self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3hr ago
Being barred out can be obvious, but only when someone is fucked. Otherwise it's similar in presentation to someone being drunk: slurring, swaying, staring at you blankly, taking ages to respond. But less agitated (usually), not flushed. If you can't smell alcohol coming off someone like that, benzos are the safe bet.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
4hr ago
@atelier I can't find a detailed review either, so it's up in the air if I've written one.
The TLDR is that Phoenix Point is incredibly mid. It's just teetering on the edge of worth playing.
The main issue is wasted potential. The ideas behind the mechanics are excellent, it's a simulationist approach, closer to the original XCOM than the new crop, but in 3D.
I particularly enjoy the ballistic simulation, since the RNG simplification of XCOM always slightly annoyed me.
But that's really all it has going for it. The gameplay was grindy, often unfun. The content didn't feel as diverse or interesting as XCOM. The story was so-so.
The balancing wasn't great, but don't listen to me on that now, because the devs implemented a community patch by a group of popular modders that redid the progression. I've seen people claim it's much better.
I'd say I like idea of Phoenix Point much more than actually playing it. I was an obsessive before release, but Julian over-promised and under delivered.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
23hr ago
I am pleased that I have achieved a level of fame/notoriety where I don't even have to do the hard work myself.
@100ProofTollBooth I'm afraid I don't think I've added anything to the discussion on Mrs. Good. It was probably someone else.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
It struck me later, but it's worth noting that A is consistently referred to as Mr. A throughout the report.
In the context of a British hospital, that means:
- A senior surgeon, since they shirk the doctor title for ~traditional reasons
- A med student, since interns are called doctors
- Someone who isn't a doctor at all: nurses, ward staff, admin etc
It is very unlikely that he's a senior surgeon. He could be a med student. He might be a particularly dimwitted porter.
Does this make things better or worse? Idk. I would only hope a medical "colleague" would have the common sense not to come up with such farcical excuses, but I've met idiots in the profession. They are overrepresented in both those making and receiving GMC complaints.
That being said, it is still idiotic, regardless of career choice.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I can't really say I have? I know I am comfortable at temperatures where many Scottish women (natives) are freezing, but women feel colder more easily. With the dudes, I don't recall touching tips to see if I'm cold and they're not.
That being said, they probably are better able to tolerate it than I am, it's just rare for it to get cold enough for that to be obvious. Nobody there really wants to hang out outside on the rare occasions it dips below -5° C. Yet I know a dude who did a charity swimming thing when the North Sea was about 2°, which you can't really pay me to even contemplate.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
There's a significant addendum that I discovered on a second trawl through the tribunal records. It's in the Substack version, I didn't bring it over here because I'd have to juggle markdown and HTML.
The gist of it is that there are significant discrepancies in A's accounting of events. Just after the incident happened, he claimed he was physically dragged in and assaulted. This was later watered down to being flashed and inappropriately beckoned.
Call me cynical, but I don't see how even the immediate shock of seeing a dude horny and nude would cause someone to jump to accusing them of physical assault.
I'm not sure what A is getting out of this. Perhaps he just was that genuinely spooked, and decided to escalate pre-emptively. He might have thought that rejecting a senior would come to bite him in the ass (metaphorically), or he might not have been thinking straight (pun not intended).
A hospital toilet... Well, it's a bit of a liminal space. Not quite private, not quite public. This one seemed very low traffic, it seemed to be specific to a floor and surgical theater, so probably closer to private for the purposes of a quick fuck.
While I was willing to give A the benefit of the doubt, his rationale for even being there is ludicrous. Does he expect us to believe that handwashing was all that was on his mind?
The least unlikely explanation, to me, seems to be that A felt genuinely aggravated by the catfishing, lost their cool, and disclosed too much before they were able to calm down and collect their thoughts. Or perhaps they didn't like the surgeon in the first place, he seems like a rather unpleasant chap. But it's all speculation, and I haven't heard anything on the grapevine.
Your moderation log is a mess, and you received a temp ban last time since you won't knock off the low-effort sneering and antagonism. Normally, from a more respectable user, I'd probably let this slide, but I suppose another temp ban has to do.
Please stop.
