19 Jun 23 Monday Briefing

Any number of things I found interesting in the past week

The experiment continues. I closed Sunday night thinking I had very little to recap, but come Monday morning it was a different story, and narrowing my focus to what I actually found interesting vs dredging up five things proved to be the secret sauce… this time.

Lonely Hearts Club

Occasionally my rabbit holes lead to an intersection of folksy semi-serious relationship advice posts and the cultural zeitgeist. When it comes to the topic of male loneliness, everyone has an opinion and EVERYONE is concerned.

The brocast manosphere is amplified by mainstream media which is finally being picked up on by the TikTok-commentariat. As a dispassionate observer with no actual skin in the game, this is mostly amusing; as a dispassionate observer who does care broadly about outcomes, this is something that makes me sit up and take notice.

We can largely agree that heteronormative relationships are impossible to divorce from their sociocultural contexts and that marriage is as much a tool for societal control as it is about love, otherwise we would all be boinking and loving as many people as we wanted without caring about the social strictures placed on such activities.

That has radically changed in the past 50 years. Louise Perry writes an incisive, if squawky, case against the sexual revolution, which Caplan squawks on in return, perhaps proving if nothing else that men are truly from Mars and women from Venus. What bothers me most is both Perry’s and Caplan’s reductive views, which perhaps they cannot be blamed for given that they are both hetero and presumably have skin in the game and therefore said skin can feel the burn of each other’s perspectives.

The long and short of it is that women no longer have to marry, but they can marry if they so desire, and let’s assume most of them do, because pairing up into nuclear or multi-generational families is still very much a sociocultural imperative (otherwise shows like 90-Day Fiancé or The Ultimatum or Marry Me Abroad wouldn’t find a market).

For women to then willingly forgo their chance at marriage and children, because patriarchy is just something they’re noping out of, and thereby depriving a lot of men of their primary source of companionship (a woman instead of, you know, other men who could also provide companionship?) is an interesting trend that I don’t think economists are paying as much attention to as say, declining population growth.

So now we add male loneliness to this toxic political economy, and here’s where I have a radical suggestion – it might be too late for some grown men, but how about parents socialise their sons the way they might daughters. You know, encourage them to form friendships of all kinds, and interests of all kinds. Model the sort of social behaviour that is healthy. Heal yourself. Show that vulnerability isn’t weakness. The world might just seem like less of a lonely place.

Daddy’s Girl

Misha Saul writes one of the most profound, albeit rose-tinted, takes on a fathers and daughters. I say rose-tinted because I am a daughter, and I know exactly how devastatingly manipulative, conniving and hurtful daughters can be, as much as they can be unfathomable bundles of delight and wonder and sugar and spice and everything nice.

Saul thinks that “the love of daughters may be the purest form of love of woman possible: desexualised, a man can appreciate the feminine in all its splendour, unmarred by lust. Gentle. Soft. Loving. Fiery.”

It is interesting that he brings up the biological impulse and countless horrific acts of familial sexual abuse that have sprung from it. There are also rather creepy things that fathers have said about their daughters that prove that they can and do see their daughters through sexual lens.

A lot is written about a mother’s love for her children; she is valorised in popular and folk culture – see the Chinese kids’ song “The Only Good Person on Earth Is A Mother”. We don’t see enough about fathers, and that is no one’s fault but our own. If anyone can change the narrative about fathers and fatherhood, it will be fathers themselves.

Give Me Love

Thailand’s biggest entertainment export is… gay dramas? Possibly. It’s hard to get precise economic data on this, but BL (boys’ love) and GL (girls’ love) entertainment content and their attendant stable of stars are a pretty big deal in Thailand and the rest of the region, and after the unexpected hit that was Gap: Pink Theory, Thailand’s first GL series, at least three more have been announced and released.

Authorities in the region notoriously contradict themselves when it comes to such matters. Laws around marriage and media censorship remain restrictive and conservative, and yet, a not-so-secret and definitely-not-subtext garden is in full bloom, even showing on free-to-air Channel 3.

I think this is a perfect example of “two things can be true at the same time” – non-heterosexual behaviours and portrayals are tolerated as long as they do not encroach on the sensibilities of the majority. In Thailand, at least, where it does seem like a range of sexual proclivities and lifestyle choices are on full display, that seems to be the case. Trans people are still not allowed to change their sex on their identity papers, but just a few months ago, Thailand’s most beautiful transgender woman was married (not legally, but socially) to the scion of Phuket’s Chinese-Peranakan Hongyok family, with one of the Thai princesses flying in to grace the event. The Hongyoks also permitted Poyd to take their royally-granted surname; something that confirmed what I’ve always felt to be true, that Asian families will generally come to terms with individual members’ sexualities or choices, but broader societal acceptance is a very, very different beast.

The amount of GL and BL content available from Southeast Asia is also a timely reminder that pre-colonisation, third genders were certainly known of, and seen as conduits to the spirit world, and engaging in same-sex relations were tolerated as long as hetero marriages were formed and children created. Perhaps this region is forging its way through a messy, murky, but ultimately authentic and culturally resonant path towards compromise and co-existence.