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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28405 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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(I posted this in last week's thread this morning having forgotten that today was Monday. Reposting in this week's thread.)

Nowadays, whenever I meet a woman or gay man who's millennial or younger, I'm counting the seconds until they ask me "so, what's your sign?" Among young Western women, belief in astrology seems to be right up there with an interest in true crime podcasts and Taylor Swift.

I have the impression that this is a fairly recent development, like in the last decade or so. When I was in secondary school I don't remember any of my female classmates expressing any interest in astrology, and I sort of remember the general opinion was that reading your horoscope in a tabloid was seen as a low-status spinster thing to do.

Three questions:

  1. Has there actually been a recent resurgence in interest in astrology? Or is my gut feeling actually mistaken, and interest in astrology has actually been constant over the past twenty years?

  2. If "yes" to the previous question, what are the underlying causes? If astrology underwent a resurgence in popularity over the last decade, why so? Is it a "god-shaped hole" effect (when people give up organised religion, they immediately start looking for something else to take its place)? I've heard that there was a lot of VC money floating around for astrology apps a few years ago, could that be behind it? Or is that an effect rather than a cause?

  3. Why is it such a gendered phenomenon? I literally don't think I've ever been sincerely asked what my sign is by a straight man - 100% of people who've asked me have been female (or far more rarely, gay/bi men). Is this true everywhere, or am I in a bubble and it's a less gendered phenomenon in other regions? I wonder how it ties into a tendency among women that they seem to enjoy the act of classifying people into "types": a few years ago when I was single, something like half of the dating app profiles I saw had their Myers-Briggs listed somewhere.

Russia's different, as the 90's were a free-for-all for religions and esoteric practices. This means there's a gap in my understanding of what "being into astrology" is in the US

  • knowing your Zodiac sign? (pretty normal here, my son's a Pisces)
  • knowing your Oriental Zodiac sign? (again, pretty normal, my son's a Rat)
  • carefully reading newspaper horoscopes for your sign? (common among left-slope women here)
  • worrying about other people's Occidental/Oriental Zodiac signs? (weird)
  • knowing your astrological birth chart or sixty-year cycle Oriental Zodiac sign? (this is starting to get weird, and this is where most midwit women that are "into astrology" sit)
  • worrying about other people's astrological birth charts or sixty-year cycle Oriental Zodiac signs? ("disturbingly into astrology")

  • Over 20 years, a high school classmate presented me with a star chart. I used to remember what my rising sign was. I never remembered the squares, trines, or other angled relationships with other signs. We haven't spoken aince graduation.

  • A year before COVID, I danced with a woman at an independent art show. She asked me my sign. I asked her to guess. She smiled & said what her favorite signs were. I was not in that list. The next morning, she thanked me for the cup of tea I prepared. I sent a couple text messages, but she seemed uninterested. I moved on.

  • Another coder I know posts about star signs roughly one a month. He has a lot more women in his social circles than I do, and they engage with him fairly well. I have noticed this, as well as his interest in the well-being of his toddler daughter.

Astrology is a tool. You can use it as a game, or you can get autistic with it and try to make grand statements about people's character. Lots of people like games; not a lot of people like to be defined.

Keep in mind that when someone is tasked with a decision and is suffering from analysis paralysis, even an irrational & arbitrary distinction such as birth month can narrow the field down to a reasonable set of choices.

Sorry, I'm going out of order.

I literally don't think I've ever been sincerely asked what my sign is by a straight man - 100% of people who've asked me have been female

I saw a tweet a while back saying something like: if you meet a straight guy that knows his Moon Sign, he's been ran through.

I've heard that there was a lot of VC money floating around for astrology apps a few years ago, could that be behind it?

A personal low-stakes conspiracy theory: "The Pattern" and similar apps got very popular around 2020, and a lot of my female friends got super into it. I don't think any of them really believe in it, but they would all read it, every day, and at one point I downloaded so my wife could see what it told me.

I joked, at the time, that Bloomberg was going to secretly take over The Pattern as part of his primary campaign, so that on primary day every girlie would get a message pointing them towards voting for Bloomberg. "Your month looks risky, it's important that you pick a leader you can trust, like Mike Bloomberg."

Even if the users don't take it too seriously, it's an app that literally tells one how to think, feel, act. Think of the advertising and influence opportunities! The potential to Nudge! Especially when combined with, what I'm sure are, generous permissions that allow the app to track where you are, and what you're doing across other apps, and use it to form a clear customer profile. Tinder wants to close the sale for premium? "We see romance in your future this week, take the plunge and take a chance!" Fanduel wants you to up your weekly bets on NBA games? "Jupiter is in the shadow of Mars this week, fortune favors the bold, you can't lose!" Financial adviser wants to sign you up? "The skies are looking stormy ahead, seek safe harbors and kind advice." This kind of vague, fortune cookie advice, is typical of astrology charts, but could maybe "nudge" someone towards a desired action. And it's totally unaccountable! The customers don't even really expect you to be right! Most won't even admit they think about it!

If astrology underwent a resurgence in popularity over the last decade, why so? Is it a "god-shaped hole" effect (when people give up organized religion, they immediately start looking for something else to take its place)?

