Fake Charity Nerd Girl

(Disclaimer: Most likely this is all deliberate and I’m just too dumb to understand Houellebecq.)

Houellebecq’s Submission reads like a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -style porn parody remix of a much better book. It’s full of really brilliant passages, and has a luminous core about the poverty of modern life and the transcendent power of spirituality; but then like 80% of the book is about the protagonist’s sexual conquests, and the positive power of spirituality and social order is heavily thematically linked to the idea of, like, “how cool would it be to live in a society where you can just force teenage girls to fuck you?”.

I guess you couldn’t get away with dodging the issue of patriarchal sexual control entirely; but the way Houellebecq presents it makes the whole concept of secular anomie and a return to traditionalism seem like a sex predator’s scam.

Which is a shame, because otherwise he had me pretty well convinced!

see I loved this because I felt like it was acknowledging that 90% of lofty arguments on social issues about the poverty of modern life or whatever are actually just elaborate rationalizations for fulfilling someone’s kinks

which doesn’t mean the arguments aren’t beautiful and convincing and they could even be right! but also, come on

I have no idea if this was intentional or not

apparently I wrote about this back when I read the book

(Disclaimer: Most likely this is all deliberate and I’m just too dumb to understand Houellebecq.)

Houellebecq’s Submission reads like a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -style porn parody remix of a much better book. It’s full of really brilliant passages, and has a luminous core about the poverty of modern life and the transcendent power of spirituality; but then like 80% of the book is about the protagonist’s sexual conquests, and the positive power of spirituality and social order is heavily thematically linked to the idea of, like, “how cool would it be to live in a society where you can just force teenage girls to fuck you?”.

I guess you couldn’t get away with dodging the issue of patriarchal sexual control entirely; but the way Houellebecq presents it makes the whole concept of secular anomie and a return to traditionalism seem like a sex predator’s scam.

Which is a shame, because otherwise he had me pretty well convinced!

see I loved this because I felt like it was acknowledging that 90% of lofty arguments on social issues about the poverty of modern life or whatever are actually just elaborate rationalizations for fulfilling someone’s kinks

which doesn’t mean the arguments aren’t beautiful and convincing and they could even be right! but also, come on

I have no idea if this was intentional or not

When applying to residencies, there’s a thing called the “couples match,” where you and your spouse/paramour/best buddy can set it up so as to guarantee that you’ll end up in the same city, at the risk of getting into a slightly less prestigious program in their chosen specialties. As it turned out, about half of the couples in my senior year of medical school broke up rather than enter into this match, an especially mind-boggling fact because the gain from breaking up was so small. After all, people graduating from a residency at no-name hospitals can get private practice jobs like anyone else. Going to a prestigious program only makes a difference to the small minority of people looking to practice in academic institutions.

Sidestepping the moral question on abortion for the moment, I think it’s a reasonable inference that the sexual marketplace among young professionals, too, would collapse without easy abortion available as a backstop. Careerism is too brittle and risk averse, and birth control in practice is too fallible, for the kind of risk aversion that young professionals maintain.  To embrace the risk of having a kid and getting your zero-slack professional life derailed is a radically countercultural move - as countercultural as eating vegan, observing the Sabbath, or, apparently, keeping your girlfriend when a slightly more prestigious residency is on the line.

If there was no recourse for accidentally “catching parenthood,” the white collar mating marketplace would be fundamentally upended.  In the best case, replaced by something else, in the worst case, replaced by nothing.  This is probably not irrelevant to the current stalemate on the Abortion Question.

1) I would generally interpret people breaking up in senior year of medical school not to mean that they value the small gain in career prestige over their relationship, but that “doing the match together” is a signal of commitment that one or both parties were not willing to make. Maybe I’m wrong.

2) If you have a contraceptive implant, your probability of pregnancy is 5 basis points per year. (According to the CDC, I haven’t dug into the literature or anything.) That’s like, pretty unlikely. (That makes an implant more effective than abstinence alone given that rape is a thing, according to the extremely back-of-the-envelope calculation I just did.)  If I were listing the top 100 most likely things that might derail my career, I doubt that would make the list. I literally had a discussion with my coworkers about the probability of an earthquake destroying our office two days ago–I spend a lot of time thinking about tail risks–and even I don’t think that’s worth worrying about. (And not to get into sex ed, but if 5 bps does worry you there are lots of great methods you can combine with hormonal birth control.)

Obviously, most women don’t use the maximally effective contraception. But if we’re positing that these ambitious professional women are low-time-preference enough to be driven to celibacy for the sake of their careers, you’d think they’d at least consider some other options first.