a few exceptions (“the dirty son of a Trotsky!” is wonderful), markets are referred to as markets, prices are referred to as prices, and so on and so forth, and this is justified with footnotes saying that it was translated from the Marxanto. I want to see what a bunch of communists who have just discovered money wind up calling a broker.

Freedom of Religion and the Secular State: A fascinating and nuanced exploration of the appropriate liberal-as-in-Locke-not-as-in-left-wing attitude towards religion. The state, Blackford argues, ought to officially take no position on otherworldly issues; its sphere is solely the secular world; it is therefore permitted neither to persecute nor to elevate particular religions. Nevertheless, the state should sometimes accommodate the deeply held beliefs of its citizens. Blackford applies these principles to a lot of different issues, from children’s rights to free speech to marriage law.

Blackford persuaded me that state religions are probably not as pernicious as I’d previously thought, as long as their influence is limited to the ceremonial (for instance, the involvement of the church in the crowning of the queen) and they have no actual governing power or public funding.

European law about religion is super-weird. Like, on one hand, there’s laicite, in which the state is engaged in wildly inappropriate persecution of a particular religion in the name of ‘secularism’; on the other hand, there’s blasphemy laws, in which the state is engaged in wildly inappropriate protection of religions justified under the grounds that criticizing people’s religion is a violation of religious freedom. All I can figure is that Americans need to do some cultural imperialism to spread to y’all across the pond the correct religious freedom norms.