My wife enjoys astrology as a little game she takes half seriously, and in my opinion what superstitions like that provide is "seasonality." By which I mean, a degree of randomization that allows you to vary your actions in ways that are useful or pleasing. Optimal strategies for many games require a degree of randomization, and human happiness tends to respond well to variation. Variety is the spice of life that gives it all its flavor. But the nature of modernity is that we've eliminated a lot of the required randomness from our lives, a lot of the seasonality. We can eat any food we want at any time of year. We watch any movie we want, regardless of whether it is in theaters or on TV or if the VHS is in stock at Blockbuster. If I want to buy something, say a new Burberry trench coat, I don't have to plan my annual trip to the Good mall a couple hours away, I can do it on my phone and have it shipped to my house. If I want to read a new book, and my library doesn't have it, I'm not hunting around for it, I'm just buying it off Amazon or downloading it off LibGen.

In that world, it's easy to settle into a rut, into a Baridan's Ass equilibrium that's not ideal but that you have no reason to depart from. Literally just changing some things for the sake of changing them (the Coolidge Effect?) would improve your life, but why will you choose to do it?

Astrology provides something of an answer to that question. If you follow it, it gives you reasons to randomize your actions, in ways that will often improve your life, if not substantively at least experientially.

Consider how Sign-Compatibility can help you choose a mate. Imagine yourself as a young woman in SF, with a job somewhere on the soft side of tech in PR or HR or XR or whatever. You have many suitors, but they are all more or less replacements for each other, none of them are so much better than the others that you feel the need to commit. You know, at some level, you'll be happier if you commit to any of them, but it's tough to choose without a reason. You break out of your equidistant bails of hay by a randomized process, what does The Pattern tell you on the day of the date, or how does their time of birth indicate compatibility with your time of birth?

Or consider the old trope of a person being totally conflicted on a yes/no decision, can't choose between two women or whatever. Another character enters the room and, hearing their indecision, takes a coin out of their pocket and says "fine, I'll flip the coin, heads you go with Jessica tails you go with Sarah." He flips the coin, the first character jumps up and says no don't do that, the second character, rather than revealing what the coin landed on, asks him "Which are you hoping it landed on?" And in that moment, the first character knows which choice to make. Interpretations of signs can help us interpret our own desires and beliefs intuitively, cutting through the noise. A simple horoscope like "Trust the right people today." is inherently useless on a rational level: who are the right people? How will I know what to trust them with? But on an intuitive level, a vague instruction like that gives you room to realize what you wanted to do all along, to interpret your own desires. LLMs serve much the same purpose, as do consultants at the corporate level.

As a last personal note, I will say that I have never followed astrology but I have two major superstitions.

One, I always considered it good luck to see a hawk, because I liked them when I was a kid. Significant conservation efforts at the Federal and State levels, along with changing demographics and development that have made habitats for Hawks friendlier, have brought Hawk populations back towards health in my area. Where in the past I might only see one once a month and it was a major "sign" of something. Now I see them most days. Maybe the magic is gone, or maybe I am mystically tied to seeing hawks and my life is just that much better now, which might be accurate.

The other is that Wawa receipts for MTO items come in with three digit numbers, and my wife and I consider it a major sign when we get a single digit Wawa receipt, and to a lesser extent the other "special" numbers like 333 or 999 or 420 etc. The first time I got a 001 receipt, my wife went in for a life changing job interview. We also had a terrible day the day we got 000. These are important.

Are we at the point, now, where Wawa hoagies can become an official Motte meme?

I'll throw in an effortpost on the Sheetz/Wawa dichotomy later this week.

Your theory about The Pattern is some top-tier schizoposting, we need more of this.

It seems like most of the posters here couldn't imagine themselves being into astrology or anything adjacent. I on the other hand went through a brief period in college where I was obsessed with MBTI, so I have a bit of an insider's perspective. But it's admittedly very difficult to articulate why I find MBTI (and perhaps even astrology, to some extent) appealing. I simply know that I do.

It's easy to think of a lot of explanations that have negative connotations. It provides (illusory) order in a fundamentally chaotic world, it appeals to self-centered people with the promise of unveiling hidden truths about oneself, it's a form of Sartrean bad faith that keeps us from having to confront the yawning abyss of our freedom. But I don't feel like any of these explanations actually strike at the core of what's going on. I don't think an affinity for astrology/MBTI/whatever is a bad thing - merely a different style of cognition, one might say. The most positive gloss I think I can put on it is that it's correlated with being the type of person who structures their experience in terms of narratives. You have a story that has a place for not only yourself, but other people as well. You evaluate things in terms of their narrative weight; you see people as more than arbitrary collections of traits and properties. People don't have a birth date and a death date - they have an origin and a telos. This sort of cognitive profile doesn't necessarily have to lead one to being interested in astrology specifically, of course. But I think that's the personality type (heh) we're dealing with.

And this sort of narratological personality is certainly not exclusive to women. Carl Jung, of course - his work was the inspiration for MBTI for a reason (even though the actual content of MBTI bears little resemblance to anything he wrote). Nietzsche's work too is replete with this kind of typological thinking.

