I was asked to write about the psychology of sex workers. Having never being a sex worker, a user of such services or a psychologist I thought I'd improvise a little and talk about the psychology of those who use their services.

For a start we seldom talk about men, and men probably use sex workers of either gender more often than women do. Indeed when articles on the internet talk about the users of sex workers services, they exclusively refer to men.

If men are hiring prostitutes, and using them for sex rather than merely talking to them, I think it's primarily for human contact.

We are primates after all, animals that spend hours grooming all members of their group.

In our society touching is nearly forbidden. We spent the first 9 months of our lives completely encased in human contact. While women can hug and touch their friends, men cannot ask for affection in our society. However it is completely okay for men to ask for and have sex. And the only other socially acceptable way for men to have human contact is via handshake and physical violence. All of limited social acceptability.

If men hug each other it is usually done while hitting the other male on the back and then it's usually only between close male relatives, like father and son, who have a good relationship.

In my opinion, men generally use sex as a substitute for affection. Sex is macho, affection is wussy.

And as such, sex therapists, marriage counselors use the frequency of sex in a marriage as a barometer for how healthy that marriage is. That's great if the sex isn't excruciatingly painful for the woman; or, the man or his partner (male or female) doesn't place undue pressure on him to perform. Nevertheless, I suspect affection would provide many of the benefits that sex supposedly delivers without the need for often invasive contraception or the risk of unwanted pregnancy. But I think the therapists who recommend sex are thinking about his ego when they advocate sex improving self image because it would definitely not be macho to say they engage in frequent cuddling, for instance.

The usual way for men to get regular sex (affection) is having a partner. But maintaining a relationship can be difficult for some men. Either they aren't emotionally/financially ready, or equipped for a partner's needs. So prostitutes may fill that need as well. The other need that prostitutes might help satisfy is loneliness. The need for intimate/personal conversations to have conversations with someone who isn't a man.  When I used to talk to clients (all men) I used to have a stockpile of topics I could discuss with them and it would involve sports and cars, these topics were extremely abstract.

Loneliness and our need to touch and be touched are what, I think, drives prostitution. But what about hormones? Yes, sex is really for procreation and our bodies are driven to procreate because of hormones. But do we really want to risk unwanted pregnancy and STDs just so one gender can relieve their hormones that could be easily relieved with masturbation?

I assumed when I was asked to write on prostitution why women took on a profession that would make them reviled. Everyone needs money in our society. Not all women have someone who can support them and men always seem to want sex - goddess knows how many times I've been asked if I was working while wearing sweats, exercising, just walking down a street or waiting for my husband...

But the problem here is the macho. Men pretending or completely unaware they are pretending to be impervious to needing anything. Needing makes men vulnerable, but that lack of vulnerability makes men commit suicide at high rates 3.5x that of women in the USA, because men cannot ask for help, affection, intimacy... things they need but pretend they don't because it just wouldn't be macho.

Over the past few days I've blogged about systems and disappearing women, but I haven't stressed much about why it's important that humans utilize what both (all) genders bring to the table, together they are better than just one gender carrying the intellectual weight for the species and convincing everyone that there is only one way of seeing the universe.

I think it will take time for women to fully understand the science they bring because for so long we've only been told only about male science, but in my opinion we know so little about ourselves, we've been too busy looking outside ourselves in context with our society to see what we do. How can we go to the stars when we know so little about ourselves? How can we make that trip without spending so much time with ourselves?

No doubt men have uncovered some of women's science already - while women were raising the next generation, dying in childbirth, managing their homes, cooking, cleaning and making money to survive, they had little free time to do their own science themselves. It's only recently women have been making any impact on society, like Rachel Carson, Elinor Ostrom, Jane Goodall, Grace Hopper, to name just a few. While none of these women used calculus to any great extent, they made major impact on society, and probably all will have an impact on any journey to mars.

It reminds me of the story of the potatoes and monkeys. While washing potatoes doesn't require calculus, no doubt it helped the monkey's more directly than mere abstract reasoning.

