If you read that “Why I won’t date hot women anymore” article from the New York Post that I gently parodied in my post yesterday, you no doubt remember Benedict Beckeld.
Sure, the name itself might not immediately ring a bell, but you will almost certainly remember his picture: He’s the muscular fellow who posed, sans shirt, while playing or pretending to play a violin.
Beckeld is also the guy who complained to the author of the article that “people who are better looking are less likely to pursue advanced degrees, or play an instrument or learn other languages.” Beckeld, who clearly sees himself as really, really, ridiculously good looking, went on to point out that he in fact has an advanced degree, can play the violin, and can speak seven languages. (Allegedly.)
Well, it turns out he has opinions about things other than hot people and their alleged unwillingness to learn stuff. Indeed, the late-thirties Brooklyn “writer” and self-publisher has a “philosophical blog” through which he attempts to force these ideas upon what one imagines, for him, has been a very unwelcoming world.
He’s a thoroughgoing reactionary clearly convinced that his ideas are far more original and interesting than they really are, and most of his essays are pretty much unreadable philosophical dreck. (Trust me, I tried to read a bunch of them.)
The only one I managed to make it all the way through was his latest one, a rambling post on the now-famous “Fearless Girl” statue that now stands athwart the famous Wall Street bull statue in Manhattan’s Financial District. Needless to say, he’s not a fan of Fearless.
After declaring in an aside that “the girl’s fearlessness stems mainly from stupidity, since not even a grown man would stand a chance against a rampaging bull,” Beckeld goes on to set forth his main thesis: that Fearless represents the ungrateful and “oikophobic” ideology of modern feminism.
“Oikophobia,” in case you’re wondering, means hatred of home; Becheld is using it to mean “the dislike of one’s own civilization and a disregard of the traditions that shaped it.” Beckeld is completely obsessed with this idea and is apparently writing a book on the subject, because why not?
Anyhoo, here’s what he’s got to say about little Fearless.
Fearless Girl is a stab not only at testosterone-laden executive boardrooms (though Fearless Girl is as much a corporate stunt as anything, whereas Charging Bull was the work of an independent artist), but also an oikophobic attack at the United States.
Oikophobic!
Wall Street no doubt has its excesses, but it also contributes enormously to its city’s and country’s financial success, and thereby to so much of the wealth that we all take for granted here, and which we criticize and consider insignificant precisely because we have come to take it for granted.
Later on in the essay, he accuses feminist types of being, basically, overgrown children. But of course he doesn’t put it quite so succinctly. Wall of text, incoming!
A part of attacking the ruling power is now the prejudice that, no matter what, one should never change for others and that one is fine just the way one is. This is why it is also significant that the statue does not simply portray a female, but specifically a young girl rather than a woman. For the dissemination of the aforementioned anti-patriarchal prejudice is a reflection not only of people having become more narcissistic, but also of the increased purchasing power of young people. This prejudice – that no matter what one does or how one behaves, one should stay the way one is – happens to be expressive of a particularly youthful and infantile attitude, and since young people have more money than they used to, or at least a greater access to their parents’ money than they used to, the popular culture is going to change in order to cater to their emotional needs, and so more films will be made, more songs produced, where this prejudice is expressed. Many of these young people will learn over time that it is in fact healthy to change in some respects every now and then, and that some bases of power – such as American power – are better left untouched, although there is, of course, a feedback loop in which the increased stress on this prejudice in popular culture will also, regrettably, come to influence those who might otherwise not have been victims of it. The girl of the statue has the knowledge and understanding of a child, but the conviction of a prophet, and therefore taps perfectly into the self-righteousness of the millennial generation (who feel intellectually flattered and therefore love the statue).
But of course he blames the millennials!
The statue – and the politicians who support its presence – thus, opportunistically, dips into that faux-feminism of the young and the angry, who know what they hate but not what they love, and who in any case refuse to understand what they owe to the object of their wrath.
You ungrateful kids! GET OFF OF MY LAWN!
Beckeld has many similarly not-very-mindblowing thoughts on subjects ranging from the election, America’s alleged decadence, and the problems he’s got with contemporary feminism. I would pull out some amusing quotes, but, well, his blog posts are far more tedious than amusing. So instead I’ll go take a nap.
If unlike me you love every second you spend readng Beckeld’s blog posts you can sample more of his writing in his two English-language books. One, called Art & Aesthetics, is apparently about, well, art and aesthetics. The other, a self-published volume with the somewhat prosaic title Statements, offers, according to the author,
two parts I wrote when I was 17 and 19 years old, respectively. It deals mainly with issues of ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history. It also contains my first critique of academia.