In Japan people might be vaguely interested if you mention star signs, but they'll really bite if you start talking about blood type.

Reminds me of a funny personal story:

When I was prepping for a factory visit in Japan, my Japanese colleague who was doing the paperwork asked for everyone's blood type. I was surprised that BigName Corp were so superstitious, and said so.

She gave me a look and said, "They need to know what blood to give you if you have an industrial accident."

One can over-egg the cultural differences.

I've brought up the blood type thing several times in the last couple of years. Everyone, without fail, scoffs at how ridiculous it is (as well they should), including self-identified true believers in astrology who take it extremely seriously and buy all the books and read the charts and so on.

I mean, obviously the idea that your personality is determined by your blood type is preposterous, but it's not obviously more preposterous than the idea that it's determined by the time of day at which you were born (not even conceived).

The blood type stuff doesn’t actually strike me as absurd at all. Blood type is hereditary, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if blood type had some sort of non-zero correlation with personality. Now, I’m aware that no correlation has been established with any rigor. I’m just saying it’s not at all absurd to believe that there would be such a correlation, given that there’s at least a material/genetic factor that could be identified as causative.

Surely this would imply that about half the population of the earth had essentially the same personality.

Only if it were the sole determiner of personality, which I don't think is what @Hoffmeister25 is suggesting.

No; just a shared tendency toward certain traits, however minor in the face of other factors.

Is it a "god-shaped hole" effect (when people give up organised religion, they immediately start looking for something else to take its place)?

Tradcath women are obsessed with medieval-style galenist temperaments, so it’s not a God-shaped hole.

Tradcath women are obsessed with medieval-style galenist temperaments, so it’s not a God-shaped hole.

What's wrong with temperaments? As long as they aren't explaining the difference in people's behaviour by the imbalance of humours, of course, they are a useful shorthand for putting people in boxes based on their default mood.

Not really anything in particular; there's nothing inherently wrong with noting a choleric personality type or whatever. But it's quite clearly the same impulse as astrology, even if a less illogical and ridiculous expression.

My point was that it's not a God shaped hole. Very religious women do the same thing in a different way.

My Greek Orthodox godmother, who was at church multiple times a week enjoyed astrology and reading fortunes in cups of Greek coffee turned upside-down. She was generally not a stupid woman.

I love Camille Paglia, can listen to her talk for hours, and agree with much of what she says. But she's also hugely into astrology.

Somehow these temperaments seem less violently offensive to rational thought than astrology.

Astrology has an "in-your-face" stupid effect, whereas the temperaments at least attempt to explain some causal mechanism.

It's strange that people feel this way given that galenic temperaments and astrology were inextricably linked for centuries. They have the same origin (Aristotle making shit up, misunderstood by Galen which is misunderstood by arabs which are misunderstood by medieval translators) and the main purpose of astrology, for pretty much all its history save for the last 100 years, was to inform galenic physicians in how to fix humors.

This is like staring into tear through the fabric of space and time and catching a glimpse of an alternate reality for me.

Can you elaborate a little?

Traditional western medicine held that there are four humors- or essential bodily fluids- which determine by their quality and relative quantity the properties of human health, including the expressions of personality/mental health. A person with a preponderance of blood is said to be sanguine(a people person personality), of phlegm phlegmatic(a go with the flow type), of 'black bile' melancholic(introverted, serious, artistic), and of 'yellow bile' choleric(a type A personality). Galen, a roman doctor, codified the interactions of these humors with bodily functions and Hildegard of Bingen(a medieval German Abbess) codified how they could be influenced herbally and through the diet. I think IIRC that this is kind of a steelman of the theory behind essential oils affecting your health.

What this theory gets right is health being different for each person and more or less about the whole person/body being in overall health rather than about treating the symptoms of disease- I'm sure our resident doctors can relate with frustration patients who just refuse to address their obesity/hypertension/whatever and want meds for the symptoms. What it gets wrong is that eating spicy food will not help you get more done at work.

90%+ of women who’ve brought up astrology will admit they believe it’s mostly or entirely bullshit after five minutes. They might not do this to a man who they think is judging them for it, but that’s standoffishness / defensiveness more than stupidity.

It’s like the homeopathy thing. Most homeopathy believers aren’t Steve Jobs; they believe in ‘western medicine’ very quickly when they need it. Similarly, an astrology girly who meets a perfect man who happens to be the wrong incompatible star sign isn’t going to break up with him unless she’s a 99th percentile crazy.

Divination, coursing and astrology have been of vital importance to the thinking of ordinary people and elites throughout history, providing external stimuli and hypotheses about what the future may be that people can react to and think about. They provide an aspect of randomness that ensures we consider many eventualities and possibilities, and don't get into ruts of thought. They also provide an anchor (albeit a random one) for narrowing down thinking about the future when we would otherwise spiral and feel overwhelmed by its possibilities.

Maybe the male/female divide is to do with astrology providing test scenarios for thinking about and imagining that tend to be to do with love, social and family life and psychology. Women are often more interested in and better at thinking about these things and they want to keep this ability sharp.

I would also venture that the internet's algorithms are spewing all kinds of scenarios and perspectives at us these days that largely meets our needs for divination, which is why astrology and its ilk are in fact really quite unpopular by historical standards.