Edit: Amadan responded at the same time, so we're hashing this out. But in general, if two mods see your post at the same time and feel compelled to act on it, you dun goofed.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
They might be bisexual. They might want kids. They might be severely repressed and in partial denial, or caved to societal or familial pressure. Or all of the above.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
And sometimes, you're bored and slightly drunk in a gay bar, and you whip out a clipboard for an interview. Pure hypothetical, that, couldn't be me.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I think you're describing bisexual men. If someone is equally attracted to both genders, but one of them is much easier to grab a hold of than the other, it makes sense to go for them first and then settle for women when you want to get married or go for the more socially acceptable option.
I know the difference between Romanians and Romani. I do not particularly care to litigate whiteness, by "debatably" I only point to the fact that some people do. Besides, the "victim" of this farce specifically claimed that he was catfished with images of a different race, and I doubt he would have said that if he'd expected a Frenchman holding a baguette and got a Pole wielding a... pole.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I learned that night that I was absolutely not gay.
I can only encourage self-discovery.
Now, you have to remember that gay men are satiated! The regularity with which Genghis Khan fucks his bountiful and bodacious harem might start off strong, but will inevitably taper due to boredom. On the other hand, if you suddenly gained access to the lady's quarters, you'd spray seed while the sun shines, or some other incredibly mixed metaphor.
I'm very sure if it was a room of half men and half women, every woman wearing a skimpy towel that was at least as fit and put together as the gay men in my bath house were, would be propositioned 5x a minute.
This is a rare occurrence. Fit gay men can go to a bathhouse whenever they feel like it. Hetero men in the former scenario would make the most of it with a scarcity mindset, gay men might well be bored and there just to do something more interesting than rubbing one out.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I can only hope your buddy left a nice tip. That kind of thoughtful approach to hospitality is on the outs.
Now, personally, I'm not "disgusted" by gay male sexuality, at least not in the usual sense. It's more confusing to me, I can no more relate to the desire to have my back blown out by a hairy Greek bull than I can to the idea of getting off to a woman's armpits. I am also deeply jealous, buggers live the straight-man dream, as much sex as they can stomach with an unending cock carousel a single swipe away. A mid gay man gets ten times the action of a top 5% straight dude, with 10% the hassle.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Now, I'll have to ask my (far too many) gay buddies about the finer etiquette of illicit gay romance once I'm back in Scotland, but at the moment, I'm imagining just how I'd die if I tried to convince the average woman on a dating app to meet me in the loo.
On a more serious note, there are tons of places that aren't the woods (the first choice, sadly shot down, read the tribunal minutes) or a hospital toilet. Doctors are allowed to step out of the hospital, mostly. How hard is it to grab a coffee at Costa's after work??? There really are so many better candidates that it just doesn't add up.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I can't find any pictures of him online, so your guess is as good as mine. While Romanians (non-gypsy) are debatably white, I would still assume it's a shock to have be mislead by a photo of some young white dude and then run into a swarthy middle-aged bloke. One flashing you to boot. Probably doesn't trim either, he doesn't sound like the type to bother.
I've never heard of a Gypsy with an M.D.
It could well have fallen off the back of a truck.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Prolonged exposure to cold produces brown fat, which makes you more resistant to cold. I'm much more resilient in that regard after my stint in Scotland.
Still, that only goes so far. Even Eskimo children bundle up, they don't play nude in the snow for prolonged periods.
In my experience, German Shepherds hold up surprisingly well to the local heat. Sure, they won't enjoy the odd day when it reaches 40°, but at that point they're finding refuge in the same place the humans are: in an air conditioned room.
There's a specific type of news story that works like a Rorschach test for whether you believe in the official version of reality that institutions present, or the messy, underground reality of actual human beings. The recent case of Dr. Samuel Stefan, a colorectal surgeon at Queen Alexandra Hospital in Cosham, is a perfect example. The headlines are all about a "doctor struck off after stripping naked in a toilet and propositioning a colleague." It's framed as a story about a predatory surgeon and a bunch of shocked, innocent victims.
But if you actually read the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) report with any kind of awareness of how the modern world works, you'll spot a massive hole in the story where a very popular yellow-and-orange smartphone app should be.
The tribunal tells us that Dr. Stefan had been "chatting to a colleague online" even though they were "unknown to each other." They arranged to meet in a toilet. The colleague, we're told, thought this was a "mutually convenient place" and "did not plan to have sex" with Dr. Stefan. When the cubicle door opened to reveal a naked surgeon beckoning him over, the colleague was "shocked, numb, and scared."
