You gotta love it...

"Caitlin Clark couldn't play for a Division One NCAA men's team!" -Joel in IT, 5'8" 240lbs

Phyllis Schlafly 2.0

On "Tradwife" social media influencers:

"It was only recently that I recognized the blatant hypocrisy hiding in plain sight: I tapped the profile link of a popular Aussie tradwife and was met with a barrage of links urging me to transact: an Amazon storefront, affiliate codes, a mailing list…even an e-book. I tapped through her website and discovered MLM-coded language: “Are you a stay-at-home mom looking to grow your Instagram and earn extra income while juggling the joys and challenges of motherhood?” Oh, no. The “anti-hustle” lifestyle is, in fact, a thinly veiled mega-hustle—one much more convoluted than the Tupperware parties that came before it.

I perused her site. Oh, look, I thought, a lead magnet! (In digital content marketing, a “lead magnet” is a free downloadable item you give away in exchange for an email address.) Hers just so happened to be iPhone backgrounds featuring affirmations like, “With humility, I embrace my role, upholding traditions as the keeper of our cherished home.” What struck me about her website was how familiar it felt: This was pretty transparently a content creator’s monetized hub, no different from the courses, e-books, and affiliate codes distributed by the boss-babe influencers the tradwives claim to disavow. Oh my gosh, I whispered to no one, She’s girlbossing all over us! The call is coming from inside the housewife!

I have to hand it to them: what a diabolical brand strategy! Build a career teaching other women how not to have a career."

Mash that like button and subscribe! This uplifting of tradional roles is sponsored by Betty Crocker!

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Historic Illiteracy...

You know, the very first Terry Pratchett Discworld novel I read, way back in 2007, was Monstrous Regiment. Kind of an unconventional entry point for the series, but I'd picked up a hardcover at Books-A-Million* on a whim.

At the time, I was unaware of the existence of John Knox's The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women, written back in that fun period of the Reformation when Protestant churches ran more towards witch hunts and heretic burnings than praise bands and Wednesday night suppers. 

The title translates to modern English as something like "The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Unnatural Rule of Women", and was basically a big gripe-fest against the existence of Catholic queens (at the time there were Marys in both England and Scotland, at whom Knox was Big Mad, and they weren't exactly fans of his, either.)

Having read a lot more on the Reformation, the excesses of various early Protestant sects, and the Thirty Years' War since then, it only made my recent re-read of Monstrous Regiment that much better. Pratchett was so adept at weaving multiple layers of commentary into a book.

*That hardback turned out to be autographed. A treasure.

A Jog Around the Blogs...

• The Work-Life Diet. That reminds me of how I lost a ton of weight while working at CCA, between being on my feet all day and only eating anything like supper a couple nights a week.


• Prof. Yamane's book is finished and in the hands of his publisher. Hooray!


• Setting boundaries, big and small. (And enforcing them.)

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"What is your major malfunction, numbnuts?"

The title of this post, delivered by R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket, is the sort of thing some people are afraid of encountering in formal firearms training classes. 

You can't exactly whisper on a range.

While I've no doubt that there's the occasional instructor living out their "I coulda joined, but..." fantasies via their part time gun school side gig, the vast majority of trainers of my acquaintance know that's a way to lose customers. You have to talk loudly to be heard on a range, but you can do that and still treat clients with respect.

This doesn't mean that safety reminders might not be delivered abruptly, as Jo Deering relates in this column for NRA Women:

"So, if you experience a criticism during a shooting lesson, ask yourself a couple of things. One, is whatever you’re doing creating a safety concern? Shooting sports are incredibly safe because we work very hard to keep them that way, and there’s no time for mincing words when someone is being unsafe at the range. If you’re doing something unsafe, you should expect to be corrected, and you can even expect that the correction will be swift and maybe not super nice.

Two, is the criticism or correction based on something you are capable of doing correctly but for whatever reason, you just aren’t? If so, you’re probably not being picked on but are being pushed to help you move to the next level. If you’re getting criticized for something out of your control, that’s another story."

This is not to say that there aren't instructors out there who do pick on students, and Ms. Deering discusses how to handle those problems in her column as well. You should go read the whole thing.

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QotD: The Upside Of Dunning-Kruger Edition...

Greg has a good piece up on the gendered differences in self-confidence and their effects on training.

"In essence, the article suggests an attitude of “just do it.” I think that’s great advice. In the context of firearms or self-defense training, women need to recognize that their fellow students aren’t likely paying much attention to them. They are too busy doing their own things. Go to class. Just do it."

She's a Lady (Smith)

It was taken as gospel that the triggers in the 3913LS were somehow improved over those in the regular 3913. The gun magazines told us so!

