It's Always More Complicated

There’s no excuse for ugly people’: controversial dentist Mike Mew on how ‘mewing’ can make you more attractive:

The orthodontist’s strange mouth exercises are beloved by incels seeking a manlier shape – and a fast-growing TikTok trend in classrooms around the world. So why has he been struck off the dentists’ register?

But honestly. This is probably because I have an perhaps unusual knowledge of medical (including dental) quackery and its promotion, and common themes are:

There Is One Big Reason For All Your Problems

And

One Simple Trick (which I have) To Fix Them.

(Cites here, so that you know that I am not making this up all out of my own head, to Alex Comfort, The Anxiety Makers, Ann Dally, Fantasy Surgery, and a tip of the hat to Rob Darby, A Surgical Temptation.)

Okay, this is at the other end of the alimentary canal to Sir Arbuthnot Lane's Cure For All Evils (caused by Chronic Intestinal Stasis), but I think we can see the pattern repeating here.

Not saying that maybe, somewhere in this, there is something that may be helpful in some, specific cases, but let us consider e.g. radium in the 1920s. Yes, it was really, really useful in treating certain forms of cancer: it was not a cure-all and downing massive amounts of radium tonic just left a person, well, radioactive, if the tonic actually contained any active principle at all.

I am also boggled at the assumptions about beauty, and trying not to comment on this guy's own appearance, but to remark that the Hapsburgs ruled swathes of Europe for centuries without manly square jaws, hmmm, plus, has this chap ever been into an art gallery in his life??? Is there one pattern of beauty or are there many?

Just reading what he thinks the epitome makes me want to assert the true loveliness of consumptive pallor, heightened by just a touch of hectic feverish flush, wilting picturesquely on a fainting couch.

No, really what're the odds?

In 3 different fora over the past couple of days, I have been strutting Mi Xpertise on:

Cartoons relating to birth control, abortion, etc. (I do know of a few, including a very early one featuring Bertrand Russell's father.)

Victorian courtesans (English/French differences, definitions, etc).

In connection with which, this video of Hardy's 'Ruined Maid' poem:

Condoms as STI prevention in UK, was this illegal (no, but advertising was a murky area, is my take on this, and the law was rather vaguely written but actually meant to be about spurious cures).

(Does that there Dr oursin ever shut up???)

***

Entirely unrelated, but what a concept: Back from the dead: the ‘zombie’ ponds repumping nature into Essex farmland:

Ponds that were dried up, shaded over or dominated by brambles have been opened up to sunlight and dug out, and are now burgeoning with rare aquatic plants, dragonflies and great-crested newts – also providing food and water for birds and bats. “It’s ideal for farmers,” says Emma Gray. “You get a lot of biodiversity bang for your buck in a marginal area for farming – you’re not taking productive land out but quickly you build up a network for species to hop across a landscape. It’s a no-brainer.”

Museum of creepy curiosities opens in London. Hmmmmm. Has he ever been to the Horniman, which far from being a higgledy-piggedly Cabinet of Curiosities, always strikes me as being about Educating The Masses About the Glories of Scientific Understanding of the Natural World, with added benefit of the really manky stuffed walrus, taxidermied by someone who had never actually seen a walrus. The Victorians were pretty into notions of cleanliness and classification and order.

Also, I suspect that some of those things in that collection are things that curators these days have ethical issues with, and indeed over which there may even now be legal constraints, such as human remains... (I have heretofore mentioned the Saga of the Bones in my office).

On respect for the dead and traditional practice, I was struck by this: I had to stop someone photographing my mother at the morgue – social media mourning has gone too far. This seems to me an entirely different matter to that practice, considered creepy by people who later came across it and even by some at the time, of Victorians having their dead infants photographed. Julie-Marie Strange addressed this in her wonderful Death, Grief and Poverty, 1870-1914 - it might be the only record working-class families would have of the lost little one.

Somebody on FaceBook was getting somewhat ethically aerated over this, London's 'tart cards' reveal history of sex work, design and printing, on the grounds that people were going and taking away working women's job adverts - my recollections of phone boxes at the period was that they were constantly being resupplied when police etc were removing cards and that there were a multiplicity in continual circulation. But it's an interesting perspective.

This, however, is a fully collaborative growing collection of over 250 objects chosen by more than 120 trans people to reflect their gender experiences.

I know there's probably entirely justified concern about what information Facebook is gleaning about people who use it - and even if my use of it is pretty minimal it would still be problematic to give it up when there are people in my life who do use it as their primary means of contact.