So long our society has looked for absolutes like there is absolute good, absolute truth, absolute knowable things, when all these things exist in context. For instance symbols take their meaning from the symbols around them. The internet gives the impression that symbols are restricted to math and perhaps astrology, I posit that we communicate entirely in symbols. All the words we use, the letters of our alphabet, numbers, all of language, data science... are symbols. And as a data scientist, I posit that learning is nothing more than the building indices between symbols. However as a data scientist I am in a front row seat to see men mystifying the field with with words like 'machine learning' when it is clear they don't know what 'learning' actually means, or AI - artificial intelligence, when they don't know what 'intelligence' means... and then they think things like the system, indeed, can spontaneously become consciousness. I was once told by a man that he knew it would becomes conscious because he'd done a course on 'ontology' once - which is still one of the funniest things I've ever heard. Indeed what they call data science is nothing like what I'd call even 'science' because the 'deep learning' isn't repeatable. It's a kind of 'crossing your fingers and hope it works' thing.

Another thing considered an absolute is 'good'. To me good is relative and perspective - in some instances a good may be bad, and what may be intended as a good may result in bad, and depends on the motivation of actions and circumstances... Hence there can't be an absolute good - or at least in my opinion. This may impact religious beliefs. However I like what the Dalai Lama says 'Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them'.

I remember reading once there is nothing bad a human can do that no good can come of it. I don't know if this is true either. But then it's not possible to know all things. So there is no absolute 'bad' either, it is also relative; and thus is morality.

In my opinion, men tend to think more in terms of absolutes rather than look for the relative nature of the universe.

There is much of our universe we've misunderstood and sometimes forgotten and until we reconsider our perspective on the universe will we be unable to traverse space. Because in my opinion the incredible spaces between the objects in our universe is to protect the universe from us. Until we've understood the relative nature of morality will we know how to deal with the rest of the universe.

Because everything in the universe is connected. Men tend to think in tasks - or atoms there is this idea that everything is independent, discrete, distinct - it's why men think they can build stuff (businesses...) completely by themselves rather than seeing they are using the building blocks from society. That they need the rest of society for the technology they use to build other stuff with. What we need is a much more holistic approach to the universe.

We know all particles have a de Broglie wavelength, even you and I. While our wavelength is beyond microscopic small - nevertheless it disperses us, in a sense, connects us in/to the universe.

While men think in terms of discrete tasks, this will be beyond them.

Of course, my ideas are independent from those who've gone before me, and knowledge isn't absolute either, it is relative as well. Some men have had ideas as well who were influenced by women that we've forgotten about or ignored because that's what men do, they disappear women. Until we realize women have something to offer and get credit for their thoughts and ideas we will never reach the stars.

In my previous post I started talking about systems and how women tended to be better at being able to see the big picture; and the problem with men managing  big projects is that they tend to be task-focused rather than looking at the consequences of the big picture.

This is why history focuses on specific men in history, like Churchill, generals, presidents because all those men who worked for The Man disappear into the hierarchical organization that allowed The Man to accomplish whatever task, such as running a country or winning a war... Thus The Man appears greater because he (in large part is due to his organization, attributed to his leadership) achieved something big. [In my opinion, this is why men who build businesses or corporations don't think they needed their employees, customers, government... to help them build their business - all those people he depended on for help disappear in the task of building the business]

This is primary reason we have so many problems with environmental collapse: men are focused on their quarterly reports to stockholders rather than the fuck-up their industry is causing the planet. Pollution is beyond the scope of their task, to make money; the rest is irrelevant. They only care about what involves money and what will hurt their corporation and how they will continue to make money.

My husband says that when you are (a man and) part of a hierarchy you are only looking at your boss and those below you to get the task done. This very quickly narrows your perspective. And men who get to the top of corporations likely were raised never having to tidy their bedrooms - that was either a job for their mother or the maid/nanny.

Women are generally better at being able to see the consequences of their actions because they focus on more than the immediate tasks to be accomplished; instead, they anticipate and plan for the consequences of what they do.  This may be primarily due to social conditioning -- after all, men, and seemingly especially those men who are groomed for positions of privilege and leadership in our society, are often raised to believe that the rules do not apply to them ("boys will be boys!") whereas women are raised to respect the rules... and thus have to be more aware of the consequences of their actions.