I first ran into it among low-IQ co-workers at a terrible job I once had, male and female. They couldn't wrap their minds around my disinterest in discussing it; I dug in my heels and refused to give them my birth date. I was affronted.

A male friend of a female friend at a dinner party brought it up, and between me slightly disliking him based on secondhand info I got from my friend, and off-the-cuff surprise, I was not kind when he casually brought up astrology as a conversational topic. My default assumption was it was a tactic to appeal to women, and the only thing I dislike more than people who actually believe in astrology is people who pretend to like things for social brownie points.

I would 100% pretend to believe in astrology to annoy you.

Which could be a fun game for years with you thinking I’m just pretending to enjoy it while I attempt to convince you that no no I’m a believer.

I did Kung Fu for a long while, and while the school was fairly no nonsense, you got a lot of people there into woo-woo bullshit. Once at a dinner, some guy was talking about some "Kung Fu Master" he knew when he was a younger man and he was travelling. The master claimed he could turn invisible and nobody could see him. To demonstrate this to guy at the table, master said he'd walk through a subway turnstile without paying, right in front of a cop, and the cop wouldn't stop him. Well, he did, and the cop didn't, and guy at the table was remarking how amazing it was that "Kung Fu Master" could turn invisible.

Without missing a beat I said "But you saw him."

Poor bastard's brain segfaulted right then and there. Just sputtered, every attempt to speak was just sentence fragments, with some broken syllables mixed in, and then he eventually went quiet.

Probably the singular time I ever called someone out on a woo-woo bullshit story and actually broke them. Normally the flow of bullshit just absorbs and works around any rock thrown into it's currents.

Obviously the kung-fu master's power was psionic, not physical. He was only using it on the cop, erasing him from the cop's perception. I'm disappointed in his creativity.

Maybe he was using a SEP field?

Has there actually been a recent resurgence in interest in astrology? Or is my gut feeling actually mistaken, and interest in astrology has actually been constant over the past twenty years?

Google Trends to the rescue!

Looks like it's been more or less flat since 2016. There was also a massive decline from 2004 to 2008, followed by a smaller decline between 2008 and 2016.

Although this survey suggests that (in America) it's more popular among young people, and that older men are particularly likely to reject it (maybe they think it's girly?). So I guess that does support your suggestion that it's having a moment among young women.

My guess is that what with all the 70s fashion (moustaches, flares, long skirts) this was only a matter of time.

IMHO, nearly every question that begins "Why do women....?" can be answered by "They are standard deviations more neurotic and agreeable than you."

Why do women gravitate towards woo-woo bullshit like astrology? Because it can never be wrong, and the wound of being wrong is far worse for women (due to neuroticism) than men. Of course they gravitate towards "knowledge" that is completely unfalsifiable. It's safe, it's cozy, and they can indulge in it as much as they please without ever risking the pain of being wrong about anything.

I mean I'm a pretty neurotic person and I don't have any time for astrology or other forms of woo.

Did yah call ya mothar? She gets so worried sick about you, and you nevaaaah call!

Did ya turn off the stove before you left the house?

Did yah call ya mothar?

A question which genuinely haunts me at night.

Did ya turn off the stove before you left the house?

Joke's on you, I haven't cooked all weekend.

Don't ask questions about group differences if you're going to just turn around and go "but I don't do thing".

Either we understand that we are making generalizations that aren't going to apply to everyone, or we don't.

Edit: Nevermind

I'm just not sure if "neuroticism" is a sufficient explanation, especially when there are millions of neurotic men in the world but their neuroticism seems to express itself in systematically different ways to the female variety.

Assume that only neurotic people are drawn to astrology. Why so? And why only neurotic women, but not neurotic straight men?

I'm just not sure if "neuroticism" is a sufficient explanation, especially when there are millions of neurotic men in the world but their neuroticism seems to express itself in systematically different ways to the female variety.

You see what you did here, right?

"Men and women can both be neurotic. I just think they're neurotic in different ways"

Yes. Yes that's exactly what's being said. Specifically when you pair higher than average neuroticism with nigher than average agreeableness.

Who, as a group, scores higher in neuroticism+agreeableness? Women.

Okay. So is your hypothesis that men who are both neurotic and agreeable will display the same interest in astrology as neurotic and agreeable women?

Maybe, but probably not.

I'm not sure what you're after here? There are some men who are definitely into astrology, but there are far more women and there appears to be some recent cultural impetus at play that's made more women get into astrology than before. That's what the thread is about.

I know what the thread's about - I started it because I wanted an answer to my question. I guess I'm just not persuaded that being agreeable and neurotic makes one disproportionately likely to be interested in astrology.

As a data point, there's a giant astrology / witchy section of books very close to the register at my local Barnes and Noble (I live in a 65% Biden voting area in a purple metro in a purple state, for what that's worth... very Karen territory). So at the very least, there are marketers who believe that there is an audience there, and it's the trendy kind of audience that you try to extract money from to keep your ailing business afloat.

