I’m a lifelong language learner, and I’ve long had an interest in Russia. Russian is one of the languages I study.
And no—before you ask—the present situation doesn’t change that. I grew up during the Cold War. Ambivalent feelings toward Moscow have always been a part of my psyche. That doesn’t make Russia and its ancient civilization any less interesting as a field of study.
I follow a handful of Russia-based YouTubers. Among these is Sasha (Alexandra) of the YouTube channel Sasha Meets Russia.
In the video below, Sasha explains why she has decided to say “do svidaniya” (goodbye) to the USA, and stake her future in Russia.
As an American, Sasha is uniquely prepared to emigrate to Russia. Though she spent most of her life in the United States, she is of mixed Russian-American heritage. She speaks fluent Russian, along with native English and fluent French.
Nevertheless, her dissatisfaction with what the USA has become in recent decades will resonate with many Americans who don’t speak Russian. She refers, wistfully, to what America was in the 1950s and 1960s. One need not go back that far. I would settle for what America was in the 1980s or 1990s.
Especially notable is Sasha’s account of confronting “woke culture” as a teenager and public school student in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts about ten years ago. I’m grateful that I missed all that nonsense, as a student of an earlier era.
Why am I bringing her to your attention? Partly because of her youth. There has never been a shortage of 50- and 60-year-olds who are convinced that the society around them is going to hell. But this is the assessment of an educated, physically attractive Gen Z woman who would have plenty of prospects wherever she went.
Yet she doesn’t choose to stay here. She chooses the country that our mainstream media and political elites constantly denounce as evil.
Last May conservative YouTuber Lauren Chen made a worthwhile video about the realities of OnlyFans, the much-hyped autoporning website.
In many ways, OnlyFans is nothing new. Amateur porn sites are as old as the Internet. Cam sites appeared as soon as the bandwidth was sufficient. Before the Internet, there were 1-900 phone sex lines.
But these things were always confined to isolated subcultures. And while the mainstream media may have occasionally reported on their existence, there was none of the cheerleading that surrounds the OnlyFans phenomenon.
Watch Lauren Chen’s video. She spends a little too much time going on about how appalled she is by sex work of any kind. (Yes, Lauren, we get that you are not at all interested in flashing your wares online for tips. Not under any circumstances.) But virtue-signaling aside, she highlights some stark numbers.
To be in the top one percent of OnlyFans creators essentially means that you make about as much as an average fast-food worker. And you do this at the cost of starring in an online library of nude photos and videos. These will exist forever, and can be dredged up by blackmailers, jealous partners, and snooping acquaintances at any time.
The stratospheric OnlyFans numbers are for celebrities, and perhaps a handful of outliers.
But what about those outliers? You’ve seen the headlines: “Nurse quits her job to make $20K per month on OnlyFans!”
Chen doesn’t mention this, but the handful of woman-next-door outliers are largely self-reported, or rather, journalist-reported. Are liberties taken with the truth? Well, what do you think?
To be clear, I’m not here to make the case for censorship, but rather for awareness. The mainstream media is selling one narrative (“Instant riches on OnlyFans await!”). The reality is something else. (You probably won’t make much money, and you’ll create numerous liabilities for yourself that will last as long as the Internet.)
If the mainstream media is any indication, the youngest generation of adults and the corporate workplace are already falling out of love with each other. What happened to all that enthusiasm about “hiring young talent”?
Gen Z workers are being “stereotyped as lazy” by some managers. Meanwhile, a group of Gen Z TikTokers (is there any other kind of TikToker?) are complaining online that the marketplace doesn’t acknowledge their worth. And when it does, it works them too hard.
I’m a member of Generation X, the first generation of young Americans officially designated as “slackers” in the workplace. (In fact, I think the term was originally coined on our behalf.)
That was back in the early to mid-1990s. Then, as now, generational norms and practices were changing in the workplace. In the early 1990s, most senior management positions were occupied by men (almost exclusively men, in those days) who had begun their adult lives in the late 1950s.
