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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:
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?
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?
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.
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 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?
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