That entire store at this point gives off serious anti-straight-male vibes, because of the books they stock and foreground, really. Which I suspect is more a reflection on the current publishing industry and the audience that still goes into book stores like that to buy books than anything particular about B&N. But as someone who reads a huge amount and loves books and bookstores (but, well, libgen, so hey, I concede my role as part of the problem), it is seriously depressing to be there.

my local Barnes and Noble (I live in a 65% Biden voting area in a purple metro in a purple state, for what that's worth... very Karen territory)... That entire store at this point gives off serious anti-straight-male vibes

My local B&N is also in a ~65% Biden area, blueish-purple metro in a purple state, at a declining suburban mall with a majority-minority attendance and I tend to be a little surprised at how... normal it is? Like exceedingly well-balanced, here's the rack of Biden books and here's the rack of Trump books, here's the Christian section and here's the astrology section, etc. The staff pick notes lean more Internet Progressive or Karen-y, but less so than some of the libraries. Also the manga section keeps growing. I'm not surprised that American comics seem less popular than ever, but I am a little surprised at the manga growth.

The indie bookstores in the wildly more expensive and whiter neighborhoods, those are the ones that exude "you do not belong here."

Also the manga section keeps growing. I'm not surprised that American comics seem less popular than ever, but I am a little surprised at the manga growth.

What makes you surprised?

Guess I'm still in that 90s mindset where watching anime other than Dragonball Z or Sailor Moon marks you as weird, and reading manga marks you as unacceptably weird and probably not very hygienic. My perception of youth culture has not kept up enough with just how mainstream manga is.

Also the manga section keeps growing. I'm not surprised that American comics seem less popular than ever, but I am a little surprised at the manga growth.

If the staff are very woke, this doesn't surprise me. How can you be pro-trans without also being pro-anime?

I think you have a completely inverted view of the culture of modern comics. Western comics are substantially "woker" than anime and manga, and the people making them go out of their way to advertise that fact.

I'm well aware that modern Western comics are aggressively woke and go out of their way to be inclusive towards LGBTQ people in an extremely ham-fisted and unsubtle way. That's not what I'm referring to. As I explained in my other comments, I'm referring to the phenomenon in which teenagers or recent adults consume anime/manga obsessively, and (for whatever reason) it starts them on the trans pipeline.

I didn't see those comments and hence didn't reply to them, but now that I go looking... I don't think anime/manga start people on the trans pipeline at all - it's just that you don't know what younger people actually do these days and hence are unaware of the ubiquity of anime/manga, i.e. "Most murderers drink soft drinks ergo soft drinks contribute to murder". The far more likely contributing factors I can see (among men, women are facing something different) are in-born rates of autogynephilia and social contagion (relentless demonisation of male sexuality followed by "and you can become one of the elect by becoming trans, which sanctifies those terrible urges").

How can you be pro-trans without also being pro-anime?

Be a feminist who is convinced that anime objectifies and sexualizes women. Eg, see UN Women's regular attempts to crack down on anime and manga.

I don't see any conflict between the claims that anime objectifies women and that it's a major contributing factor to trans identification. I'm not aware of UN Women being a TERF/gender-critical organisation but I'm open to correction.

They are quite pro-trans and also quite anti-anime. Even if they acknowledge that anime is a major contributing factor to trans identification, they are still extremely hostile to it and regularly push governments to censor it.

How can you be pro-trans without also being pro-anime?

What exactly do you think is the connection? And what are your thoughts on the converse of this statement?

All I know is that my friend was doing a rotation in child psychology and whenever one of her patients was a teenage boy who was having gender issues, she would think "so he's autistic and spends all his time playing Minecraft and watching anime". And she was always right.

I don't know why watching anime seems to set so many people on the trans pipeline, I just know that it does. I know that being trans and watching anime both have very large overlaps with autism (in both boys and girls). I also know that there is an awful lot of hentai which depicts extremely feminine and sexualised women who also have very large penises, which perhaps instils in teenaged boys unrealistic expectations for how their own transition will go.

I don't know why watching anime seems to set so many people on the trans pipeline, I just know that it does. I know that being trans and watching anime both have very large overlaps with autism (in both boys and girls).

Autism causes watching anime because the sensory interpretive circuits in the brain don't work the same way.

I suspect it's being autistic, not the anime-watching, that causes the susceptibility to transsexualism; I saw anime as a kid, of course, but I hadn't gotten into hentai, or started downloading anime, when I went GID.

Surely the type of anime plays some effect? I don't think that standard shonen battle animes like Dragonball, Demon Slayer, Naruto, etc. are making people trans, or encouraging them at all. But there's a particular subset of anime that really plays up the "girls are so cute!" schtick. And another, smaller niche that really delves into genderbending stuff in a way that most western media avoids.

I don't think we even know there's a correlation between anime-watching and transsexualism after controlling for the obvious confounder of autism (if you have evidence there is, I'm all ears). No point reaching for hypotheses to explain something until you know whether there's something to explain - especially not when you're thinking of reaching for a notorious false friend like the Jack Thompson argument.

More comments

Who doesn't play Minecraft and watch anime? These were the default hobbies of the older zoomers.

Is anime that popular among older zoomers? I would've thought the default form of non-interactive entertainment among older zoomers would be American TV shows or streaming.