Let me just pause here to appreciate the absolutely wild level of benefit-of-the-doubt the MPTS is giving this situation. We're apparently living in a world where the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service believes that two men who've never met, after chatting on some unnamed internet platform, regularly arrange to meet in a hospital toilet cubicle to do... what, exactly? Exchange sourdough starters? Talk about the finer points of laparoscopic mesenteric excision? Compare notes on the hospital's pension scheme?
If you follow the link to the actual MPTS ruling, you'll come across gems such as:
Mr A said that he had met Dr Stefan the day before on XXX and they had chatted by message and had arranged to meet in the Hospital toilets on B level once it had become apparent that they both worked for the same hospital. Mr A said that Dr Stefan had first suggested meeting at night in a woodland area for ‘sexual actions’ but that he had declined this and said he wanted to see Dr Stefan’s face first and did not do sex in public.
Mr A said that he thought they were simply meeting in the toilets to get to know each other and that they would go for coffee afterwards. Mr A stated that it now sounds silly, but he had thought that perhaps in wanting to meet at the toilets, Dr Stefan had wanted to stay hygienic and maybe wanted to wash his hands or for Mr A to wash his hands. Mr A denied that he had any intention of sexual acts whilst at work.
Sounds silly?
Sorry, Mr. A, it sounds retarded. But I'm impressed at the chutzpah. Maybe he wanted to apply mouthwash to your cock too, to be extra safe. You "get to know each other" in public toilets in much the same way that "Netflix and chill" involves ardent attention to the best of the Silver Age of television.
Of course, there was catfishing involved:
Ms G said that Mr A continued to explain to her that, as he started work on that day at 1:30pm, he arranged to meet with the person prior to his shift starting, at the B-Level toilets. However, Mr A then received a text to meet at the C-Level toilets on the third floor of the Hospital from the Main Entrance on A-Level. Mr A told her that he then sent a message to the person to say that he was at the toilets, and one of the cubicle doors inside the toilets then proceeded to open. He then saw a man naked, with scrubs hung up, and playing with himself. The man gestured down with his head, nodding towards his own penis and Mr A understood that this meant for him to do something to the person or watch what he was doing.
Mr A told her that the man looked nothing like the XXX profile, in looks or age. The profile had stated that he was a 28-year-old white male, but that the person in the toilet was at least 10 years older than that and not white. Mr A said that he had seen XXX, panicked, and left the toilets.
Unless the "online platform" was LinkedIn and the "chat" was about a job opening in the proctology department, there's exactly one reason why two men who don't know each other arrange a meeting in a toilet stall. That reason is Grindr. And the main purpose of a Grindr meeting in a toilet stall is definitely not a "mutually convenient" chat.
The tribunal's choice to just accept the colleague's claim of shock at face value suggests one of two things. Either the MPTS members are literally the last three people in the UK who don't know what a hookup app is, or they're putting on some kind of elaborate legal performance where everyone pretends the "victim" was just an innocent bystander who stumbled into the world of public sex by accident.
If you're a man and you arrange to meet another man in a toilet stall after an anonymous internet chat, the "naked" part of the reveal is usually what "meeting" means. The idea that this was some kind of ambush on an unsuspecting guy requires us to believe in a level of innocence that would make a Victorian governess look like a hardened cynic.
And yet, this is the story the tribunal went with. Why?
Maybe it's because the legal system just doesn't have the right words for "misunderstood sexual subcultures." In the official world of the General Medical Council, there are only Doctors and Patients, or Harassers and Victims. There's no category for "Two guys who tried to have a quick hookup during a shift, but one of them got cold feet or thought the other was being way too weird and decided to blow the whistle to save his own ass."
To be totally clear, Dr. Stefan sounds like a nightmare. The report lists other incidents where he tried to kiss colleagues or repeatedly touched the genitals of junior doctors on the wards. Groping people while they're trying to do their rounds isn't a "misunderstanding of subculture." That's just being a sexual harasser. If the tribunal wanted to strike him off for the ward-groping alone, they would've had an open and shut case that didn't require them to pretend a toilet meeting was some kind of platonic coincidence.
But the toilet incident is the one in all the headlines. It's the "deplorable behavior" that the public finds most shocking. And because it's the main charge, the tribunal has to treat the colleague's story as the gospel truth. They have to believe that a grown man walked into a toilet to meet an internet stranger expecting a perfectly normal, non-sexual encounter.