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Why is the difference between how men and women think important?

Men tend to follow the leader, line up behind other men, and seldom learn to think outside the box. This is especially evident when it comes to Artificial Intelligence. The men who implement AI don't try to make it better by experimenting seriously with the algorithms. It takes women to truly experiment;  we see but one example, historically, with Admiral Hopper especially. She was told not to write a compiler by her male bosses, who were quite happy with the idea of having one, perhaps two computers, per town - they weren't interested in putting computers into every home. But Hopper wrote the compiler and here we are.

The same old ugly techniques of developing AI becomes a problem when you hear about cases like Google's awful racist image-recognition misfire (which was patched, rather than carefully understood).  It seems to me that for really outside the box thinking, you need women, because men do tend to (in no small part due to social conditioning) fall in line. Men can really only see one way to solve the problems with AI.

And this is important for space travel - okay wait a minute, how did we get from AI to space travel?

Well I think our civilization won't come of age until we learn to live in harmony with our environment. We might have to manage our environment but we must master ourselves to live with the confines of our environment because we depend on it. We and our technology can only function within a very narrow range of temperatures and even if we build colonies on the moon and Mars we will still be dependent upon earth for technology and our environment.

Our biggest problem is that we are all so dependent upon each other we don't see how the person who builds the circuit board in our mouse depends on, for instance, the technology of growing coffee. And the many steps in a supply chain are needed to make something as taken-for-granted as computer mice. So when we are living in our colony on the Moon we will still need the next shipment from earth for something as seemingly prosaic as a replacement mouse.

However mastering our environment -- controlling our use of it so it becomes sustainable -- will be a major milestone for our civilization. It will signal that we have come of age, that we are an adult species.  We have made steps towards our civilization's adulthood before - by walking on the moon and seeing a new perspective of ourselves and the universe. We avoided a nuclear war (so far) - and the cold war ended (or so we thought) without a nuclear war.

These are milestones - but the other one will be to manage our world - by managing our environment and making sure we don't get wiped out by an asteroid. We have been lucky so far but these steps are salient in protecting the future of our species.

Because in my opinion - while space is massive - it is massive, in some sense, to protect the rest of the universe from us. And we won't be able to traverse space until women break us out of Einstein's light box - because you see that is what limits our ability to traverse space. The same thing that cripples our AI - calculus, at least as a way, or rather, THE way, of understanding everything.

In my opinion we need to realize what women bring to the table - which so far men think is pretty useless because they think they know everything - they make everything mysterious to control knowledge - and thus women and their knowledge has been marginalized.

There are vastly different ways of seeing the universe than merely using calculus (the mathematical backbone of physics).

But women's ideas have become mainstream for the benefit of men. One of the fundamental axioms of womanhood is that women form equalities. It doesn't take much to step from equalities to the notion that 'all men are created equal'.

Another is women being upset about rape has led to people being wary of their sons (as well as our daughters) being raped by older men.

Another fundamental law of the universe is that everything is recycled. Everything. Whether it is in our environment or in our universe - all will be recycled sooner or later. This isn't very interesting to men who are focused on their profit & loss statements. But it will be fundamental to off planet colonies. In my opinion until recycling underpins our technology our whole civilization will be unsustainable.

These are merely a few examples of women can bring to the table that will benefit all of us. And until we give women and their minds all the recognition they deserve then our society will not function as it will need to to survive.

(to We know so little about ourselves in society - how men operate, how women operate - how they interact with each other. Unfortunately research on how society operates is relegated to women's studies, perhaps philosophy, perhaps sociology, but no self respecting man would be caught dead in the area unless he wanted to 'score' or is trans - either way, this is pretty much a man free zone.

This is unfortunate because we really know so little about ourselves and how we operate. And because we don't it means we have no way to fix the myriad of things that are going wrong with our society.