It isn't just futa hentai, there's also a disturbing trend with non-sexual yuri (lesbian) stuff.
It attracts boys and failsons who are struggling to be men, feeds them "cute girls doing cute things with other cute girls", barrages them with anti-male propaganda, and sorts them into toxic groomer communities.

Do you remember that famous Tumblr post that went "for all my lovely trans-girls who need to hear this: you do not have the Male Gaze, you cannot Sexually Objectify women, your love is Pure, you are not Gross for looking at women because you are not a man"? Millions of poor boys who fell into the manga/anime tumblr-sphere grew blasted by a firehose of that shit, usually backed up by groomer teachers.
Tumbler's long past its peak now, but the scene has mostly moved to discord, where kid-games-for-autist servers have softcore porn and roleplay channels, and being "queer" gives predators total immunity to rules.

Those communities were actually a lot worse than the porn ones, because A) they didn't exclude minors, B) they enabled predators who pulled the "heckin wholesome trans-girl egg-hatcher uwu" act, and C) got a ton of institutional support from e.g. school librarians trying to bait kids into reading "queer affirming comics' (you can see endless examples of this on librarian reddit)

Source: I knew people in Yuri manga translation, and saw the browser history of a few boys who were getting their first porn from /r/egg_irl reddit predators they met on minecraft discords.
And I know far less about it, but I'm confident there's an equivalent "boys love" pipeline for girls. They're all the same types of awkward weeb girls who read that stuff back when I was in school, but now with support from teachers who groom them into "oh you must be a boy if you like reading about boys so much. Let's get you a haircut and some jeans but don't tell your parents tee hee"

TL;DR if you have a kid who spends too much time on the PC and has started reading weird tranny-adjacent stuff, literally just check his discord account. It's an invasion of privacy, I know, but a potentially lifesaving one. And of course if you see anything furry, it's too late.

Do you remember that famous Tumblr post that went "don't listen to anything women-as-class say; you shouldn't assume they have any privileges over you, because you're not in the category they are designed to repress"?

Yeah, I have no idea why men would ever latch onto a movement that tells them that. Maybe I was wrong about the trans-feeders: you take any alt-right figure and make him incapable of directly saying women are at fault for this, and I think "just claim you're a woman, then you'll be allowed to act fucking normal" is what comes out.

Maybe the trans-feeders were directionally correct about men needing to be less accommodating. Shame they can't use any of it if they go all the way into eunuchry.

barrages them with anti-male propaganda

You'll get that if you interact with the fandom. But as for the works themselves, a lot of yuri anime/manga will strenuously avoid depicting or even mentioning men as much as possible. The recent Mahou Shoujo ni Akogarete for example appeared to take place in a world entirely without men. This was never an explicit plot point and no one in the show ever pointed it out. There were simply... no men, anywhere in the world, as though it were taking place in a parallel universe that had just always been that way. Is it anti-male propaganda if you simply ignore men entirely?

I didn't particularly like the show (made it 4eps before dropping), but the English "community" around it is the perfect example of everything in that post.

Just looked the series up on reddit, check out /r/yuri_memes and users like /u/CuteNervousLesbian for what I mean. Literally has the "umm yikes men have the gross male gaze, unlike wholesome me wanting to fuck them with my heckin girlcock" thing. Just impossibly creepy 30+ year old men grooming kids on reddit.

English "nerd" communities have poisoned a lot of media for me. Thank God most of my actual hobbies gatekeep creeps like that.

Is the show itself to blame? Not sure where I fall on that. Depends on the intent of the authors I suppose, which I don't have much insight into.

Is it anti-male propaganda if you simply ignore men entirely?

Is it racist if there are no people of race X in the work?

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Yeah, it's not the works themselves but the surrounding culture which the works are an escape from.

My sons used to play Minecraft (and Fortnite, and currently Mariocart or some soccer game) and also watch anime. They're like most boys their age in Japan. If there were something in these that were correlated to being trans, I'd have expected it to have manifested more clearly by now. Your friend doing child psychology rotations may have noticed a trend with "western" kids, but that, as has been said, is probably correlation rather than any kind of causal mechanism. Even within anime there are many, many styles and genre, and just as many in manga if not more. (Manga = print or otherwise cel-based drawn 2D comics, and Anime cartoons, in other words moving, as the term animation suggests.)

I don't think there are any good stats on this, but most estimates of trans people in the population put it at around 0.5% or less. If anime increased the likelihood of identifying as trans to just 0.75%, that would represent a gigantic increase in likelihood while still making it vanishingly unlikely that any given anime fan is trans or even seems trans.

I do buy into the theory that whatever correlation exists is due to them being both downstream of autism, though.

I'm assuming neither of your sons is autistic or on the spectrum?

Not that I've noticed.

I think it's correlation rather than causation. i.e. I think both are caused by some underlying independent cognitive/personality trait. I was having sexual fantasies about being a woman years before I started watching anime or interacting with the online anime community (and certainly long before I knew what futa was!).

I can certainly agree though that both autistic and trans people are overrepresented among anime fans and in other adjacent socially reclusive hobbies.

