The Bluestocking, vol 240
it wasn’t acceptable for men to read self-help books
Happy Friday!
It’s an unusually skimpy newsletter because I had my driving test yesterday and was fretting about it 24/7 for the week before.
Despite being asked to turn right on a roundabout—my nemesis—I passed. Thank you to Bluestocking reader Emma who recommended my driving instructor Gemma, who deserves some kind of medal for putting up with my bunny-hopping gear changes without heavy medication.
Thank you also to Shane at Bromley Test Centre for asking me about checking the brake fluid as the first question, which meant I got to open the bonnet LIKE A DAD.
Helen
The Pick-up Guru Who Burned Out (New York)
“While healing from some of his old wounds, [Mark] Manson became disillusioned with the PUA scene, and as he would later do with Subtle Art [Of Not Giving A Fuck] and self-help, he increasingly cast his advice as a rebuttal to the field’s conventional wisdom. “What Mark helped people see was it was never about the women,” Mr. Awesome, now a West Coast academic, recalls. “It was about you. When you got your shit together, pickup got easier.” Instead of dumb tricks, Manson talked about things like “non-neediness,” “power in vulnerabilities,” and “being something versus saying something.”
He found himself reading academic papers on the psychological underpinnings of male behavior and came to understand that many of the men in the PUA scene, like himself, had troubled or nonexistent relationships with their fathers and that PUA provided these men with a substitute. “I basically kind of built my name by explaining why all this stuff that Neil Strauss wrote was toxic and really damaging, and not just to women — to men,” he told me. “Like, okay, yes, this does hurt women, but you’re also objectifying yourself and degrading yourself.” In his view, the reason pickup became a thing was that it wasn’t acceptable for men to read self-help books.”
This dude sold 12 million copies of his book. Am I surprised he has an NFT collection? No.
Quick Links
“If you’re looking to sort out how the ostensibly pro-choice side got complacent enough to let the right to choose get overturned, look no further than the sorry state of contemporary feminism. If even so-called feminists think the typical American woman has it too easy, what hope is there for the fight for women’s rights?” Phoebe Maltz Bovy on why women can’t be afraid to “center themselves” in the abortion debate (Spectator World).
“The Oxford Playhouse is a big venue, with 663 seats, and my friends, families and contemporaries were there for what was going to be an official launch of my career as a comedy writer. It ended up with about 100-150 people walking out, including many of my contemporaries, and the final scenes of the play witnessing ugly and brutal heckles from the audience.” James Harris on a personal failure that did not lead to an uplifting redemption arc (Substack).
“Because reproductive autonomy is the fundamental women’s right, without which all others — to hold office, have an education, to be economically independent or safe from male violence — are worthless. The Taliban can simply close girls’ schools and lock women indoors: Republicans must resort to tethering them to poverty, abusive men and the home with their own perfidious biology.” Janice Turner in the Times on Roe v Wade (£).
Wes Yang put a callout for the best tweets of all time, and between the accidental witness to the Bin Laden raid, and lots of Dril, my favorite was this crude Sorkin joke.
“That meeting did kick off a multiyear informal working relationship whereby [Steve] Bannon and I would collaborate on a story or issue in which we had common interests despite having deeply conflicting values and big-picture objectives. Sometimes our target was a Democrat, of course, but on other occasions there would be a Republican primary where Bannon would support the cryptofascist and I would back the moderate squish and we would make common cause by sullying the regular old Republican in the middle.” Former Republican operative Tim Miller on dancing with the devil, aka the nuttier bits of the rightwing ecosystem. “Many of us who were serving it with a side of winks and grins were blind to just how powerful the forces we were unleashing would become,” he writes. (Vanity Fair).
The Met has been placed in the police equivalent of special measures. Good. Just read the catalogue of failures in the case of Stephen Port—who killed four gay men and left their bodies in the same graveyard before he was caught—or the report into racism and sexism at Charing Cross police station, and tell me it doesn’t need a complete overhaul.
“Writers are always in conversation with each other. Toni Morrison is renewing William Faulkner; Zadie Smith is renewing Dickens; Derek Walcott is renewing Homer. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was written in part as a rejection of Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but the title of Achebe’s novel is taken from a poem by William Butler Yeats and the plot resembles the structure of a Greek tragedy. There is some conflict between white and non-white authors in the canon, but there is also great continuity between these two groups.” Tomiwa Owolade on teaching Heaney and Larkin (Unherd).
“Lots of sound and fury signifying the square root of bugger all.” Alex Massie’s verdict on Nicola Sturgeon’s promise of a referendum next October (Substack).
See you next time!
Congratulations! I literally turned right at RB when learning to drive, passed test 20 years later. Spent first few weeks of independent driving sussing out scenic routes which largely avoided any kind of right turns. Enjoy!