I was sat on my back deck enjoying the benefits of climate change and supping a nice cold beer (not Bud Lite). What better way could there be to while away a lazy afternoon?
I decided to make it even better by doing a bit of “research”. Not the kind of research where you figure out new stuff that nobody else has, but the kind of research where you look stuff up and try to understand it. Same word; two different meanings.
I realized, like you do, that I had no idea how one of these new-fangled Frankenschlongs worked. You’re a woman, but want to be a man, and so you get the forearm butchery done to create a neo-phallus. OK - it’s a bit gruesome and maybe it’s necessary for your mental health, but how does it work? I mean, to put it crudely, what happens when you want the little man to stand to attention?
Is there like some little button you press? Do you have to pump the thing up?
My strange and twisted mind came up with the following fictional scenario
Daphne : Am I not appealing? 2 hours of foreplay and nothing is happening
Bob (née Roberta) : Oh sorry, I forgot to press the button
(some fumbling, followed by a whirring noise, and then boing!)
I realized I just knew nothing about the mechanics of the process.
I still don’t know how the trans neo-thingy works, but in the process I discovered that there are surgical procedures designed to help men1 overcome their excitability problems. Personally I think I’d try Viagra first and maybe consider celibacy if that doesn’t work, but you do you.
There are 3 main options to go for if you need to go down the surgical route to cure your erectile dysfunction; the three-piece inflatable, the two-piece inflatable, and the semi-rigid rod.
Each of them has their, erm, ups and downs. You can do your own research, if you have a few moments in between the beers, by checking out the Mayo Clinic’s information page.
One of the downs, or the not-quite downs, of the semi-rigid rod is that you basically have a permanent semi-stiffy. On the plus side, however, the semi-rigid rod
Is easy to use for those with limited mental or manual dexterity
I’m not quite certain of just how much manual, or mental, dexterity is required to operate a penis. My own experience tells me; not very much. But the thing didn’t come supplied with an instruction manual and so I had to make it up as I went along.
Feeling a bit queasy after just a short time “researching” I decided to look at another kind of heat pump, because I realized I didn’t know how those worked either.
These are the things your government is probably trying, as I speak, to get you to install into your house in their noble efforts to stave off climate change. Gas boilers, oil-fired boilers and electricity - bad, bad, bad, really bad baddie badness, that will lead to massive catastrophe as the world gets a bit warmer and more people are able to do their own research on their back decks for longer.
I had heard bad things about these devices, so I tried to figure out how they are supposed to work to see if I could understand what the issues were. They’re actually quite a nifty idea. The theoretical basis is neat and really does seem to “give you something for nothing” (kind of).
The reason why they work - allow you to heat (and cool) your house for less energy input than is required by more conventional methods (oil, gas, electric heating) - is because their whole ‘ethos’ is built around the idea of moving heat and not creating it. You can go through the maths, but the TL;DR is that moving heat in order to achieve a 1 degree rise in temperature requires less energy input than achieving that same rise by the conventional methods which create heat directly.
So far, so good.
The issue, like almost every brilliant theoretical idea, is that there is something of a mismatch between theory and reality.
Getting an effective heat pump installed is not easy and nor is it cheap. If you have an existing house it will require your entire heating/plumbing system to be ripped out and replaced and it has to be replaced with the right stuff that is adequate (at least) for the job. It’s easier for a new-build house, but then you’re relying on the builders not to cut any corners in their desire to maximise profits (which, of course, they never, ever, do).
The long and short of it is that I would suggest that most people’s bad experiences with heat pumps are because they have installed a system that is inadequate for the job (and for certain houses with poor insulation, for example, it may not be possible to achieve adequacy even with the very best gold-standard heat pump installation).
It’s very unlikely you will ever recoup the financial costs in replacing your existing heating/cooling system, even with today’s artificially inflated energy prices. You can, however, bask in the glory of knowing you’ve done your bit to save the planet. You are much poorer financially and colder physically, but you’ve amassed a whole lot of virtue capital. You are no longer a super-spreader of that deadly Carbon Dioxide.