A futa for those not aware, is short for futanari referring to a character with male and female physical characteristics, usually female anatomy and male genitalia.

Futa is futatsu or two. Nari seems to be derived from naru or 成る "to become". Futanari is therefore "dual form" or similar. It is not the accepted term for "hermaphrodite" but has a similar meaning. It's mostly an anime term.

Like most Japanese terms futanari gets shortened by the Japanese. I guess those extra two mora are just too much.

is short for futanari referring to a character with male and female physical characteristics, usually female anatomy and male genitalia

And more specifically/notably, hyper-exaggerated female physical characteristics (and also hyper-exaggerated dicks). Futa without these things is rare (though more generally that is what traps are, and why "draw a girl call it a boy" is a standard criticism of that subject matter).

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Seeing a clarification like this in the comments feed makes me dread scrolling down to see the context of why it was necessary. Good job.

a reflection on the current publishing industry and the audience that still goes into book stores like that

In my neck of the woods, that's best described as "people who want overpriced coffee and will suffer being near books to get it".

I feel like I encounter it less since I got out of the dating game. I don't really meet many young women anymore, and they were the main source of astrologists in my life. The comedians I've heard joke about it also tend to be young and single guys.

Are you suddenly more exposed to young women for some reason?

I'm pretty sure it's a phenomenon for most women, not just young ones. Its just that the young ones haven't picked up on how men think it is silly. My mother was really into astrology stuff, but the level of eye roll my dad gave off when she brought it up meant she preferred to talk to her children about it. My mom is also religious, and a microbiologist PhD. I've asked her about conflicting internal beliefs before, they don't seem to bother her.

Not a god-shaped hole. There is a witch-shaped hole. Its filled with astrology, seance, ghosts, crystals, etc. Its a common quirk among women, if you are straight I'd suggest making your peace with it and trying to ignore it.

Not a god-shaped hole. There is a witch-shaped hole.

This. The common people are absolutely obsessed with superstitio and always have been, and it’s gendered a bit female. Essential oils woo moms are the same thing. But, uh, bodybuilder bro lore is also the same thing.

Essential oils woo moms are the same thing. But, uh, bodybuilder bro lore is also the same thing.

I've been waiting for the perfect prompt for my erotica-trained LLM. Thank you, sir.

Just to even the scales a little, there is a conservative female coded astrology stand in: Lord of The Rings.

I was never a fan of either the books or the movies, but it's comes up all over the place (there are now like 5 different VC backed companies named after minor elements / characters --- Anduril, Palantir, etc.) As I understand it, Tolkien did intend for it to be a Christian allegory, but didn't want to make it as thinly veiled as things like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.

That extent to which that is true or not doesn't matter. Conservative women get their fill of woo-woo, but in the context of being a princess / queen in a holy war against Satanic forces. They might join you in rolling their eyes at astrology, but will have strong thoughts about Galadriel.

Tolkien vehemently denied that he was writing any sort of allegory in the preface of LOTR, though I guess stating things plainly is the best way to be interpreted to have meant the opposite.

I offer no argument here. Like I said, I was never really a fan.

Let's say Tolkien didn't want to be an allegory. I surrender. My point was wrong. Please forgive my fundamental stupidity.

But people still treat it as a Christian Allegory. And some of those people woo it up.

I apologize if my counter came off as needlessly pedantic.I do enjoy both books and most of the films and feel a certain misplaced responsibility. Your wider point is of course evident.

I mean to what extent is being fans of a fictional world whose themes appeal to them comparable to astrology? LotR doesn't come with some woo-woo belief system attached.

The woo-woo belief system of astrology isn't a genuinely held belief system by 90% of astrology "practitioners." Elsewhere in the thread someone pointed out that the women who have astrology apps or know all of their moon signs don't truly believe that random musing on the constellations have causal validity. It's sort of a fun pastime paired with a "good vibes" aesthetic.

I'd say that's what LoTR is to many of its fans. It's not a cohesive belief system beyond being a re-telling of a Christian narrative. Nobody actually thinks they're fighting that bad guy spooky ghosts thingies (wraiths? Nazgul?). But it's fun to dig into the guts of the aesthetic.

Men tend to have a lot of superstition around gambling and sports teams. The cryptozoology and xenology "researchers" also tend to skew male.

I do wonder if there is a similar effect with women where enough social approbation will make people hide their magical beliefs. But people are much more ready and willing to make fun of men, so the magic beliefs get repressed harder.

I think it's tied in a bit with the neuroticism trait, which does skew more towards women.

My MIL and SIL honestly believe that a person could commit with their dogs on a spirit level. They sent a picture to the “dog psychic” who texted back basic cold reading techniques. My MIL and SIL feel for it hook, line, and sinker.

My MIL told my mother about it while at a family dinner. My mother became deeply concerned — she was concerned they were speaking with demons!

I was the only one who said it was an obvious fake!

Yeah I almost added "cats" to my list of witch shaped hole things, but I think the more accurate one would just be "familiars" aka deep spiritual connections to household pets.

aka deep spiritual connections to household pets.