Back in 1993, Dean Speir (writing as "Waldo Lydecker") wrote "The LadySmith pistol, like the LadySmith revolvers, boasts a smoother, lighter trigger pull for what is presumably those dainty little hands which S&W thought would be the primary market for the firearms." I seem to recall Smith marketing hinting at that, too, so I'm sure the writers were just passing on what they'd been told.

Imagine my chagrin years down the road to find that there doesn't appear to be any separate SKU for LadySmith mainsprings...or any other spring or action part, actually...vice the ordinary Model 3913. Indeed, there's no difference in the weight of the DA pull on the two pictured autos and, while the LS does have a slightly subjectively smoother DA pull, it's hard to say how much of that difference came from the factory since both pistols were acquired used. They certainly have identical six pound single action pulls according to my trigger pull gauge.

The differences are indeed cosmetic, being differences in the shape of the dust cover and the color of the xenoy wraparound grips. Oh, and the LS was thinner due to having the offside decocker/safety lever deleted.

But oh what a difference those cosmetic changes make. The 3913 is a functional little single-stack auto, perhaps my favorite of its genre, but the 3913LS is downright hawt-looking.

In retrospect, I should have been a bit more dubious that the LadySmith received any additional trigger polishing and massaging at the factory when the MSRP was the same as the regular model.

We live and we learn.

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This is relevant to my interests.

Safariland is releasing non-boob-squishing rifle plates...

(I mean, it looks like they're technically "less-boob-squishing", but still...)

Tab Clearing...

• 95-square-foot Tokyo microapartments, in case the 82-square-foot one yesterday was too claustrophobic.


• You may have heard that a NASA photographer got a camera melted because he "got it too close to the rocket". That's not what happened; dude's been doing this for decades and knows what he's doing. His Instagram feed has some absolutely jaw-dropping photos. I felt a pang of sympathy because the melted camera was a Canon 5DS, the same model I use for work.


• Why elite athletics are segregated by sex.

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Retconned...

If you're a Tolkien nerd like me, you've watched Galadriel get retconned a bunch. The character Galadriel who was introduced The Lord of the Rings was expanded some and had background material added in The Silmarillion. Then there was a whole chapter centered around Galadriel and Celeborn in Unfinished Tales that rewrote a bunch of her past (and this is where she got retconned as the prime mover of the anti-Sauron alliance of the Second Age).

Heck, the Galadriel in the footnotes at the end of Return of the King doesn't entirely jibe with the character we met in the text.

If you want a good thumbnail of how her character evolved over time, this essay is a good encapsulation.

Seen in this light, some of the sperging around the Amazon Prime series has been pretty droll.

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QotD: Ms.-Anthropy Edition...

Ms. Ecks made me express mirth audibly with this one:

"Even at that, using "Ms." carried a faint whiff of brassiere smoke well into the 1980s or even 90s..."

Well, I guess it's time...

It's that quadrennial hint to get off my ass and start working out.

Bad Numbers

Like I've said, statistically speaking, you already know the person you're most likely to have to pepper spray.

There's a darker side to that statistic, and Kathy Jackson takes a closer look at it, and what it implies for some of the statistics often tossed around by anti-self-defense types in gun control discussions.

"At the Rangemaster Tactical Conference several years ago, Massad Ayoob gave a presentation titled, “Lessons from Recent Cases.” It was an eye-opening look at three self-defense cases that went to court, and the legal issues that came into play during each one. One of the cases involved a woman who defended herself against her estranged husband. Based on the information Mas gave, it was a good shoot. But I found myself mourning for a woman who ended up having to shoot (and kill) her children’s father, just to survive the immediate threat to her life."

You should go and read what she wrote.

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Slender Man for Suburban Housewives

I've had a few tabs open for a while now, waiting for the Muse to strike about this "sex trafficking panic" that has eaten social media whole. The Muse never did strike, so I'm going to strike her so I can close these tabs.

Basically, it's Slender Man for Suburbanite Housewives; the Ladies' Auxiliary of Q-Anon.

"Are you nearing middle age? Is your life kind of dull, a vast arid expanse of paying bills and cleaning house, stretching out to the horizon of senility? Here's a fun and exciting game that you can play that adds a thrill of danger, complete with puzzles to decode and patterns to recognize!"

You've got people freaking out every time they see a work truck, LARPing their kidnapping fantasies in Hobby Lobby, and zip-tying their own wiper blades together in the hopes of going viral on Facebook.

There's even a Junior Version of the mythos. I've seen parents flip the f^$k out when a stranger got too close to their kid in an otherwise innocuous attempt to get a can of soup off a grocery store shelf. The ugly truth is that you need to worry about friendly ol' Uncle Earl or the kid's Sunday school teacher a lot more than you need to worry about a stranger who looked a bit too Middle Eastern while trying to get some minestrone in aisle 6.

Unless you're an immigrant of questionable legality or a teenage runaway (or both), your odds of needing to worry about sex trafficking are about the same as your odds of needing to know what to do with those Lotto winnings. Settle down, Gladys.
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What are the odds?