So that sounds like an absolute delight, huh?
@moggie
I look at that paragraph and all I see is
Oh yeah, Millennials have it so easy. I mean, lets just buy all the houses!
Assuming you made over 100k in August 2016.
And since that article was from so long ago, it no longer applies. House prices have jumped 33% in the GTA this year.
And spring is coming…
People still ask me “why are you renting when you could buy?”
A) fuck you very much for asking.
B) have you not SEEN the house prices??? The little detached house in the second article will probably go for two million dollars, once the price war is done.
If houses were as cheap as they were when the boomer generation was buying, i would buy three. But they aren’t, and i will never own one, because who can? We’re basically making landed gentry here, and it sucks.
Oh, also, better hope your rental is older than 1991 because if it isn’t fuck you.
There was a theory that this would spur more housing being built, and competition would keep the prices reasonable. But since anyone with a hint of sense could see that theory is stupid, it obviously didn’t happen. I mean, it’s just a COINCIDENCE that gas prices are always the same, right? Or that they’ll go up before a long weekend? The free market works for all of us, dammit! /s
… Teel dear about people applying the way things worked when they were young and white middle class and could support a family on one income. That isn’t true for people who are still white and middle class, much less for the rest of society. Argh.
The ad break after this sentence made it look like the book was offering me a free smart phone, which sounds better than the actual description of the book. It just sounds pretentious.
@Moggie
I don’t insist that people call me doctor (except here where I use it to distinguish myself from the other EJ). I do enjoy it when people call me doctor, but I’ve had my PhD for less than six months so the novelty of it hasn’t worn off yet.
@Moggie:
I know a married couple with PhDs who insist on being called Dr and Dr Davenport. Does that count?
@ Doctor ej
I’ve mentioned before my bedazzled admiration for people who have the wherewithal to work for PhDs; so as far as I’m concerned you should all have special tattoos and heralds announcing your presence.
@Alan
Well, I did get a science tattoo to celebrate getting my PhD…
Non-Dr EJ:
“Pass the salt, dear”
“Ahem…”
“Sorry! Pass the salt, Dr dear.”
“Here you are, honey.”
“Ahem…”
Perhaps my opinion is coloured by working in a university. If everyone in the place insisted on the correct honorifics at all times, it’d get ridiculous.
@ Doctor ej
In Asimov’s “Lucky Starr” series, members of the ‘Council of Science’ have special thought activated tattoos that they use as ID.
That is soooo cool though.
I do now though have an image of a drunken session in a tattoo parlour resulting in some sailor wondering why he has a science tattoo and your mates asking you when you served on the Nimitz.
dr. ej:
Well, you earned it.
It seems, every emerging generation takes heat from the mainstream media.
Millenials: For whatever it’s worth, you have my sympathy. I certainly wouldn’t want to be young, and trying to establish myself, in the Cheeto era.
I remember the garbage the media spouted about my generation: Generation X. We were slackers, we were latchkey kids. Slackers! I graduated college during the early 90s recession. I made do, for awhile, with two part-time, low-paid, customers service jobs. I was all of 23 years old… I didn’t tank the economy!
Supposedly, MTV had decimated our attention spans. Ridiculously, we were supposed to have this fetish for the 70s TV show, The Brady Bunch. (I’m talking USasians here, of course.). All, completely unrelatable to me.
We didn’t even get a proper name; we got a letter: X. It seems we’re defined by what we’re not: We’re not Baby Boomers, and we’re not Millenials. Oh, well. And, we’re a small generation, in terms of numbers.
Academia is a strange place, isn’t it? It’s really easy to forget that in the real world, a PhD is considered a serious achievement.
He is a white male supremacist who thinks he is much cleverer and more interesting than he is?
Of course.
I can’t wait for the women who were unfortunate enough to date him start coming forward to tell about what a dull date he was and how tedious dinner with him was.
@Alan
That sailor would have a hard time explaining that tattoo. It’s not a common or easily recognized image.
This is photograph 51, Rosalind Franklin’s x-ray crystallographic image of DNA. I have it tattooed just above my ankle and I love it. It’s fitting because my PhD did involve a lot of DNA work, but it also commemorates an underappreciated woman in science. So not only do I have a science tattoo, it also has some feminist undertones too.
