It's Always More Complicated

Though I suspect it's more just 'did not bother to do any research'.

Two pieces in today's Guardian Saturday.

The one about blokes being (IMHO) totally scammed over testosterone doesn't appear to be online yet, but I, who have done my time in the noisome pits of sex-related quackery, was going: this is the latest round of what used to be rejuvenation operations of various kinds (HAI! WB Yeats!), the Blakoe energiser, electrical belts, devices to prevent the leakage of the precious manly fluids, pills to restore Lost Manhood, and I wouldn't be surprised if radium tonics had featured at some point.

The placebo reaction is a powerful thing.

And then we get The rise of the literary nepo baby? The children of famous novelists on following in their parents’ footsteps.

Well, maybe in these parlous times it does help getting an agent and one's foot in the door at a publisher? But it is hardly a new phenomenon that there is More Than One Writer In The Family.

Will concede that perhaps I am thinking of those literary families of an earlier era which were perhaps more into churning out more or less hackwork as a cottage industry (e.g. the Allinghams).

Then I bethought me that Angela Thirkell's son Colin MacInnes was also a writer, albeit, as one may see from that Wikipedia entry, a very different article from Mama, wot. (I seem to recall from the bios of her that I read that they were estranged and he was a hostile witness.)

There's also a bit of a reverse pattern in the Drabble family, whereby John Drabble took to novel-writing after his daughters. (Famous Sibling Literary Feuds....)

(Reporting in vaxx-boosted, by the way.)

Have been noting hither and yon stuff about blokes 'looksmaxxing' and 'mogging' (which apparently does not involve cats? is there some reference to tomcats facing off and fluffing out their fur? probably not. Who knows.)

This is yet another of those things That Blokez Do apparently in order to attract the opposite sex and I do not think it is because I am Old, and my tastes were formed in A Different Day, that I feel that there is a significant Failure To Do The Research about What Actually Pulls The Chixx.

Not that this is exactly a new phenomenon, when I was reviewing those books on yoof culture in the 60s/early 70s, I was thinking that various of the paths being pursued by (presumably) cis het men, because Teh Gayz were in separate chapters, did not seem to me necessarily terribly productive - maybe being a great dancer, but not if it was all about him showing off moves, ditto the being A Mod Face.

And after all the idea that women only go for men who look a certain way is to laugh at, cites yet again the instance of The Late Rock Star Historian, who was a scruff who was not perhaps quite at the John Wilkes level of having serious disadvantages in the way of appearance to overcome but was - well, I suppose it depends on the artist you're thinking of and there were painters who would have turned out an excellent oil-painting of him but was hardly of male-model looks. But was if not of universal appeal, considerably popular with the opposite sex.

We are frankly not surprised at reports that young women are eschewing the dating game, because what it turns up is very likely young men blatting on about their self-maintenance regime and probably trying to shill for supplements and peptides.

Am also given to wonder whether the people who follow these creatures are all acolytes of their maxxingmessage, or whether at least some % are treating them as the modern equivalent of the old-style freakshow. (Though for all I know, in the darker reaches of the internet you can find videos of men biting the heads off chickens and so on.)

While I was thinking that it would be preferable for them to contemplate upon the natural world and build bowers for, or offer particularly attractive stones to, the objects of their interest, I also became cynical as to whether female bower birds and penguins are quite so appreciative of these efforts as naturalists would have us suppose. ('Him and his bloody bowers' - 'Not another pebble')

But so not in the way people who diss on my lovely city of residence usually mean it.

From scorpions to peacocks: the species thriving in London’s hidden microclimates: An extraordinary mosaic of wildlife has made Britain’s urban jungle its home:

London is the only place in the UK where you can find scorpions, snakes, turtles, seals, peacocks, falcons all in one city – and not London zoo. Step outside and you will encounter a patchwork of writhing, buzzing, bubbling urban microclimates.
Sam Davenport, the director of nature recovery at the London Wildlife Trust, emphasises the sheer variation in habitats that you find in UK cities, which creates an amazing “mosaic” of wildlife.
“If you think of going out into the countryside where you have arable fields, it’s really homogeneous. But if you walk a mile in each direction of a city you’re going to get allotments, gardens, railway lines, bits of ancient woodland.”