These were the so-called Silent Generation of men. They had been too young for service in World War II, and too old to be drafted for Vietnam. This was the generation that discovered Elvis, and settled down to marriage and family before the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Think Richie Cunningham and Happy Days.
That crowd had faith in institutions. They were no-nonsense and reflexively suspicious of anyone under forty. That was a generation that had never been under forty, not even when they were in high school.
The Baby Boomers, meanwhile, were eager workaholics. They were the forty-somethings in middle management in the early 1990s.
The Baby Boomers had dabbled in rebellion in the 1960s. Then they took advantage of the 1980s economic boom, becoming the yuppies (Young Urban Professionals) of the Reagan era. Despite their early flirtation with the counterculture, most Baby Boomers trusted the system. After all, the system had functioned well for both them and their Greatest Generation parents.
Young Gen Xers, circa 1990, weren’t necessarily lazy. Almost all of us had worked through high school and college, to one degree or another. We were, however, stubbornly cynical of institutions and cagey by nature. We weren’t eager joiners.
And while we were willing to work, we were very much coin-operated. We weren’t enthusiastic about toiling for years at a low-level position in the hope of an eventual payoff. We knew how that often went. “Downsizing” was a corporate buzzword of the early 1990s. The old social contract was dead–or at least revised.
Therefore, we were regarded as “slackers”. But we weren’t slackers. We just had a different set of underlying assumptions and motivations.
Today the surviving members of the Silent Generation are in their eighties and nineties. They haven’t been in the workplace for years. The Baby Boomers are in their sixties and seventies. The Boomers are either recently retired, retiring, or soon to retire.
So that leaves Gen Xers at the top. How ironic. (Gen Xers have always loved irony.) The typical senior management position is now filled by a fifty-something Gen Xer, that “slacker” of 1990 or 1992.
And what is that Gen X senior manager doing? He or she is complaining about the youngest adults in the workplace, Generation Z. That’s ironic, too.
I’m sure some of the complaints about Generation Z are valid. Too many Zoomers are performatively sensitive, a quality that immediately irritates Gen Xers. Whatever else you might say about Generation X, we always had thick skin. I am quick to roll my eyes whenever a twentysomething publicly behaves like a wounded kitten on TikTok. In that regard, Gen Xers are as gruff as members of the Silent Generation were.
What will happen over the next thirty years is that Generation Z will adapt to the workplace in some ways, and the workplace will adapt to them in other aspects.
That’s what happened in the past, after all. Gen Xers who succeeded in organizational settings eventually learned to set aside some of their cynicism. On the other hand, there are a lot more Gen X women in management than was ever the case for Baby Boomers or the Silent Generation. In that way, the workplace largely adapted to Generation X, the generation of “girl power”.
Generational adaptation, then, is something that goes both ways. Thirty years from now, fiftysomething Gen Z managers will be grousing about those Gen Alpha employees, who strike them as lazy, indifferent to organizational norms, and downright incomprehensible at times. It could not be otherwise.
You may have noticed that your personal Facebook feed contains a higher-than-usual volume of ads and “suggested content” posts of late. This is a direct result of Facebook’s strategy to increase its ad revenues.
Advertisers pay Facebook for a.) the number of times an ad is shown, and b.) the number of times an ad is clicked. (I’ve run many Facebook ads myself in the past, so I do know what I’m talking about here.)
Facebook’s current business plan, apparently, is to push out as many ads as possible, to as many users as possible. Never mind the all-important factor of ad relevancy.
Case-in-point: a conspicuous number of ads from Bikini Beans Coffee, a Tempe, Arizona-based company, have been appearing in my personal Facebook feed in recent weeks.
As the name suggests, all of the baristas at Bikini Beans Coffeeare lithe young women in bikinis. If the ads are any indication, they are all quite attractive.
I’ve also perused the Bikini Beans Coffee menu. The company’s drink selection looks promising, with only a small premium added for the jollies associated with being served by half-naked young women.
My brain is already turning to mush…
But why run such ads to me, in particular, among all the 243.5 million Facebook users in the United States?