A lot of these things are male things, like men suiciding, men raping each other, male on male violence which is all about the hierarchy's imposed upon society, how to gain ranks on this hierarchy... much of this we know but it's code. We aren't allowed to talk about it, we can't appear vulnerable, we have to adhere to social norms, be attractive, be funny, be not too clever, but clever enough, be average sized, be rich... We should really study these things because much of this have devastating impacts on individuals.

The other thing that seems to happen with amazing regularity is using women to make men look better and this can be done by saying essentially no woman can ever achieve anything because all women are less than men. This I have seen so many times even by men who pretend to foster the accomplishments of women. I have seen this particularly when it comes to Admiral Hopper (who?).

I've seen this especially when we talk about computer history - they say things like Babbage-Turing instead of Lovelace-Hopper. This how women are edited out of history.

Turing may have done useful things with computers but he didn't invent the compiler, which gave us operating systems for computers; the internet, the web, the IoT, AI, smart phones and basically filled our homes and offices with computers and other devices.

In my opinion Hopper gave us the 21st century in much the same way Tesla gave us the 20th century.
But when you read about her, they say things like she invented COBOL (which is not very sexy - not like JAVA or python - which are all based on Hopper's original compiler). That she coined the term 'bug' - cute but hardly groundbreaking. Or if they mention she invented the compiler, it is often 'Hopper and her team'. But when it comes to other male inventors they never ever mention the team, while they no doubt had one.

One of the things you men do is use other people, especially women.

For instance, I know this guy who writes 'academic' material and he says he can't distinguish between my thoughts and his own and so it is unnecessary to credit me because he also talks to his wife. I told my husband that this person can't remember the difference between his thoughts and mine and my husband said that should be all the more reason to credit me. This guy did say that I was supposedly influenced by his ideas. I can remember all the ideas he has given me over the years on one hand.

However, he never comes to me with an idea to discuss - he only comes with boring stories of how people aren't delivering what they said they would to the point I said don't tell me anymore of this drivel. And so now he has nothing to tell me at all.

Given that we often speak for about an hour to 90mins a week I then go on to fill in the time with my ideas and what interests me. I know sometimes the stuff I say isn't profound but he definitely considers it more interesting than anything that he shares with me, because these ideas get repeated back to me as his own.

I once asked him for a reference and he gave me this sorry excuse of a reference that he even doubted my achievements and asked me to give him proof. I gave him proof. Nevertheless the reference was given grudgingly and written without interest or thought.

I asked him today if he ever acknowledged me in these endless books he never stops blathering about. He said perhaps he did once - a long time ago. So he has been passing off my ideas as his own and not crediting me. I feel completely disappeared.

I find it curious that this person calls himself an academic when he doesn't understand the concept of plagiarism.

Other things men do is mystify things that aren't mysterious. Men like to make things complicated so it will make them look more intelligent or clever.

I remember explaining to this 'academic' person how computer programming was simple yet he started telling me I was really doing something else.

Yet he can't even write computer code. In my opinion, men shouldn't write computer code because they make it too hard for them to do. Women are much better at doing system thinking, as women who run households are capable of managing many problems at once and dovetailing them in together. Men tend to think in terms of tasks rather than looking at the whole picture.

We see this problem with men doing housekeeping all the time. Men focus on one task at a time, women often see many tasks at once and optimize the completion of the tasks at once.

We see this in the packing problem which men tend to out perform women on because men tend to make this an abstract (to be fair he used the word abstract - but this was the first time I'd verbalized this concept and no doubt would have summarized it as abstract later) problem. I saw this on a show called Brain Games that men were able to pack a car trunk quicker and more efficiently than a woman - you see the woman considering what to put where but the man just puts objects in. I rather think the woman is actually trying to organize the objects going into the trunk instead, like diapers, want this to be easily accessible, yet away from food, clothes go at the bottom because won't be needing them until we've arrived... At least that's how I pack the car trunk. I am also solving many problems at once when I am packing the dishwasher, and while I am optimizing for exposing the dirtiest dishes to water flow, I am trying also to get as much as possible in and also remembering how I will unpack it knowing where dishes are stored and how far I can reach to return those dishes into cupboards easily and efficiently.