This creates a really weird set of incentives. If you're a junior doctor and you get involved in some risky, slightly unprofessional behavior (like meeting a senior colleague for a hookup in the hospital)*, and it goes badly, your best move is to claim you had no idea what was happening. You have to play the "shocked and numb" innocent to avoid getting caught in the fallout from the other person's misconduct. The tribunal, meanwhile, has to go along with this performance because admitting otherwise would mean acknowledging that NHS hospitals are places where people have complicated, messy, and sometimes illicit sex lives.
The MPTS is obsessed with "public confidence." They mention it specifically: "The Tribunal was of the view that public confidence would be undermined if Dr. Stefan was permitted to practise."
Public confidence is a weird thing. It's rarely based on actual truth, it's based on keeping up a certain appearance. The appearance here is "The Medical Register is a Sacred List of Saints." If the tribunal admitted that Dr. Stefan and his colleague were probably engaging in a common, if risky, gay subcultural practice, it would mess up the appearance. It's way better for "public confidence" to pretend that Dr. Stefan is a lone predator lurking in toilets, jumping out at innocent men who were just looking for a "mutually convenient" place to stand around.
Why did such a murky outcome where neither the primary accuser or the defendant come out smelling of roses collapse into such a binary outcome? We might prefer thinking about it as legibility, in the same sense as Seeing Like A State. The state and its institutions (like the GMC) need the world to make sense in a certain way. A "predatory doctor" makes sense. A "messy situation involving two men, a hookup app, and a complete disaster of professional boundaries on both sides" doesn't make sense. It's too complicated. It raises too many questions about what else is going on in those toilets. It suggests that the hospital isn't just some sterile place of healing, but somewhere humans with hormones and smartphones actually exist.
(And absolutely don't ask about what happens on the beanbags, the ones in the mess)
Watch what happens when you try to tell the truth:
"Dr. Stefan and Mr. A met on Grindr for a bathroom hookup. When Dr. Stefan turned out to be older and a different race than his profile pictures, Mr. A got uncomfortable and left. Later, when Dr. Stefan was under investigation, Mr. A decided to protect himself by claiming he never intended a sexual encounter."
Now what? Now you have to ask: Is catfishing someone on Grindr professional misconduct? Is meeting a colleague for bathroom sex professional misconduct, or only if one person changes their mind? If Mr. A was also planning to have sex at work, does he also get sanctioned? What's the standard? How do we enforce it?
This is all rather inconvenient. Messy.
So the tribunal goes with the version of reality that makes the most sense in their framework, even if it's the version that makes the least sense to anyone who's lived in a city in the last twenty years. They treat the colleague's "shock" as a medical fact rather than a legal move.
We should also think about the "timeline concern" the panel mentioned. Dr. Stefan was already under investigation for the toilet incident when he allegedly went on to grope people on the wards. This is where my sympathy for the "he was just a guy on Grindr" defense completely disappears.
If you're a surgeon and you've just been caught in a toilet cubicle with your pants down, and the GMC is breathing down your neck, the rational response is to become the most celibate, professional, and invisible person in the history of medicine. You should be the guy who won't even look at a colleague's thigh, much less touch it.
The fact that Dr. Stefan apparently kept making unwanted advances while actively under investigation suggests a level of impulsiveness or lack of reality-testing that's genuinely incompatible with being a surgeon. Surgery is all about extreme impulse control. It's the ability to stand still for six hours and make movements measured in millimeters. If you can't stop yourself from grabbing a junior doctor's genitals while the medical board is literally in the middle of deciding whether to end your career, you probably shouldn't be holding a scalpel inside someone's abdomen.
So yeah, the guy had to go. Getting erased from the register was the only possible outcome. Even if there's no evidence that he was a threat to the general public (or an incompetent surgeon), he certainly was a menace to any nearby twinks, and not a great colleague.
(This is dry British understatement, before someone gets their knickers in a twist)
But I still can't get over the toilet thing.
I keep imagining the tribunal members sitting around a mahogany table, reading the transcript. One of them says, "So, he met a man he didn't know in a toilet stall. Why would he do that?" And another one says, "The witness says it was a mutually convenient place. Maybe the library was full?" And they all nod seriously, recording in the official judgment that this was a believable and logical chain of events.
There's a real cost to this kind of institutional blindness. When we force people to lie about the context of their lives to fit into the "victim/predator" binary, we lose the ability to actually regulate professional behavior effectively. If the NHS wants to stop people from having sex in the toilets, they have to admit that people want to have sex in the toilets. They have to deal with the reality of workplace culture, the stress of the job, and the way technology has changed how colleagues interact.