More than 10,000 yellow-tailed scorpions (Tetratrichobothrius flavicaudis) are thought to live in the crevices of walls at Sheerness dockyard, Kent, and are believed to have spawned a second colony in the east London docklands. They arrived in the UK in the 1800s, nestled in shipments of Italian masonry.
Meanwhile, Regent’s Park provides perfect woodland conditions for the UK’s main population of Aesculapian snakes (Zamenis longissimus). One of Europe’s largest snake species, these olive-coloured constrictors are thought to be escapers from a former research facility, surviving in the wild by preying on rodents and birds.

Art-loving falcons: 'Swooping from the Barbican, the falcons often spend the day at Tate Modern, just across the river'. Doesn't that conjure up an image?

Bats! - 'Wildlife experts believe they navigate much like human commuters, using linear railway embankments as guides through the city.' Bless.

And FERAL PEACOCKS!!! 'Other birds are legacies of Britain’s aristocratic past. Peacocks, for example, are known to strut through the Kyoto Garden in Holland Park, feral descendants of birds once kept by the gentry'.

Mention of the pelicans in St James's Park as descendants of gifts to Charles II, but alas, no crocodiles from that era have survived.

Given this metropolitan seethingness of nature red in tooth and claw, do men really need to go on Rewilding Retreats in Cornwall? (there was a para about this in the travel section which I can't locate online) - particularly given the 'walks in ancient temperate rain forest', I felt this was folk horror movie waiting to happen - just me??

Of course it would be Jonathan Jones making these overheated speculations, wouldn't it? Did Leonardo da Vinci paint a nude Mona Lisa? I may have just solved this centuries-old mystery.

We do wish he would go and look at some landscapes, or maybe abstracts, for a change, though doubtless he would find some female sexual symbolism to perve over there.

Cannot help feeling that he is just some point on a spectrum away from this very weird - not sure if it entirely constitutes a subculture? The Goon Squad: Loneliness, porn’s next frontier, and the dream of endless masturbation Very NSFW and rather creepy - the author in an interview cops to Perverse Exhilaration which may have something to do with discomfort at the tone as well as the actual matter?

There was a piece in Guardian Saturday about people who fall in love with their AI companions, and want to marry then and have children with them, and apparently some women also bond with them, but so far this is not online that I can find. Based on a book that's coming out?

I will concede that this piece on sperm donation is not about dodgy docs or freelance 'donors' but it still all sounds fairly spooky: Why are sperm donors having hundreds of children? Because while, okay, some criteria seem reasonable:

Rules vary across the world, but in the UK you also have to be relatively young - aged 18-45; be free of infections like HIV and gonorrhoea, and not be a carrier of mutations that can cause genetic conditions like cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy and sickle cell disease.

From this small pool of donors, some men's sperm is just more popular than others.
Donors are not chosen at random. It's a similar process to the savage reality of dating apps, when some men get way more matches than others.... "You know if they're called Sven and they've got blonde hair, and they're 6 ft 4 (1.93m) and they're an athlete, and they play the fiddle and speak seven languages - you know that's far more attractive than a donor that looks like me," says male fertility expert Prof Allan Pacey, pictured, who used to run a sperm bank in Sheffield.

I am over here muttering 'Morlock Power!'

On men spreading it about, historically speaking: the challenges of illegitimacy when exploring genealogy and how to find that shadowy figure who is not on the birth certificate/in the baptismal register. (With luck he had a bastard sworn upon him when that was a thing, otherwise it's a lot more work and a lot of surmising.)

Let's blame the woman, let's let's let's, she probably did something wrong: Marked: Birthmarks and Historical Myths of Maternal Responsibility - which just mutatates and mutates, no?

A conversation with historian Dagmar Herzog on Fascism’s Body Politics and disability under fascism in her new book, The New Fascist Body

And I think relating to all these sorts of issues: Reproductive norms: stigma and disruptions in family-building:

Our expectations of conception, reproduction, and family-building are imbued with reproductive norms. In our younger years, we may imagine and expect that we will have a certain number of children at specific ages or points in the life-course, and in particular circumstances. We may think that conception will be straightforward, pregnancy will pass without complications, and our children will be healthy and without disabilities or impairments. We may have hazy, dreamy ideas of what our children will be like and perhaps more defined ideas of what we will be like as parents.

This one, true, does sound like A Good Egg, The pioneering medic and campaigner for reproductive choices, in Ireland before these were legal: until right at the end, 'he has continued to campaign on controversial issues, including fluoridation of drinking water', masking during the Covid epidemic, and other things not specifically mentioned. Okay, some of the early Malthusian pioneers were also into things like anti-vax - voila T R Allinson - but just possibly there was a certain getting locked into the role of being 'He's A Rebel'.