But I have been lately been given to wonder exactly how granular and detailed is the information that is gleaned, and, okay, I daresay my adblocker is blocking ads so I'm not seeing these anyway, and I've gone into the ads settings and turned off just about everything that might be deployed to advertise things to me -

Which hasn't stopped, once or twice over the past weeks, sponsored advertising posts popping up in my timeline WOT, but after I have spent some time clicking to hide these, the hint appears to be taken...

But, anyway, in the wholly Point Thahr: Misst stakes, when I go into Settings/Ads/Preferences/'Advertisers', and find a whole swathe who come from 'contact list added to Facebook', they are 99.9999 recurring US-based, most of them realtors, with a tiny sprinkling of health-related organisations. And I go through, and I delete them, or at least remove them from view, and wonder Y O Y? how pointless is that? given that my location is one of the few bits of public-facing information available?

Or is this a subtle misleading? and in fact I am being bombarded with subliminal wombattery, because their algorithms have noted that what I post is mostly wombats? and I am being lulled into a false sense of security?

There are contexts in which the term 'luscious' is of prime appeal and represents something central to the experience, e.g. mangoes.

I am just not sure that it is a word, culled from a review (and have we not heard of the long practice of picking out from a review single words that might be taken as favourable, publicity department, for the use of?) of a television programme, that would tempt me to view the thing. Okay, it appears to be of a histodrama nature, but even so, 'luscious' suggests to me, 'the wardrobe department and the set designer ran amuck', rather than, 'this is a riveting dramatic representation of a key period in Our Island Story'. It also suggests to me that it is the only potentially positive word they could find in the review they cite to put in the publicity.

Also in Dept of matters of context, there is a hoohah about the proposal to stage Shakespeare's Richard III in Leicester Cathedral, where he is now buried.

Up to a point, maybe, Richard III Society &Co, but I very much wonder how much attention would be being paid these days to the loser at Bosworth Field if Shakespeare hadn't written the play and given him enduring posterity as a fascinating villain.

Or would the story of the ickle princes in the Tower foully done to death have its own longevity even without that? as having a significant S&Y (Sellers and Yeatman) value as the bits of history people remember.

Thinking about the Tube lately and remembering that a few weeks ago I saw a poster on one of the stations which was basically TFL patting itself on the back for not being a profit-making body but ploughing all profits back into Improvements.

Which, you know, I thought was the nature of a public utility and not something that they should be going 'Yay look at us wot good guyz we R'.

***

Is this actually a problem of marriage, per se? Marriage problems: more than a third of people are single or have never married (ok, paging Groucho Marx re living in an institution, eh?) But a lot of those people are living in stable long-term relationships (like yr hedjog) and might indeed go for civil partnerships were they available. (Am also suspicious of that 'since records began' thing, because journos usually crap re demographic history.)

***

And somehow this seems to me to link on to this, which I had previously missed, but OMG WTFBBQ???!!! Invisible Girlfriend/Boyfriend

[A] new start-up that allows users to “build” a significant other with whom they can exchange text messages. The founders said they created it for people who wanted “social proof” they were in a relationship, i.e., for people who wanted to pretend they were getting some when they weren’t. It found takers: People created over 70,000 invisible baes. When people started chatting with their newly acquired invisible lovers, they initially assumed it was a chat bot, but after a few messages, they realized they were talking to a human being, or rather several human beings. The service is powered by thousands of crowd-sourced workers.

I suspect that you either see this as a lovely romantic story or as dangerously pathological and encouraging a very dodgy mindset:

Canadian searches for Irish girl who stole his heart.... dentist from Kelowna, British Columbia, has travelled thousands of miles back to Ireland to find a red haired, freckled girl he saw once in a café in County Clare.... a year later, he is back in Ireland, travelling around, enjoying the scenery and hoping that he might just run into her.

In fact, I think that Ye Olde Storye about Ye Saracen Maydenne who followed Her Crusader back to British shores knowing only his name and the word London (at least in the version in Thomas B Costain's The Black Rose) ought probably to be reversed, as Ye Crusader who spots Saracen Maydenne on a battlement somewhere in Outremer, never has any conversation with her, but gets back to England, Home and Beauty, is overtaken by Road to Mandalay-type feelings (no, no, not Manderley, Mandalay), and hies himself back to the Near East pronto to find her.

See also, actual, as opposed to popular narrative, gender stats for stalking.

I cam across this sad tale while clicking from link to link off some discussion about why, no really, randomly approaching Chix They Fancy in random public locations when said Chix are going about their business and preoccupied with other things, so not the fastest means to beautiful relationship, with citations to that whole thing where blokes, told this, go 'But how else can I meet wymmynz???'