All of my code is bug free, unlike men's code. I have written systems that have never developed a bug, this is situation normal for me. But perhaps I am not normal. Men on average just can't do it.

But this is something that isn't studied. It is possible that a lot more software could be bug free if women wrote it instead of men. But men have taken over an area that was invented and once performed exclusively by women.

Of course we are all on bell curves - some people are better than others at somethings - regardless of gender.

So it's prime day and I received an email saying there's a special edition of 'a mighty girl' with pictures of microscopes, action figures of - I suppose it looks like Hermione Granger, who in my husband's opinion really didn't need Harry or the red haired one because she could do everything by herself - except, you know..., for plot. Still that would have meant that Hermione was pretty lonely - and that is a serious problem - loneliness.

Yes I know a lot of people don't have a problem being alone for periods of time but loneliness means never having someone to talk to ever, or probably more precisely, for perhaps months - or even years on end.

Perhaps you can press someone into service, pay a psychologist to talk to you, a fortune teller, a prostitute - if you're a man... In Japan they solved this problem with rent-a-friend services. But are we ready for rent-a-friends in the west?

Yes, obviously, because we have plenty of fortune tellers, psychologists and prostitutes, which are all there for other reasons obviously and their excuse for being there is because we have a problem admitting to ourselves, that we are lonely. I guess the real reason for the coyness is it feels somewhat shameful to admit to ourselves that we have needs and this makes us vulnerable.

And loneliness is a problem because we are extremely social. We're so social that I think we're really addicted to TV because there are people there that don't/can't hurt us. Sure we can't participate in conversations with them - tell them they are wrong, tell them how much we are fascinated by their perfectly scripted lives... but they can't ask us how we are doing, what our day was like, how we feel.

The embargo on admitting loneliness seems based on the desire to appear impervious to emotional pain or neediness. Is there anything more shameful than being vulnerable in someway? It opens us up to ridicule, it lowers our social ranking if we have needs that in someway aren't being met by our day to day life.

The most popular people get all the attention they need by being surrounded by adoring fans. The rich too. But I also think that is a fantasy because plenty of film and TV stars suicide at all points of their career even at what might appear to be it's pinnacle. My guess is that they were lonely for genuine contact with someone they considered an equal.

For most people that equal is their partner. If you don't have a partner, the world is a very lonely place. Because it is that partner that we are supposed to get our quality communication from, the person who is meant to be most kind and honest with us, most sensitive to our needs, who won't ridicule us for having toilet paper stuck on our shoe but will let us know kindly and discretely so as not to further embarrass us. The person who gives us all the affection we need, whether it is straight up affection, a hug, a kiss - or sex. And in my opinion it doesn't have to be sex - it can be a hug or a kiss.

I think a problem with our society is that sex is overrated. Do we need affection, yes. We are primates after all, our ancestor apes spend half their days grooming each other. They didn't spend half their days having sex though. Do people sometimes have sexual urges? Yes, but that's something they can deal with themselves. (I am not going to tell you what to do in the bedroom - I don't care so long as you are adults engaging in consensual acts where no one is being permanently harmed or hurt.)

With all the taboos on sex, it has become the only valid way men can receive affection - it leads to bragging rights as to how much males are 'getting' and results in all manner of evil - whether it is unwanted pregnancies or rape and even death. Males can't admit to needing to touch or being touched - so parents I recommend you get your kids pets they can pet as much as they like.