This one seems to be a pretty common one, historically. I don't think of myself as very witchy, but I admit getting touched when I read ancient epitaphs for pets: "I am in tears, while carrying you to your last resting place as much as I rejoiced when bringing you home in my own hands fifteen years ago." Or reading about one of Muhammad's companions who was so devoted to his cats that he got nicknamed "father of kittens."

Are you suddenly more exposed to young women for some reason?

I recently changed jobs, but in my previous job most of the colleagues I was friendly with were women in their mid-twenties.

I can confirm both being asked by women (at work!) and being shocked because I thought it was low status.

My theory is that it’s not so much a “god-shaped hole” as an “identity-shaped hole.”

The other day, I forget where, I saw an ad to find out my “work personality type.” Astrology, Myers-Briggs, various personality quizzes do a couple things I think

  • they let you out yourself and others in a box
  • they seemingly outsource introspection—why “know thyself” when you can read it in a book?
  • they give you a narrative for yourself

It’s not completely unrelated to god I think, but more about missing meaning, purpose, and something to tell you who you are.

It's not really low status from my experience. Most of the young women I know that talk about it are liberals in the PMC.

Notably though most of them aren't really committed to it; I get the impression it's more of a fun topic and that if I said I don't believe that I wouldn't get much pushback on it.

Same group is definitely into all of the personality tests though, and they take those more seriously.

  1. It's definitely been increasing. I noticed the trend start somewhere during the COVID lockdowns, and it seems to have spread at an accelerated rate since then.
  2. I blame the Tik tok. It seems concentrated in younger women. These same women all got tattoos at the same time as each other, and started carrying metal cups at the same time as each other, started shoving bull rings up their noses at the same time as each other, and claiming they were neurodivergent at the same time as each other.
  3. In my experience women consume a lot more algorithmically driven short form video based social media than men.

neurodivergent

This one really, really bugs me, I see it as stolen valor. Also, they're still unforgiving of the neurodivergence of others.

"My neurodiversity makes me exciting, quirky and unable to be held accountable for any of my moral shortcomings; your neurodiversity makes you nerdy and lame; his neurodiversity makes him a creepy rapist."

Emotionally and descriptionally true from the female first person perspective.

The usual Women’s Wonderfulness and infantilization vs. the male burden of performance and accountability. The same behaviors that would get men mocked and ostracized can be forgiven, overlooked, neutral, or even moderately positive for women.

I recently had a pretty negative experience with a woman who genuinely WAS neurodivergent, moreso than my awkward ass. I found it incredibly disheartening to find out that she didn't have the same "resents normies but desperately wants to be accepted by them" complex as me, almost as if despite her awkwardness the world had still welcomed and cherished her.

Me and neurodivergent women:

"Oh, what I thought was eye-fucking this whole time was just you being slightly autistic."

I found it incredibly disheartening to find out that she didn't have the same "resents normies but desperately wants to be accepted by them" complex as me

Why?

This complex doesn't seem particularly helpful or conducive to positive outcomes, and I'd say that her lack of it seems more psychologically healthy. It seems like you're aware that this is a maladaptive pattern - is it something you're working on resolving?

Well, instead she just resents normies and lives in a leftist hugbox.

This is an adult woman who complains that straight men always assume she's not an aromantic demi-asexual, who hasn't yet learned that most straight men interpret her eye-fucking, sharing intimate details, and saying the other person is pretty as flirting.

Reminds me of that tweet like

Short women: Tee hee, I can't get things off the top shelf ha tee hee!

Short men: The streets will run red with their BLOOD for how they treated me.

False symmetry. Height is a masculine trait, and its absence is a feminine trait. The counterpart to short men isn't short women, it's tall women - short men and tall women are both wrongly-heighted. The counterpart to short women isn't short men, it's tall men - short women and tall men are both superbly-heighted.

The point I was making is that women can be afflicted with a particular trait which presents no obstacle to their socially flourishing (autism, being short) but the same trait can often be ruinous if a man is afflicted with it. Maybe tall women have a rough time of it, who knows - the parts of the internet I frequent seem to actively fetishise them in an only half-joking way, many unusually tall models and other female celebrities are widely considered sex symbols (e.g. Taylor Swift, Claudia Schiffer, Famke Janssen, Elle MacPherson, Brooke Shields, Sigourney Weaver, Uma Thurman, Nicole Kidman, Gisele Bündchen, Rebecca Romijn), and I'm not aware of any equivalent to complimentary adjectives like "Amazonian" or "statuesque" for short men.

Do women mock other women for being tall? That could be the source of any reported rough time.

I've heard tall women essentially complain that it narrows their dating options. It's a reasonable desire for her partner to be taller than her. Luckily, most men are taller than most women. Short men can date slightly short-er women.

A 5'2" woman expecting any partner she has to be 6'6" is an unreasonable desire. She's allowed to have that preference, but her having difficulty finding a partner isn't some grand injustice, it's self-inflicted.

I'm not aware of any equivalent to complimentary adjectives like "Amazonian" or "statuesque" for short men.

I believe they've started calling them "short kings," but I'm not convinced it's complimentary.

Oh, to be clear, I didn't mean to imply that tall women are precisely equivalent to short men, or that tall men are precisely equivalent to short women - different sexes are different. It's just closer than the other way around.

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