Not sure that was quite the same trajectory with DNA James Watson, who seems to have had an interesting arc from being Very Successful at a Very Early Career Stage and never quite achieving the second album and becoming Weird. The Guardian obit mentions his being taken up as a very young researcher by Naomi Mitchison, but not that she dedicated Solution Three to 'Jim Watson who first suggested this horrid idea'.

On the subject of breeding, which sort of springs out of that, do we think that anyone would WANT the seed of these charmers: inside the hidden world of social media sperm selling:

One common tactic often warned about in these communities is that men will pressure women into sex, telling those who want to use “artificial insemination” with a syringe or baster, that sexual intercourse is more successful at producing pregnancies, which is not true. Sex, euphemistically referred to as “natural insemination” in these groups, is not the preferred method for most women, and yet recipients who are desperate to get pregnant can be persuaded to allow their boundaries to be crossed. Many of the posts in the groups are from people who will donate only through sex or through a method they call “partial insemination”, where the donor’s penis is inserted immediately before ejaculation.

Plus also just plain scammers. And

While sexual assault and harassment is rife, there are also risks of serious sexually transmitted diseases, hidden genetic disorders and creating a child with someone to whom you could end up being legally bound for life.

Testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) is a prescription-only treatment recommended under national guidelines for men with a clinically proven deficiency, confirmed by symptoms and repeated blood tests. But a wave of viral videos on TikTok and Instagram have begun marketing blood tests as a means of accessing testosterone as lifestyle supplement, advertising the hormone as a solution to problems such as low energy levels, poor concentration and reduced sex drive. Doctors warn taking testosterone unnecessarily can suppress the body’s natural hormone production, cause infertility, and increase the risk of blood clots, heart problems and mood disorders.

I do not think these are healthy or useful ways to look at SEX. Notches on the bedpost was bad enough, or how many times per night they could Do It, but really, these are taking the whole thing to new levels.

My boyfriend sees sex as a competition he is losing. How can I change his mind?:

He feels like he doesn’t perform enough (he does) and worries he isn’t big enough (he is!). He grew up without a father – the father’s fault – and I wonder if this has something to do with it. How can I assist him to see sex as non-competitive?:
Response:I assume he doesn’t think he’s losing the competition with you, somehow, but with imagined manly foes, comparisons, symbols of everything he (imagines he) isn’t?

Because of this: Sperm-racing investors blow $10 million on ‘seed round’ for sports venture:

Last weekend, Zhu flew to YouTuber David Dobrik’s slick white Los Angeles mansion, collected the sperm of three influencers, and injected it onto a small race track as a crowd gathered in the living room. The competitors — Harry Jowsey, Jason Nash, and Ilya Fedorovich — watched a video of their swimmers, overlaid with animated tadpoles, zoom to the finish line.

Yeah, well, I'm over here going

a) tortoise and hare, and are those sprinters whooshing right past the ovum in their mad gallop?

b) bit of an assumption that they are actually, you know, viably fertile, which I don't think at all correlates with speed. Motility is one thing, having what it takes to fertilise that ovum is another (and haven't I read something somewhere about It Is The Ovum That Chooses? Heh.)

c) Mary Ellman's image in Thinking About Women: 'the activity of ova involves a daring and independence absent, in fact, from the activity of spermatozoa, which move in jostling masses, swarming out on signal like a crowd of commuters from the 5:15.

Be respected literary novelists, that is?

Here be blokes going wah wah wah about the plight of the male novelist, lo, the voice of the Mybug B heard in the land, no?

Is this the death of the male novelist? The lonely life of a man writing fiction in 2025:

“Being a middle-aged white guy and working in this space today feels, to me, like what it must have felt to have been a poet at the end of the 20th century,” Niven tells me, laughing. “It’s a very niche, very recherché area, with a tiny audience. Men just don’t read fiction in anything like the same quantities they used to, and fewer of us, it seems, are writing it.”

He tells me a story about a friend – “with a big public profile” – who published his first novel a couple of years ago. “It was very good, but it was non-genre, and he’s a middle-aged white guy, so I did my best to manage his expectations.” The novel was turned down by every major publisher before eventually being picked up by a tiny independent. The book, once published, came and went, as so many do. “If it had been written by a woman, it would have sold six, seven times as many as it eventually did. But this is where we are today.”