Well, first of all, I’m a middle-aged man. A middle-aged man’s brain is known to turn to mush when a scantily clad, attractive young woman is placed before him. That is an established fact. Middle-aged men often have a significant disposable income. When their brains turn to mush, they open their wallets.
Also, I’m a coffee connoisseur. I regularly research different kinds of coffee online.
But Mark Zuckerberg is still ripping off Bikini Beans Coffee. Why?
As I mentioned, Bikini Beans Coffee is based in Tempe, Arizona. The company has five locations. All of them are somewhere in Arizona, mostly near Phoenix.
I, on the other hand, am in Cincinnati, Ohio.
I’m unlikely to drive 26 hours (1,800 miles) for a cup of coffee, even if bikini-clad coeds are involved. My brain might turn to mush in front of attractive young women, but that form of manipulation has its limits.
I haven’t even contemplated going to Arizona, in fact. This means that none of my search activity, either on Facebook or elsewhere online, would suggest that I will be in Arizona anytime in the near future.
Facebook, therefore, is more or less throwing advertisers’ spaghetti at the wall. Bikini Beans Coffee has been paying good money to show me photos of its nubile, skimpily-attired baristas. That exposure (no pun intended) isn’t free.
This is why I rarely run Facebook ads for my own business anymore.
Facebook nowadays is a mess. Facebook has been battered in recent years, by privacy concerns and iOS updates that have undermined its tracking abilities.
The social media landscape has become more crowded and competitive, too; and this is a battle that Facebook is mostly losing. As most of you will know, young people have been abandoning Facebook for TikTok. Older Facebook users are spending less time on the site. Many older users (some of my friends included) have deleted their Facebook accounts in recent years.
This means fewer and fewer opportunities to show ads. As a result, Meta (Facebook’s parent company) is growing desperate. More shots in the dark, more spaghetti thrown against the wall.
If you’re running ads on Facebook, Meta is playing ever more random games of chance—not with their money, but with yours.
Paris Jackson, the only daughter of the late Michael Jackson, recently posted an Instagram video in commemoration of her father’s birthday. She received some negative remarks about her armpit hair.
Based on the photos I’ve seen, Miss Jackson’s armpits are unshaven but trimmed, not what I would call overgrown or hirsute, by any stretch.
But this raises a question. How does untrimmed body hair affect beauty and sex appeal? Body hair—on both men and women—seems to go in and out of fashion. National and cultural factors also seem to exert an influence.
I am naturally hairy, for better or worse. I had chest hair when I was still in junior high. I also have hair on my arms, legs, and back.
I was born too late to capitalize on all this excess bodily carpet. In the 1970s, chest hair was associated with male sex appeal and masculine virility. Burt Reynolds and a handful of other hairy male celebrities drove this trend.
By the time I reached full adulthood in the 1990s, however, things were going the other way. This was the dawning era of the manscaped metrosexual.
Then both men and women began trimming and shaving their pubic hair. I won’t go too far down that line of inquiry, so as to keep this post safe for work. But the larger message here was that body hair was out of fashion.
I was late in picking up on this, as I am on so many things. One day, a friend flippantly asked me if I planned to show up at a summertime social event in a tank top with my “back hair hanging out”. (This person is not a friend anymore, but that’s another story for another time.)
I might have replied that in 1976, my ample body hair would have been considered the height of sexy. But this conversation took place well into the twenty-first century.
I have since succumbed to the manscaping trend. I now keep my back hair in check with a battery-operated device called a Mangroomer. I have become accustomed to having less body hair than I once did, and I’ll pull out the Mangroomer when I start feeling a little shaggy back there.
As far as women’s armpit hair goes: I suppose I’m a prisoner of my early biases. In my formative years, women religiously shaved their armpits but never shaved their privates. Once again, my inclinations and preferences are the exact opposite of twenty-first-century trends.
One of the nostalgia-based Twitter feeds I follow recently posed the question: “Who was your celebrity crush when you woke up on your 13th birthday? I’ll start.”
The Twitter feed’s author then posted a vintage poster of Christie Brinkley from the early 1980s. If you’re of a certain age, you’ve no doubt seen this one before: Brinkley clad in a one-piece blue swimsuit, her facial expression maddeningly sultry, her blowing hair accentuating her in all her early twentysomething feminine glory.