Instead, we get this whole show. We get a "Digital Reporter" (are there any analog ones left?) writing about "deplorable behavior" like we're still living in 1955. We get a tribunal that pretends Grindr doesn't exist. And we get a medical register that's "protected" from a man who was clearly falling apart, but for reasons the tribunal is too "proper" to actually spell out.
Dr. Stefan didn't show up to the hearing. He offered no remorse and no attempt to fix things. He's basically vanished from the profession, likely on a one way flight to Romania. Maybe he figured there was no point in showing up to a trial where the fundamental premise of the "crime", the toilet meeting, was being discussed in language that had nothing to do with the reality of what actually happened.
In the end, the system worked. A surgeon who didn't have the basic judgment to function in a professional environment was removed. The "public confidence" has been "maintained." But as I read the article, I can't shake the feeling that the only person who's truly "shocked, numb, and scared" is anyone who expects our public institutions to have even a basic understanding of how modern humans actually live.
Queen Alexandra Hospital will keep on functioning. The toilets will stay "mutually convenient" for all sorts of activities. The GMC will keep striking people off using the moral language of the mid-20th century. And the rest of us will keep reading these articles, squinting at the space between the lines where the real world, messy, sexual, and mediated by technology, is hiding in plain sight.
It's a comfortable fiction. It's a world where doctors are either saints or monsters, where toilets are just places for quiet reflection, and where online chatting between strangers is always leading up to a polite conversation about the weather. It's a world that doesn't exist, likely never has, but it's the only one the MPTS knows how to deal with.
*It's worth noting that Stefan was a SHO/Senior House Officer. That's an antiquated but commonly used term, and it absolutely doesn't mean a doctor very high up the totem pole. That doesn't necessarily mean that he wasn't senior to many people, but they'd have to be interns of one flavor or another.
Updated version on Substack, with a few juicy extras.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
I'm not one for New Year's resolutions, though I think they probably serve a useful function in terms of signaling (but not costly enough) and as a form of pre-commitment.
The important things I have to do? Those are already on a schedule. Can't afford to fuck those up. Everything else? Buddy, I'm drowning, the last thing I need is a regimented swimming lesson plan.
There's something about people from warm climates and their relationship with cold weather. My dad lives somewhere where winter means 25°C. I live somewhere where 14°C counts as reasonable t-shirt weather. On our October video calls, he'd be bundled up in a wooly hat and scarf, looking at me like I was insane for wearing shorts.
This extends to dogs, apparently.
When my German Shepherd was born in the middle of winter, my parents insisted he needed a coat. He was maybe two weeks old and had barely figured out walking. With the coat on, he could manage about two steps before toppling over. It was devastatingly cute and completely unnecessary.
I showed them pictures of other German Shepherds the same age playing in actual snow. They had a theory ready: "He was born in India, he isn't built for this climate."
-_-
I want to emphasize that we are talking about a German Shepherd here. Germany, famously, gets cold. The breed standard does not include a clause about thermal sensitivity based on birthplace. And yet.
One of our current dogs is a Golden Retriever who's undersized for his breed, over a year old but unlikely to get bigger. He was born without testicles, which might be related. In winter, at 14°C, he shivers. So he wears a coat now.
The coat used to belong to our first dog, a rescue who was the mother of that German Shepherd puppy. She's been gone for over a decade. The coat is still here, still doing its job, just on a different dog with different-colored fur that it happens to complement nicely.
I started writing this as a joke about my parents' temperature anxiety, but I'm not sure where I ended up. Maybe something about how we take care of things we love even when it's slightly ridiculous, or how objects persist and find new purposes, or just that dogs are great even when they eat your shoes.
The German Shepherd did eventually learn to walk in the coat. We never threw it out. I guess that says something.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3d ago
Partnered relationships with expectations of sexual exclusivity? What, I can't use my right hand by myself in a relationship?
It is hypocrisy, or at least gross overreach. Most of the women I've known IRL have been neutral to positive towards porn, but the ones who found it objectionable would find it even more objectionable if their boyfriends demanded they stop using their vibrators and reading smut in their spare time. Often they go as far as to claim that smut isn't the same as a porno, since one is coarse and visual, and the other is in the rarefied realms of imagination.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3d ago
That's just true of any kind of showbiz?