And apparently at least one of the lairy 'scabrous, satirical, and vigorously male' novelists of the 90s who cannot catch a break these days:

["W]rites crime novels now. The last refuge of the scoundrel is the crime novel. And I get it! There’s a definable audience for crime fiction, but if you’re not writing genre fiction, then it’s difficult out there.”

Oh, wait.

I do wonder WHY they want to write SRS LTRY FIKSHUN??? is it all about the Kultural Kred? (Am currently reading Norma Clarke on Goldsmith and Grub Street, and how it was Not Gentlemanly to be a hack who wrote for filthy lucre, and the delicate balancing acts Georgian literary figures had to engage in.) And why are they all about being warty boys when they do so rather than being, oh, Henry James or Scott Fitzgerald or noted for their exquisite prose style? is it also about Macho Cred?

My own literary tastes among the Blokes of the Pen whose works you will tear from my cold dead hands have been discursed of here and they range widely. I can't help imagining several of them waxing satyrik about this lot.

Naturally, I feared the worst from the headline: ‘Men need liberation too’: do we need more male novelists?, but apart from the guy who is the editor of this new imprint which is to encourage poor wittle male authors (Son of Mybug, well, I guess, Grandson? Great-Grandson? Distant Descendant discovered through sending his DNA to be tested?) they are all actually WTF, FFS, what are you talking about?

He moans on that the vast majority of commissioning editors in publishing are women, which I fancy is a situation that has historically pertained for Quite Some Time and did not happen just yesterday, and there have been Fabled Agents and Editors of Ye Fayre Sexxe who were the champions of Bloke Writers, some of whom were fairly toxic specimens (e.g. look at some of the authors with whom Diana Athill worked closely).

Come on down Anne Enright:

The majority female readership is generous to male writers, while male readers continue to be reluctant about reading and praising women.... More books are being published today than ever before, and this includes more books by men. I have seen publishers eat up novels by younger men (especially Irish men, I am glad to say). I have seen them fall on such books with relief that they exist and that they are good. I don’t see any problem with men getting published, when those men are not misogynistic, because it is actually misogyny that has gone out of fashion, not male writers. I worry about men who miss all that, and who miss the inflated, undeserved feeling of importance of the good old days.

Yay Leo Robson:

Anyone who knows anything about anything, or at least about the English novel, knows that it can never be “too female”.... There have been periods when male novelists consumed most of the attention: notably in the 1980s and early 1990s, when it was deemed necessary to found a women’s prize for fiction. But everyone knew that the leading English novelists were Penelope Fitzgerald and Iris Murdoch, who wrote often and brilliantly about men.... Of course I am exaggerating, slightly. There have been some decent male novelists. If this were not the case, it would have been somewhat presumptuous or arrogant to have attempted writing a novel myself.

Sarah Moss suggests maybe the problem is men as readers:

I suspect that if there is a problem with men’s literary fiction, it’s as much to do with reading as writing. The gender (im)balance of audiences at book events suggests that men much prefer to read nonfiction.... If patriarchy means that some men miss out on the joys of literature, that’s quite low on the list of its harms and also unlikely to be fixed by setting up a men’s publishing house. I wonder also how much this is a British problem, because I can immediately think of dozens of Irish men, established and emerging writers, publishing very well-received novels.... Many men, it seems, experience no curiosity about the female gaze, or women’s experiences. Maybe women, who always used to read men and buy their books, are beginning to return the compliment.

Why, why O why, would anybody choose a 'sperm donor' (and it looks as though he made his donations very up close and personal, we are not talking test-tubes?) whose pitch was - on Facebook! - 'recipients did not have to “have a weirdo in a lab coat look at your hoohaw”. (The service was also free.)

Do we think that anyone asked for a recent STI check? The whole thing sounds ick to the max.

No, instead you got involved with this deeply odd and controlling bloke who claims he fathered more than 180 children and far from just vanishing over the horizon, in several instances has tried to gain custody of the resulting children.

In the US, where he was offering sperm donor services until 2017, there is a warrant for his arrest over unpaid child maintenance amounting to thousands of dollars.

I suppose at least this guy has been seriously spreading it about ('dozens of children across South America, Australia and the UK' and presumably USA), unlike the Dutch guy most of whose 100s of offspring are in the Netherlands.