Who was your celebrity crush when you woke up on your 13th birthday? I’ll start: pic.twitter.com/xcGa7g48lP
This got me thinking about the whole concept of celebrity crushes, why some people get them, and why I have always been more or less immune to them.
Not that I’m above tilting at romantic windmills. When I was a freshman in high school, I developed an aching crush on a senior girl at my school who was also a popular cheerleader. Talk about hopeless causes.
And it actually got worse from there. From my adolescence through my early adulthood, I subscribed to the Groucho Marx school of romance. Marx, you might recall, once said, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” There was a time in my life when my interest in a member of the opposite sex burned in inverse proportion to her interest in me, or lack thereof. (Fortunately, I have learned to put that one behind me.)
But I have always confined my interests to people who were physically present within my immediate environs, and at least theoretically attainable. I never fixated on anyone whom I knew only from television, movies, magazines, the radio, or the Internet. What would be the point of getting worked up about someone who lives on the other side of the country, or the other side of the world?
I have, at times, become briefly infatuated by the combination of an actress/character. I am part of the generation that grew up watching the Brady Bunch in rerun syndication. I suppose I would be lying if I denied that I had a pre-sexual, boyhood crush on Jan and Marcia Brady, played by Eve Plumb and Maureen McCormick. But even then, I recognized that these characters were contrivances, not real life. To romanticize them overly much was delusional.
Maureen McCormick as Marcia Brady, circa 1970
Later on, in my teenage years, I found myself drawn to Diane Franklin’s innocent, doomed Patricia Montelli in Amityville II: The Possession (1982). But I also saw Franklin portray a manipulative schemer in The Last American Virgin, which came out the same year.
I will admit that Molly Ringwald’s interpretation of Jewel in Fresh Horses (1988) stirred a little mini-crush in me for the 105 minutes of that film. By that time, though, I had already seen Ringwald in a variety of roles. The illusion ended as soon as the closing credits rolled.
Celebrity crushes seem to cross lines of both gender and generation. Consider those film clips from the 1950s, which show young women of the Eisenhower era going absolutely nuts over Elvis. When I was in grade school, a conspicuous number of women in my class maintained fantasy relationships with Shaun Cassidy and Scott Baio. Perhaps your twenty-something daughter once had a thing for…what was his name…Justin Beaver?
In more recent years, I’ve read stories about Taylor Swift’s stalkers, and the lengths to which they will go in order to get a few minutes of facetime with the constantly hyped and too-omnipresent singer. In their throes of futile devotion, they send her both love letters and death threats. One broke into Swift’s New York City apartment twice in one year. Police found the man sleeping in her bed, like a demented Goldilocks.
I would have no interest in meeting Swift, let alone turning her into a quest of some kind. I’m baffled by the legions of male and female Taylor Swift fans who self-identify as “Swifties”.
But Rolling Stone identifies the typical Taylor Swift devotee as “Millennial, suburban, and white.” I’m a Gen Xer. The oldest Millennials were born when I was in high school. I’m about 15 to 25 years older than the typical Taylor Swift fan.
And indeed, most of Taylor Swift’s overly ardent male fans seem to be Millennials, too. Come to think of it, I have never heard a man of my generation make so much as a wistful remark about Ms. Swift.
There is, however, an online legion of men my age who hold long-simmering crushes on Diane Franklin. This seems to come up every time the actress (who is amazingly humble and good-natured for a “Hollywood person”) sits for an interview.
You need only peruse some of the 1980s- and horror-themed podcasts on YouTube to get a grasp of this. Every middle-age male podcaster who interviews Diane Franklin seems incapable of not telling her that he had a teenage crush on her back in the 80s. As if she hadn’t already guessed that.
She always smiles unflappably, and waits for her interviewer to move on. All of them eventually do, but sometimes after belaboring the point a bit too long.
Franklin was, indeed, one of the crush-worthy young female stars of the 1980s, starring not just in the aforementioned Amityville II and The Last American Virgin, but also in Better Off Dead (1985). She even had a role in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989). No, I never had a crush on her; but I do remember her as an actress.