The other side of the taboo is women have to play this game of being virginal and "pure" yet sexy. This is women go nuts trying to pretend they are young because young girls are supposed to be virginal and "pure" and sexy because they are at their most fertile... so women become infantile by removing their body hair, get plastic surgery, and do all kinds of crazy things in the name of 'beauty' aka making themselves small, in need of protection. in other words, generic, that their only assets are their virginity (they didn't 'put out') their DNA (their appearance) and the intelligence to spend time playing this game of subterfuge. Beyond that women are supposed to tease men into chasing them and refuse to 'put out' to make the other half of this game of making sex taboo. A number of serial murderers have admitted to killing women because they didn't consider the women pure/perfect enough)

Well I digressed some and then some more. My point about mighty girl - is how much extra does it cost your parents so their daughter can be mighty? The image above is a screen capture of a wonder woman and batman cup - both on Amazon today and you'll note that wonder woman will cost over $7 more than being batman (that's over 50% more). I asked on the listing why this was so and I was told that their daughter loved it. I'd love to have one too but I can't justify paying $7 more for a silly cup. The problem is, it can be very expensive to be a woman.

I do have issues with girls dressing up as boys to be mighty though. Hollywood's idea of a female friendly movie is substituting the male lead with a female lead, so wonder woman is really just a guy with more flesh showing - perhaps? The reality of female friendly are movies like Hot pursuit, Wild, Bad Moms, the Heat, and TV like Sharp objects and Little Big Lies (this show genuinely terrifies me)...

People have this misconception that Jane Austen wrote romances. Especially Pride and Prejudice - which was written at a time when novels were just a step removed from the devils work and young ladies were encouraged to read sermons rather than the Gothic horrors, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho, which Austen references in Northhanger Abbey, that had been general fair available for young women to read instead.

I think people underestimate Pride and Prejudice as a guide to seeking employment and economics for a particular class of women society. The choice was, a) be rich and independently wealthy, such as Emma, Lady Russell, Lady Catherine de Bourgh and her daughter, b) be a governess, and c) marriage.

And thus it's considered to be a romance.

Austen states pretty clearly that women have to enter marriage with their eyes wide open (Charlotte Lucas and that love is for men). While keeping your eyes open when you have no idea what a man is like in private because you are only allowed to meet him in public (to ensure your virginity), you have little experience of the world (because you are very young) and figuring out how much money he has, has got to sound mercenary but the reality is many women died in child birth at the time. So if marrying might mean your death in delivering an heir, you might as well make it as comfortable as possible by being rich.

And this seems to have been so easily forgotten - it wasn't until very recently that women stopped dying in child birth but then again the numbers are increasing again, at least in the US.

Austen wrote about the class system and how easily the rich manipulate those with less money for their own amusement. Think of Emma and how easily she manipulates Harriet Smith and in the end (the book not the movies) Emma will no longer associate with Harriet who goes on to marry the farmer. In movies they always reunite Emma and Harriet, and imply they remain life long friends.

Probably the weirdest thing people have told me is that Bridget Jones is a modern Pride and Prejudice - I always cringe when hearing this because the Bridget Jones is nothing like Elizabeth Bennett. But the only reason why people say this is that in the 1995 BBC version was made with the same actor playing Darcy as they used in Bridget Jones. While Darcy is important to the story, Austen pretty much uses him as a potentially interchangeable protagonist - we never really get inside Darcy's mind until he writes his letter to Lizzy. Even the author of Bridget Jones said she has no pretensions of crafting a modern Elizabeth Bennett.

Pride and Prejudice is about Elizabeth and her mental life. I am pretty much convinced Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice in response to Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria, where Wollstonecraft complains about the portrayal of women in literature.

I realized I didn't provide references for the statistics I quoted last time but for the record I have gathered these statistics several times on this blog so dig a little an you'll find the figures and links to the sources. I usually gather these figures from the FBI where they detail online many crime statistics, plus I use incarceration figures as well. These numbers have changed over the years slightly and new figures are posted every year.

But I was thinking about Gary Southern again, yes I know, I love to say who? after mentioning this guys name but in my opinion, any man who gets 1 month jail time for poisoning a state's drinking water deserves infamy, and I mean the Casey Anthony or Monica Lewinsky levels of infamy, and neither of these women did anything as bad as what Gary Southern did. And I'd like to add Snyder to my list of infamous men, that'd be Rick (or dick as I'd like to refer to him) the governor who poisoned all those kids in Flint Michigan.

Why isn't he infamous, when what he did was much much worse than Lewinsky?