I think I’ve shared this here before, but it explains a lot about Rosalind Franklin’s story and why so few people know about her and her work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZUun93_V18
@Moggie
I can confirm that is true. Thankfully, I only had to fight a small, slightly venomous snake.
@ Dr EJ
That tattoo is just cool on so many levels. I’m mildly smug that I did actually recognise the photo. I did once toy with submitting an article to Cracked along the lines of “Five photographs that revolutionised science”. But ignoramus that I am I could only think of that one and the eclipse photo that proved relativity. Until they prove the Loch Ness Monster is real I don’t think the ‘Surgeons photo’ counts.
It’s a fine line between underappreciated and thoroughly ripped off. Still, if women scientists didn’t want guys stealing their work they should have used drawers with better locks.
One of my favourite ‘unsung women’ facts is that Barbara Cartland (the fluffy pink romance novelist) designed the troop carrying gliders used on D-Day.
Barbara about to undertake the world’s first long range towed glider flight. This was the proof of concept that gliders could be used as transports.
http://i.imgur.com/YlZPIeK.jpg
@Alan
True. You could definitely claim that the work was stolen. Watson and Crick downplayed her contribution in the acknowledgements of their paper, even though she had written her paper first. They were published in the same issue of Nature, but Watson and Crick’s came first, making it seem like hers was supporting and confirming their work, when it was really the other way around. She had actual data and molecular measurements; they had a model built off of her data.
(All the papers are archived here: http://www.nature.com/nature/dna50/archive.html)
It would have also helped a lot if James Watson were not a sexist, self-centered asshat. Seriously, in one of his books, he boasts about how he used data from Franklin and Wilkins without them knowing. He may be a brilliant scientist, but everything I’ve heard about him is that he’s probably pretty unpleasant to be around.
@ Dr EJ
I’m reasonably convinced that it wasn’t just plagiarism but an actual physical theft was involved. I know there’s now a question as to who handed over the papers and whether Rosalind owned the copyright or if it belonged to the uni. The fact is though that it’s now only the alleged perpetrators able to give an account. But that’s like me coming back from a camping trip and claiming the rest of the party simply insisted that I eat them.
Quite a stretch to claim that Fearless Girl is unAmerican! Since when is Wall St the seat of American Patriotism?
Business people of the Wall St type tend not to have national allegiances when it comes to making money. If more money can be made in Tokyo, Hong Kong or London they won’t hesitate in upping sticks.
You would think that such a clever man would know that!
@Alan
That is entirely possible. Wilkins was in regular contact with Watson and Crick. He showed Watson the photo, but how Wilkins managed to get his hands on it is up for debate.
@Rhuu,
Eeep!!! Glad I don’t live in Toronto if that’s what the prices are like there. O.o
Unfortunately that attitude of ‘if I could afford [things] back when I was your age, you can afford [more things] now!’ isn’t a new one. Back in the late 1990’s my parents decided to dump a house mortgage on me when I was thirty because (as near as I can figure out their thinking on the matter*) ‘it was time for me to grow up, move out of their house, and learn to manage money. The end.’
….
…let’s just say it didn’t work out the way they assumed it would. And that the financial lessons that experience taught me are still bugging my life now, and need to be unlearned.
*At no point in the discussions about me buying this house was I ever asked about any part it. No-one asked to see my paychecks to see if I could afford it, no-one asked what my long-term plans were or what my debt load was, to see if living at home was actually a better deal for me at that time. So I can only guess at what they were thinking based on off-hand comments about the matter.
Bleah.
“Beckeld, who clearly sees himself as really, really, ridiculously good looking”
…so of course he won’t date hot women. He wants to be The Pretty One — that explains itself. (Weiningerian haverings-on = unnecessary.)
Complaining about “millennials” is victim blaming. It’s supposedly your own fault that you came of age when it’s harder to find a job. Further, younger people have always tended to have less money, so that also must be Their Fault ™.
@Redsilkphoenix: i’m so sorry to hear that! Sometimes people just need to *listen*.
The government is supposed to be trying to find ways to cool this market. We’ll see if they actually can!
@Redsilkphoenix: Jetpack Vixen, Agent of the FemiNest Collective; Keeper of a Hell Toupee, and all-around Intergalactic Meanie
/hugs No parent should shackle their kids with financial burdens like that.
@Rhuu
Can? Certainly. The government (wait, do you mean the city government or the provincial /federal? Affects what specifically they could do) absolutely could do something about housing prices. They almost certainly won’t, though.