About two years ago, I decided to become more active than usual on Twitter. I looked around for various 80s pop culture-related Twitter accounts to follow, and this inevitably led me to Diane Franklin, who has a presence on the platform.
Franklin has a mid-sized account, of about 10K followers. I skimmed through her most recent tweets, and I noticed that she was interacting with some of her followers.
“Oh, what the heck?” I thought.
I followed Diane Franklin and sent her a tweet. She tweeted back. I tweeted back. And so on.
Then it struck me. Diane Franklin and I were actually having a conversation (though it was doubtless more enthusiastic on my end). If only that 14-year-old version of myself, circa 1982, could have seen this!
She may have glanced at my Twitter profile. I look my age, and my tweets would have revealed me as someone old enough to have seen her 1980s oeuvre when all those movies appeared for the first time in the cinemas.
Then I paused, and considered what I was doing. I suddenly realized that I was in imminent danger of becoming one of THEM: one of those now middle-age, formerly teenage Gen X males who still carry quixotic torches for Diane Franklin.
“Oh, no! This is weird!” I shouted. “This is creepy. I’m not going to do this!…Or at least: I’m not going to do it anymore.”
I quietly deleted all my tweets addressed to Franklin, and then I unfollowed her. I’m sure she barely noticed my disappearance. She probably didn’t notice at all.
I’ll never approach Diane Franklin on Twitter again, needless to say, nor any other female celebrity. That was a one-time lapse. (I’m not much for social media, anyway.)
I still have fond memories of Diane Franklin’s films, of course. I still appreciate her acting skills and good public graces.
But I have this rule: “No celebrity crushes.” I’m not going within even a hundred miles of such make-believe and self-delusional territory, not even for a celebrity who was gracious enough to communicate with me, and not even within the make-believe world of Twitter.
WishTender was trending on Twitter this morning. It’s a new app that allows online “content creators” to ask “fans” for gifts.
But not just any content creators and not just any fans. You probably won’t find your favorite indie rock band using the site. And if you’re a writer thinking about WishTender…stick with Patreon instead.
Certain hashtags were predominant in the WishTender Twitter thread: #paypig, #findom, #footfetish, etc. If some of those terms are unfamiliar to you, I’ll let you do the Googling. But you probably get the general idea.
During the COVID lockdowns, there were numerous stories about enterprising women making millions by autoporning on OnlyFans. Sex—or the mere hint of it—sells, in case you haven’t heard. One young lady, an adult content creator who posts under the nom de guerre of Amouranth, claimed to have made $2 million in a single month.
A former pretzel store worker told the New York Post that she makes $99K per month posting risqué photos online. She quit her job after making $20,000 during her first month on OnlyFans.
On one hand, I’m skeptical of such claims; but we can assume that the OnlyFans millionaires who make the news are the outliers. No one asserts that all OnlyFans content creators make this kind of money. I’m sure it takes persistence, and more than a little luck.
And then there’s the target audience to consider. Many men are easily led around by their…noses…when placed in the presence of a woman they find attractive. Even a virtual presence. And it’s sooo easy to spend money online. I can’t visit Amazon without finding at least two or three things that I absolutely need.
WishTender takes the digital sex panhandling economy to yet another level. Here one can make a naked (pun fully intended) exhortation for anonymous Internet saps to send them stuff. “Get your Prada/groceries/coffee funded by your fans” the Wishtender site promises its users.
This is all perfectly legal, and it should be. If there are people (almost exclusively men, one can assume) who are that eager to be “paypigs” and “findoms” to strangers, more power to the content creators who are raking in the cash…and designer shoes.
But I can’t help wondering: at what point does this particular sector of the online economy reach its saturation point, especially when you consider the likelihood that the broader economy will slow down in 2023?
But then…silly me. I’m forgetting the gullibility that arises when you combine (some) men with photos of attractive women they’ll never meet, and the ease of spending money online. There are no doubt men out there who will prioritize the purchase of digital porn over food.
