Attention Deficit Disorder*

WARNING : may contain some hideously stereotypical notions

I may be the only guy who has experienced this - but I suspect not. You get home from work and your other half is in a bad mood. The person you love and care for has had a really shitty day at work. You ask what’s wrong and you get an outline of what happened.

At this point the laws of the universe kick in. You can’t stop them. Your subconscious is screaming at you “Nooooooooooooooooooo!! Don’t do it. Not again!!”

After a futile struggle lasting all of a few milliseconds and several million more exclamation points, the switch goes on. It’s inevitable.

You go into “solution mode” (known these days as entering the toxic dark dimension of ManSplain).

Two hours and the mother of all arguments later, after having had all of your carefully constructed ‘solutions’ torn down with increasing anger, you’re holding your head in your hands and wondering if the sofa is going to be more comfortable tonight than it was the last time you did this.

You were only trying to help. What went wrong?

No, you idiot. She did not want your “help” - she wanted your attention. She wanted someone to listen to her and make the occasional sympathetic grunt (the height of empathy for the male of the species).

Human beings, to some extent, all crave attention. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It would be an odd relationship indeed if there were not attention paid to one another. But it needs to be the right kind of attention, and there needs to be some balance.

Like with so many other things in these enlightened 21st century times, the balance has gone walkabout.

Why is little Johnny always behaving like such a little shit? We’ve bought him all the latest gizmos. Odds on, there’s an element of lack of attention going on. The benefit of the attention he gets from punishment outweighs the negative consequence of the punishment. It’s not like he can vocalize any of these subconscious drivers - so he acts out. He’s craving attention - the right sort of attention, but he has no way to properly explain all that, and so he becomes the demon spawn of Beelzebub.

A lot of these behavioural problems can be helped by spending a bit more time doing positive, affirming, things with Johnny. If that doesn’t help - then maybe he really is the demon spawn of Beelzebub.

So why does so much of the “self-identity movement” (SIM) look to me like the attention-seeking behaviour of little Johnny?

A large part of me thinks I might be being grossly unfair here, and that I simply haven’t understood things properly. That I haven’t understood things properly is certainly true. Take the phrase “I identify as . . .”, for example. I don’t understand what this even means. I am what I am - warts and all, for better or worse, take it or leave it. I don’t know how to identify as something.

Yet, at times, the whole western world and its Uncle (or Aunt, or whatever the gender neutral version of this is) seems to be in the business of identifying as something.

My heart goes out to those with ‘genuine’ gender dysphoria. I’ve put the word genuine in quotes, not because I’m trying to be dismissive, but because I recognize it as a very loaded and judgmental word. Aren’t our feelings always genuine? We might be unjustified in feeling a certain way, maybe even a little unhinged or unnecessarily emotional - but we feel what we feel. There are many times I’ve felt in a certain way where, on reflection, I recognize I was being a plonker - but, at the time, the feelings were utterly genuine. Misguided, perhaps, but true and real for me, at that moment in time.

The question, really, is not about the ‘genuineness’ of any particular feeling, but to what extent the rest of the world should accommodate those feelings? If I’m feeling angry and emotional, to what extent do I expect others to accommodate that?

If we try to strip away the emotion and attempt to apply some kind of logic to the trans issue we might ask the following question :

If I accept that society should accommodate those who feel they are a different gender, should we also accommodate those who feel they are a different species?

Is it even a fair question? One might claim that the person who feels themselves to be a deer, for example, is denying biology whereas the person wishing to change gender is merely wishing to adopt a different social construct - that of gender - and so the two situations are different.

But then we fall head first into the Great Rabbit Hole of Confusion. If gender is just a social construct and not rooted in our biology then what does it mean to identify as a man on Tuesday, and a woman on a Wednesday? Aren’t you, then, just identifying with a particular conception of what it is to be a man or woman? And isn’t that conception just based on stereotypes?

If gender is not rooted in a tangible physical reality, then what IS it rooted in?

Charles declares that today he is Charlotte - according to his perception, his own mental construct, of what a woman is. Robert, on the same day, declares himself to be Roberta and yet Robert’s conception of what it is he is on this day differs from the conception of what Charles thinks he is.

We’re left with the uncomfortable notion that being a woman is just whatever anyone says it is - and woe betide anyone who questions it.

It reminds me of the joke where a bunch of truth-seekers pester the hermit meditating in his cave. The hermit loses his patience and screams at them “Yes, I’ve achieved inner peace and you’re just going to have to take my fucking word for it you little shits”

And to balance out the misandrist joke in the picture above here’s a misogynistic one

Q: How many women with PMS does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: As many as it fucking takes - now just fuck off before I scrape out your eyeballs with a spoon

It may simply be my idiocy, my lack of understanding, but I doubt it. The whole SIM thing is a chaotic sprawling mess of rabbit holes, warren-like mazes that go nowhere. How has this arisen? How has it become such a thing?

I ask this question about drag story hour for schoolkids too. I mean, where the hell did this idea come from? Did a bunch of teachers have a meeting one day and try to figure out how to make story hour more interesting?