From a discussion elsewhere about a women's self-defense-slash-"empowerment" program:

"While I agree that a lot of "women's self defense" stuff is overly oriented on stranger danger and getting Gladys ready to go all krav maga on the white slavers in the Hobby Lobby parking lot rather than "minimize assholes in your life", I find the notion that one can separate "relationship safety" and "physical self-defense" into completely different spheres to be exotically naive."

Like I've said before, statistically speaking, you already know the person you're most likely to have to pepper spray.

Of course, even the stuff that does acknowledge the physical component tends to peddle woo, because people like woo. One two-hour session of stomping on the foot of a guy in a Red Man suit and yelling loudly is an easier sell than hours in a gym or dojo every week. (And lord knows I need more time in a gym.) It's a market driven by customer demand, and what customers demand is: "I'd like to buy a hundred dollars of self-confidence, please. I can squeeze in two hours on Saturday next week between grocery shopping and Suzy's band recital."
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Color Me Skeptical...

Kidnapping survivor Elizabeth Smart is launching a self-defense initiative after she says she was assaulted on a flight to Utah last summer.

"I had been asleep and all of a sudden I woke up because I felt someone's hand rubbing in between my legs on my inner thigh," Smart told CBS This Morning's Gayle King.

Smart was kidnapped from her Salt Lake City home when she was 14 by Brian David Mitchell and Wanda Eileen Barzee in 2002.

During the interview, Smart said she was shocked that a strange man sitting next to her would do something like that.

Instead of looking around at existing options, we needed to invent our own kung fu? Does it address sleeping next to strange dudes on planes?

The odds of this not being the punchy-kicky strip mall dojo Krav Maga-esque version of Lethal Lace "holsters" are slim, I'm afraid. "I suddenly became aware I didn't have something and so, instead of researching a market I had insufficient knowledge of, I decided to invent something myself."
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They say it ain't nobody's business but the Turk's...

Legislation has again been introduced that would decriminalize statutory rape in Turkey, provided the rapist marries his victim.

Considering that legal protections of this sort have actually been rolled back in such hotbeds of progressivism as Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, it's pretty safe to give this some serious side-eye as another worrying step in the de-Attaturking of the country.
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Endurance

"In September this year, the US swimmer Sarah Thomas (already holder of the world record for the longest open-water swim) completed another breathtaking feat of endurance. The Channel Swimming Association records 1,652 solo, observed, unassisted swims (no neoprene wetsuits or flotation devices) of the Channel since 1875. Thirty-four people have swum it there and back without stopping. Four people have swum it three times in a row (two men, two women). But only one – Thomas – has swum it four times. It took her 54 hours and 10 minutes, and though the crossing at its narrowest point is 20 miles, because of the strong tides pushing against her, she actually swam not 80 but close to 130 miles."

Ultra-endurance athletes are a whole different species. Interestingly, it's one athletic endeavor where women do extremely well relative to the guys, and researchers are studying why that is. It might be psychological.

"Paris tells me about another infamous ultra race she ran in 2015, the Dragon’s Back: five days, 315km and 15,500m of ascent in the Welsh mountains. “One of my role models is Helene Diamantides, one of the pioneers of women’s fell running. She said to us at the start of the race: look around the room. If you are a man, you have a 50% chance of finishing the race. If you’re a woman, you have a 90% chance. But then, there were far fewer women in the room. Because they have less ego, they wouldn’t turn up unless they were well-prepared. Whereas men can be a bit like, how hard can this be?”"

Pop Will Eat Itself

"In “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,” a 1976 Ms. magazine article, Jo Freeman described how feminists of her generation destroyed one another. Trashing, she wrote, is “accomplished by making you feel that your very existence is inimical to the Movement and that nothing can change this short of ceasing to exist. These feelings are reinforced when you are isolated from your friends as they become convinced that their association with you is similarly inimical to the Movement and to themselves. Any support of you will taint them…. You are reduced to a mere parody of your previous self.”"

Purity spirals and public draggings are nothing new, the internet just lets them be done faster and more efficiently.
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Social Self Defense

The unspoken bogeyman in the self-defense industry is the actual statistics of self-defense. If you don't live in the 'hood and avoid entertainment districts late at night and don't do drugs, your chances of being hit by random violent crime are really pretty small.

But rather a lot of violent crime isn't random. Statistically speaking, you probably already know the person from whom you're most likely to need to defend yourself.

And there are levels of predation that are not violent, and not necessarily criminal. There are people who transgress boundaries all the time, sometimes with no intent other than hoping for a date, and some because they actually derive pleasure from causing others discomfort.

Does this sound uncomfortably familiar? Then you need to read Creepology. I just finished it and it's a fantastic read. It's a rare self-defense book that's this relevant, useful, and well-written. Highly recommend.
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