Bit like the vaccines, then (you know which ones I’m talking about). Your health is now fucked, but you did your bit to save the planet.
Way back when, when I was but a PhD student, the other half had a lease car through her work. It was a sweet, sweet vehicle; a Peugeot 205 1.4 GTI. The designers had got something very right with this car; it moved like the proverbial shit off a shovel, cornered like it was on rails, and was a joy to drive. Unfortunately, the missus got involved in a bit of a metal-to-metal contretemps on the road (not her fault) and we got a replacement, erm, vehicle for a few weeks while her lovely Peugeot got fixed.
The thing they gave us was something called an Austin Allegro. A clusterfuck of British ‘engineering’ that should have been called the Austin Adagio. This bathtub on wheels (they felt like square wheels) was horrible. It was like someone had taken the idea of a car and seriously messed it up beyond all recognition.
I stopped thinking about pumps, penile or heat versions, and started thinking about this perpetual mismatch between idea and implementation.
I thought about how many things there are that sound great in principle, but turn out to be unworkable (or just plain wrong) in practice.
It’s almost a fallacy to think that just because you have a great idea, that idea is workable in practice.
Need I remind anyone about lockdowns, or masks, or six-feet ‘social distancing’, or plastic screens, or hand sanitizing till you’d stripped the skin off your fingers, or asymptomatic transmission, or vaccine passports and the like? Strictly speaking none of these things are great ideas (they were actually dumb ideas) but there is some “on the surface” appeal to them.
These ideas failed miserably in their alleged purpose of controlling a ‘pandemic’.
If you’re a bit of an idealist like me you might think something like socialism sounds like a great idea, or even that having a global government would be great for managing resources so that people didn’t have to starve any more. These are great ideas for some hypothetical idea of what a human being is (or ought to be) and some hypothetical idea of how things operate. The problem is that these ideas don’t work in practice, because the (socialist) idea of what a human being is (or ought to be) is far removed from the actuality.
The stuff in our heads, one great idea after another, just doesn’t really work all that well when faced with reality.
We seem to have unlearned so much wisdom of the past. Anyone remember this one?
If something seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is
This is the basic modus operandi of the politician; they promise you the Earth and deliver a pebble (and a pretty unappealing and crappy one, at that)
But we fall for it all time and time again.
All your problems will go away, you’ll be almost incapacitated with euphoria, once we’ve chopped your tits off, removed your uterus, and installed your trans heat pump.
Yeah, sure. Dream on, Buddy Lite.
We seem to operate in a world of fantasy. It’s hard to maintain the initial romance when the urine splashes of reality have to be cleaned off yet again. But you yearn for a time when it wasn’t so. You yearn for a quick and easy fix, for a world in which magic holds sway.
We need to embrace reality, and perhaps more importantly, to embrace complexity, for there are very, very, rarely simple solutions to complex problems. Anyone telling you that in order to solve some poorly understood complex problem we can just adjust a single parameter - turn down the CO2 dial you bastard, or just change interest rates - is either deluded or trying to get something from you.
Dreams are great things to have, but we shouldn’t be too surprised when our dreams fail to match the reality. We never needed a new normal, and we certainly don’t need the new normal where the abnormal is touted as normal, we just needed to realize that dreams and reality are two different things.
Old fashioned men - the ones born without a vagina
Perfect analogy Rudolph. One transitioner I read about compared it to standing on one shore of a river, and being promised to arrive on the other side, only to be abandoned somewhere in the middle of the river unable to get to either side ever again. That comparison sticks with me. Not to mention being a pharma pill taker for the duration. It's really sad and I am glad to see people speaking out finally. Like with the vaccines, if people really knew the risks and realities of it, they would likely choose not to do it.
OMG the stuff you think about :-)