How many musicians make real money? How many starlets make it big in Hollywood? Are you going to bite the bullet and call those industries exploitative too? So exploitative that they deserve to be shut down? What is the competition ratio and Gini-coefficient worthy of concern?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3d ago
Availability bias is a hell of a drug. When we say all child stars go crazy, we are ignoring the vast majority who did not. Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan come to mind because their wreckage was photogenic ("leave Britney alone!!"). We tend to ignore the thousands of former child actors who are now working as unremarkable real estate agents or middle-managers in the suburbs. If we look at the high-tier cohort from that era, we find people like Natalie Portman, Kenan Thompson, or Joseph Gordon-Levitt. They seem, by most accounts, to be functioning adults. They didn't have public meltdowns, and they didn't undergo a sudden, jarring pivot into hyper-sexualized branding.
This suggests that the "going crazy" outcome is not a universal law of child stardom, but rather a specific subset of outcomes driven by two things: the personality traits of the children (and parents) who seek high-level fame, and the specific economic demands of the transition from "adorable child" to "adult artist."
Consider the Miley Cyrus or Selena Gomez examples. It might be very tempting to view their transition into hyper-sexualized imagery as a psychological rebellion against a father figure or a Disney-enforced childhood. But looking at this through a lens of market signaling, a different picture emerges.
If you are a child star, your brand is built on a specific type of innocence. This brand has a hard expiration date. By the time you are twenty, the Disney Girl persona is a depreciating asset. To survive in the industry, you have to execute a rebranding that is loud enough to signal to the market that you are no longer a child. If you do this subtly, nobody notices, and you simply fade away. If you do it loudly, you successfully kill the old brand and create space for a new one.
The majority of Miley Cyrus's fans today barely remember her cutesy Hannah Montana shtick. She quite successful pivoted, and has done pretty well for herself after the transition. Either way, she couldn't continue as HM indefinitely.
This is not necessarily a sign of "daddy issues" or clinical mental illness. It's a pretty rational response to a career-threatening bottleneck. It is the "I am an adult now" signal amplified to a level where the signal-to-noise ratio overcomes the public's lingering memory of you as a twelve-year-old. The fact that this rebranding often takes the form of hyper-sexuality is less about individual pathology and more about the fact that sexual maturity is the most legible, universal signal of adulthood available in our culture.
There is also a selection effect at play regarding who becomes a top-tier child star in the first place. High-level fame requires a specific type of drive (or perhaps a specific type of parental obsession, itself probably heritable) that may be correlated with higher-than-average rates of neuroticism or cluster B traits. We might be looking at a population that was already at higher risk for mental health struggles, which the industry then amplifies. This is different from saying fame causes the illness. It might just be that the people most likely to seek the spotlight are also the people most likely to struggle when the spotlight gets too hot.
I would also push back on the idea that these performers are just "doing what they’re told" by sleazy managers. While that certainly happens, it ignores the agency of the performers themselves. Many of these women are highly intelligent businesspeople who understand exactly what sells. They are navigating a landscape where the "male gaze" is both a source of revenue and a target for performative feminist critique. They are playing a complex game of triangulation. They provide the sexual imagery that the market demands, but they frame it as "empowerment" to satisfy the cultural gatekeepers of the prestige media.
(Case in point, Taylor Swift)
This isn't necessarily madness on the part of the performer. It is a highly sophisticated, if somewhat cynical, way of maximizing market share across two demographics: the "dudebros" who want the fanservice and the "woke" commentators who want the girlboss narrative. In other words, you get the horny gents, and you let their girlfriends convince themselves that this is somehow empowering.
Looking at this broadly, we've created a world where the most valuable currency is attention, and the most efficient way to get attention is to play in the space of sexual signaling while simultaneously denouncing the very people who are paying attention. It is a system that optimizes for friction. (Though I suppose if I were making their kind of money, I might be willing to trade a little bit of my own sanity for the privilege).
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
Someone had "fun" too close to the sun.
That being said, it would be nice if the NSFW tag worked properly, as an alternative.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
I think he's imagining white people cooking like prawns south of the tropics. Or simply dying of melanoma of the melanoma.
Needless to say, it's not that bad. Sure, it's remarkably unpleasant, but covering up and staying indoors during the worst of the glare goes a long way. Melanin or modern sunscreen goes even further. It was malaria that was the real bottleneck in a lot of places.
Watchmen.
It kicked off a copycat trend of deconstructions of the genre, but unlike most of them, it was an actually good movie. Just don't watch the Director's Cut, the comic-book scenes add little or nothing to the story.
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