I blame the media. they never shut up about the women but slide on by when it comes to the shit these men do. This is why we get shitty men like Kavanaugh on the SCOTUS, and the POS in the white house, the guy who gloats about grabbing "pussy".

These men are shameful, indeed, I'm deeply embarrassed that these men are supposed to represent me in anyway. but they don't represent me. We've forgotten what politics is for. It is nothing but entertainment for the small minded who live in a world of 'people' magazine and stupid television.

Turn off your TV, stop reading the news - indeed - putting news behind a paywall is probably the best thing that's happened to the news; the mainstream media love Trump because he sells them advertising.

But the way, these guys behave like they think they're entitled to do the things they do and when they get caught, throw a tantrum and then go about their business, because we don't put them on a list of infamous shame as women are and the media are to blame for this.

There is no end to the evil men do and then blame others for.

Yes, I know, not all men.

However, think about 'she was asking for it' and you know exactly what i mean - he's not to blame - she was 'asking' to be raped... then there are the associated questions: what was she wearing, how drunk was she... Society has been trained to believe it really isn't the man's fault she was raped.

Indeed women take the responsibility for everything, because most women are conditioned to apologize constantly even for things they did not do.

But the reality is it was definitely the man's fault.

Why do we constantly let men off the hook?

Another example is: men are constantly tearing up the environment for the sake of profit, they are digging up the world, we buy their stuff, throw it away and then other men bury it. Of course these men will blame consumers, they will blame women for wanting to marry rich men, they will blame... someone else.

Politics taking a leaf out of history learned this lesson well - men in the middle ages blamed and burned women at the stake, Hitler and the Nazis blamed the Jews, Slavs, Roma, homosexuals, the old.... these days men blame Hispanics, Muslims, immigrants...

Feminism is ruining ... everything, we're told by men, because we know men aren't to blame for anything - men never started a war - women start all the wars too. and then they will turn around and say things like - men are murdered more often than women - yes men are the primary victim of murder - but they are murdered by other men - a fact they neglect to mention constantly. Men are also the victim of more violence - but not at the hands of women, as they like to point out how violent women are - nevertheless, men are the victim of more violence but that violence is at the hands of other men - and when men are raped, they like to say men are raped by women - and possibly there are women who rape men - but the statistics demonstrate that men rape men more often.

Men have a man problem.

I'd like to tell men, especially rich, white, older men to stop blaming others for the shit they do. And when they are finally caught, these men will turn around and act like they didn't know what they were doing was wrong.

At the risk of sounding sexist, I'd like to tell these men to grow a pair and take responsibility for your actions.

If you ever read any game theory you'll quickly learn why men suicide at such a high rate in the US. Basically it's about branding people as 'winners' and 'losers' and those who share, yep you guessed it, are definitely 'loser'.

So you think of a pie which is meant to be divided somehow - the winner would get all the pie and the loser none. That might be nice for the winner if they can eat a whole pie but then the rest of us miss out and the winner has to spend way longer at the gym. If you like working out then that's awesome for you. Meanwhile, everyone else is hungry and with the zero-sum game mentality, you probably don't care because you just ate the pie. It's not until the 'winner' needs heart surgery from eating too much that they'll wish they had shared the pie with the heart specialist and the other hospital staff because in the meantime they starved to death.

While you may think you're doing best getting all or most of the pie while others get none, nobody else matters in this equation - it's a superficial win, and bad for you, ultimately, because it's the attitude that'll cause you to suicide.

You see they did research to figure out what made rich white men happy - and then they decided to broaden the research to figure out what made poor (white) men happy. And what they found was that all the money or pie in the universe doesn't make you happy. what makes people happy are their relationships to other people (not pie or money).

Feeling useful and needed is one of the best preventatives against suicide - not eating all the pie. Feeling useful and needed isn't only a preventative against suicide, it is also useful in curbing addictions.

Still you don't have to have the intellect of Einstein to figure out when we're all better off, we're all better off.