Hello. This is the C21st. Even before online dating sites there was a long (cite here to Harry Cocks' work on personal columns) tradition of ways people who were interested in romantic relationships, whether or not 'view marriage', via small ads in periodicals, introduction bureaux, using the resources of one's friend/kinship/neighbourhood network, etc etc.

Men who are seeking a partner of the opposite sex do not have to go out into the wilds with a Very Large Butterfly Net and bait to attract their prey (because the discourse does, the discussion suggested, present the dynamic in exactly those terms).

So, Y O Y, do they think interrupting women as the latter go about their quotidien business in public spaces is the Only Way They Will Ever Score?

Are there, still, various problematic feelings about putting oneself out there with the clear intention of finding a partner, rather than being struck by a coup de foudre in the coffee shop or launderette? O Menz, they b such romantix.

OMG spam from Fortnum and Mason!

I don't think I've ever ordered anything from them online, so how I am on their list I know not - can it be that a shop which has been going for 300 years is investing in lists of email addresses? Woe, Woe, Infamy!

(I was actually shocked! shocked! when I was in Piccadilly for a meeting last week and popped in to replenish my supply of Aromatherapy Associates products to discover that they no longer stock these. What is the world coming to, we ask.)

Apparently it is National Stationery Week.

(Let us pause for a moment to consider the irony of promoting this via email...)

I can see that they have probably long been in the business of providing tastefully bound visitors' books (I am not sure about that eau-de-nil, though) to hostesses, but I note a certain regrettable turn towards the twee:
Quirky pug notebook
Fortnum & Mason Snowglobe - a snip at £50.

At the side of the up escalator, ads for something promising 'Hot White Teeth in 2 weeks'.

To which my response was, are not hot teeth rather uncomfortable? or perhaps it is just a pleasing warmth.

Even so, perhaps not optimum for eating ice-cream with.

Which led me to think about that (though apparently it's a spoof?) Ben and Jerry literary-themed Oliver Twist ice-cream -

Um, gruel-flavoured ice-cream*? this is like sardine toffee and I don't think even Heston could bring it off, the concept is not want-more-ish, more push-the-dish-away-half-eaten.

Heston: 6th Michelin star

*Though on looking this up, I see that it's suggested as 'rich dark chocolate and simple vanilla flavors with a smattering of English Toffee'.

A thought generated by Oliver Burkeman's column in today's Guardian Weekend, which has interesting resonances with this post I made some while ago about people undervaluing their own skills.

Burkeman is considering Rothbard's Law: "People tend to specialise in what they're worst at" and suggests that what it's getting at is this:

[I]f a talent has always come naturally – or if it's been decades since you last found it difficult – you conclude that it's nothing special. And so, in your efforts to achieve something impressive, or to gain a feeling of accomplishment, you gravitate toward whatever it is you can't do. You stride out into exactly those fresh pastures in which you shouldn't be setting foot.

I also wonder if in the mix there is the Protestant Work Ethicy notion that dammit, things ought to be difficult because life is real and life is earnest and we are not here to enjoy ourselves but to STRIVE (to seek, to find and not to yield). (While looking for the Stern quote below, I came across this perhaps pertinent line from Doris Lessing: 'This set of mind, this predisposition towards suffering, the unconscious belief that to understand life - or to know the score - means immersion in painful experience, shows itself in other areas.')

I'm thinking now about people who make a big deal about how hard what they do is and how they alone have the special talent/knowledge - I've vented before about archivists who want to be the sole conduit between reader and record - but this can be performative and about keeping oneself in a job (paper I heard at the conference about psychologists in WWII who produced just such great protocols for selection procedures in the military that they essentially did themselves out of a job by the time the war had ended).

I wonder also if, hovering about this, is my darling GB Stern's apercu that 'There is no delight like the illegitimate pleasure of suddenly marketing what is not quite one's own job'; I can see that in areas where one's achievements are of a hit and miss nature, having one's random hits valued may well be very cheering.

And on a further paw, I'm thinking about that sensation which sometimes comes over me that, yes, I could do that, it falls within my sphere of competencies, but I have no desire whatsoever to do that thing (and sometimes, dr rdrz, I end up somehow having to do it anyway). Which is the reverse of Thing that is challenging even if within that sphere.

Possibly also relevant here: column in the Review section by a first time novelist on the demands to self-publicise (though it goes off into other areas). Some writers can presumably do this, and others can't, and others do it badly. Though I'm not sure that there are writers out there who think more of their ability to promote themselves than to write whatever it is they write: not that I'd bet that this doesn't ever happen at all.