Head Teacher : how do we make story hour more engaging for the kids? I think it’s got a bit stale
Teacher 1 : why don’t we invite external people to do it? Any suggestions?
Teacher 2 : police men and women?
Teacher 3 : doctors or nurses?
Teacher 4 : civil engineers?
Teacher 5 : drag queens?
Everyone : that’s a fucking brilliant idea - let’s do that

It’s like they tried to come up with the most bizarre, the most surreal suggestion - and it became a thing. They looked around and all was ennui and boredom. The Holy Python of Mont looked down upon them and took pity. “Let there be drag” He intoned, and the world was never the same again.

This chaos can only arise when things like objective truth, logic and rationality are de-emphasized, and things like “lived experience” or “my truth” get elevated. The post-modernist rejection of objective reality and the attendant focus on structures of power and oppression has warped our perception and thrown everything out of balance.

This is not to say that a post-modernist analysis of how power structures can influence things is nonsense from the outset. There may be some value in such an analysis - but it’s not, and shouldn’t be, the be-all-and-end-all. We need an appropriate balance in our tools of analysis too.

When you’re taught to believe in demons, everything bad that happens is perceived to be demonic in origin.

When the world isn’t giving you the attention you feel you deserve - it is, for some, perceived to be the world’s fault. But if you can make a case for being oppressed, marginalized in some way, then telling others about your plight, your suffering, becomes a way of gaining the attention you feel you so richly deserve. You feel welcome and supported by this new ‘community’ you’ve joined - and validated and affirmed - and, better still, you get oodles of sympathy and attention from ‘allies’. The attention you get far outweighs the alleged negatives of now being in an oppressed or marginalized class.

The problem here is that genuine oppression exists and some people are genuinely marginalized. How are we to distinguish, or rank, degrees of ‘oppression’? But when schoolkids can be facing expulsion for the egregious crime of ‘misgendering’ one has to wonder exactly who is doing the oppressing here and whom is being oppressed? The power today seems to be lying squarely with the SIM people.

Of course my writing is SO good, SO insightful, that I really ought to have over a million subscribers and be lauded the whole world over. The world is marginalizing me and I’m being damaged by my obscurity. I’m not getting anything like the attention I deserve. What should I do about that?

Become a better writer, perhaps?

Quite.

This is the rational response. There’s a reason why certain podcasts and blogs and substacks are more popular than mine - and it’s nothing to do with unfairness, or discrimination, or marginalization, or power, or privilege - or whatever the current buzzword is. It’s because the people writing those blogs and substacks and recording those podcasts are a whole fuck-ton more talented than I.

They deserve their position. If I want to get the same degree of attention as them, I need to up my game.

If you’re oppressed, if you’re marginalized and discriminated against, then that’s a bad thing. It’s not an achievement, or some fucking badge of honour. It’s not a way of getting the world to look at you and ooze the Great Syrup of Empathy from its bleeding heart. Being oppressed and discriminated against is a fucking awful thing - and nothing to be celebrated at all.

So why does it look like so many people, these days, are desperately trying to claim this special status? What hole in their hearts, what vacuum, are they trying to fill?

Even people who do get huge amounts of attention still seem to crave so much more. Perhaps it becomes addictive after a while. Watching Meghan Marsupial attempt to claim victimhood status a while back was every bit as surreal as drag story hour. The Holy Python of Mont was working overtime that day.

I’m uncomfortable with the tenor of some of my comments. As I’ve said, some people really do suffer oppressive environments. Who am I to compare the suffering and distress of the Uyghurs in China, for example, with the suffering and distress felt by someone who is misgendered?

If you prick us, do we not bleed?

I can’t help but wonder whether we’re in the process of really messing things up. Big time. It’s clear that a lot of ‘western’ societies are filled with people who are not happy. The number of people on mood-altering drugs is truly disturbing - and yet, materially, we’re living with almost infinitely more comfort and plenty than any colonialising Emperor of old.

There is no balance - and people increasingly seek validation in the attention they get online. I posted this picture of my Starbucks yak milk latte an hour ago and I have only 2 likes. My life is over.

Something is broken, and we’re not fixing anything with our current obsessions of which SIM is a prime example. This endless quest to “identify as” is not making us happier. Our current obsession with racism (but only one particular kind of racism which, peculiarly, doesn’t seem to apply to Asian people who are deemed to enact ‘whiteness’ and get discriminated against for their scholarly achievements and hard work) is not making things better at all. All we’re doing is seeing demons everywhere - because we’ve been taught to see demons.

Is it too ‘conspiratorial’ to suggest this is being purposely driven? Probably. It’s more likely to have arisen organically - a sort of emergent perversity. However, let’s finish with a little parable.

The tribe is on a hunt today. They have located the lair of a sabre-toothed tiger and have set out to kill it. Grak, the leader, gives his men a pep-talk.

Grak : stay frosty lads, it’s going to be tough
Ugg : (coughs)
Grak : (looking over) You have something to say Ugg? And why have you stained your hair with purple berry juice?
Ugg : I’m not a lad today, and please address me as Ugga
Grak : (thinking) you’re not a woman - but you will make great bait

*Today’s musings were inspired by Guttermouth’s excellent piece which can be found here.

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