While this makes perfect sense to me, even if it is as simple as, if my neighbors kids have opportunities and good income they aren't breaking into my house - they don't need state funded rehab or prison time - all things that my tax has to fund - and even if my tax is funding a great education for my neighbors kids, it means later they'll have good jobs either in other people's businesses or their own and they can finance my retirement. If my neighbors kids are in prison or rehab their prospects will be bad and not great for adding to the economy, other than as cash cows for men who own and operate prisons and rehabs.

Plus they have found that when there is greater economic equality in a country, everyone is better off, and greater inequality is bad for everyone.

 I hate this meme - yeah i know it's meant to be funny, and that's how people who use it think it's meant to be see - as merely funny - but it's not.

You see women are policed for being too fat/thin, good mothers, whether they are too slutty, whether she is/was asking for it... now this meme is telling us we have to police women to keep it 'real' too.  "real" as opposed to 'snooty' which i guess we have to figure out whether the woman looks too rich and it's only really men who are allowed to be rich.

Some people have tried to pass it off as 'people' but it explicitly states women and grocery store? Well that is a job women do, buy the groceries. But there are men who do go grocery shopping and one man who I talked to about sharing this said "men do keep it real in the grocery store".. seriously, this guy has polled every man who goes shopping?

Aren't we over policing women yet?

My other real problem is - whether we deem a woman is too snooty at a store is trivial to the real shit that is going on in the world - men still aren't being policed for violent behavior, and as soon as I said that - you thought - not all men are violent.

The other night I was watching the Prime documentary on Lorena Bobbitt. I wasn't in the US at the time this happened, I only heard about it through the filter of press in which ever country I was in at the time and it was all treated as a horrible joke - where women in the US were out of control running around willy-nilly chopping men's penises off like it was the new fashion or something - and the description of the search for the missing member was astonishing - the trouble they went to! Once women's clits are chopped off in countries they still do that in, is there a search? - I don't think so and no one would consider reattaching a clit anyway.

I digress.

The brutality with which Lorena had been treated by her husband was completely ignored by the press despite the televised case. The story is still thought of as "she chopped his penis off because he was supposedly cheating". From what I can gather from the documentary Lorena would have been happy if he'd been cheating.

The documentary did touch briefly on John's upbringing - and it was NOT pretty. I think John lost both parents at an early age was no doubt the product of pedophilia, violence and who knows how much verbal and emotional abuse.

Nevertheless, having violence inflicted upon you, physical, emotional, sexual, is no excuse to do it to other people. It possibly is the only option for people who have known no other life, perhaps, and don't know it is possible to deal with situations in other ways, but you do NOT have to perpetuate violence in any of it's forms. It is a choice.

Female journalists wanted to write articles about domestic violence but their male editors shut them down (rich white men own and operate pretty much everything), according to the documentary, saying, "nobody wants to hear about that stuff". But the mainstream media is how we learn so much about our society.

Boys and men are the primary recipient of violence, and although some women may be violent, most of the violence males experience is at the hands of other men. Males are nearly four times more likely to be murdered than females, males are nearly 10x more likely to murder than females. It should be noted about half of all murders are never solved. But when it comes to domestic violence, men are about 5x more likely to kill their wives than a woman is likely to kill her husband.

I did see a static once showing that males are 3x more likely than a female to be murdered by male, but it was a while back and I can't find the reference now. Also most of the violence, sexual and physical males experience is at the hands of other males.

We need to speak about this, rather than worry whether a woman is too snooty, ffs. We worry about women so much because, i think more than anything, we're afraid of men, men are afraid of men.

This is keeping it really real: men have a man problem.

Interestingly John Bobbitt got off for raping his wife, yet Lorena was sentenced - even though she went to a psychiatric facility, which I think she thought was useful for her. I think this shows a bias in the justice system, and that it's about maintaining the social order, so the justice system is biased towards white men. And if you want to know how biased society and our justice system is, have a look at Gary Southern. I bet you are asking yourself who is Gary Southern. In my opinion this guy has done much worse than any woman has ever done, yet he is not a household name.

The problem is that men have created a hierarchy men which they live under and force the rest of us to live in as well, because might makes right and that's how you ascend the hierarchy.