Things Get Seriously Weird...

[ecosophia]

During this week's Magic Monday, one of my commenters -- tip of the Druidical hat to Seasidehermit -- noted that people on one of the popular Neopagan online forums were talking about a sudden distance opening up between them and their gods:  the gods they pray to have gone silent or, in some cases, gone away completely. (You can find two of the many examples here and here.) In the light of what follows, it's probably worth noting that the Neopagans in question are among those for whom yelling "Orange Man Bad!" and praising the latest excesses of cancel culture and woke activism are standard social habits. 

I was interested enough in this to follow up on it -- and what to my wondering eyes should appear but several comments (here's one of them) by Neopagans who have had their gods go silent, but are now suddenly noticing strings of repeating digits on clocks and other digital readouts. 

That is to say, they're seeing "gets." 

For those readers who didn't follow the Kek Wars in the months leading up to the 2016 election, or missed my four-part blog post on the subject (Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four), a "get" was slang in alt-right forums (such as the notorious "chans") for sequences of repeating digits in the numbers automatically assigned to posts by forum software. One of the many weird features of that memorably strange election season was that posts dealing with Donald Trump fielded improbable numbers of "gets." (The most famous of these was a random post on 8chan on June 19, 2016, which said simply "Trump will win," and got the post number 77777777.) The cascades of "gets" was among the things that convinced a great many alt-right chaos mages during that election that they had somehow come into contact with the ancient Egyptian frog god Kek, who had taken Pepe the Frog for his mascot and who had chosen Donald Trump as his anointed candidate. (As I said, it was a memorably weird time.) 

And now Neopagans who are opponents of Trump are being quietly left in the lurch by the gods they worship, and at least some of them are seeing the signs of Kek's presence...

Something very strange is stirring, in the midst of this extremely strange time.

I'd like to ask my readers this: are you experiencing any particular sense of distance opening up between you and your gods? And are you seeing "gets"?

Comments

[ecosophia]

That's a very good point. Where do you think the frustration comes from?

[(Anonymous)]

I might have an insight here: I'm a straight male, but I've had a number of "casual" partners who've noted that the sex they have with me is vastly better than they usually get from casual sex. They've said they tend to do okay in relationships, but struggle with getting off in casual sex; my guess, having asked about it, is that the difference between me and most of their other partners isn't that I do something in bed that the other men don't, but that I won't sleep with someone unless we're close friends, and so everyone I've slept with I've had a genuine emotional connection to: my logic is that even though we use protection, it's never perfect, and if she ends up pregnant, I want to like the mother of my child!

Conservatives tend to value the emotional aspects to sexuality (there's a reason it's called "making love"!) while liberals seem to tend to discount it. If, as my experience seems to suggest, plenty of women can't get it off without that connection, the results of the sexual revolution and the corresponding dramatic increase in casual sex would be a lot of women have a very easy time getting sex, but a very hard time actually getting it off, which is the perfect recipe for sexual frustration!

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know how far back the previous commenter is tracing this, but I (same commenter from the top of page 4 who felt politically homeless since Sanders dropped out) would relate it to the demise and demonization of sex-positive feminism. This was already happening a few years before #metoo but #metoo made it more visible. These days there is a lot of concentration in left-liberal culture on how sex with men is bad for women. Middle-aged women among my close friends think they are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But on social media it sounds like quite a lot of middle-aged women are on that bandwagon, it isn't only younger ones.

Then there is the issue of porn that's been discussed in your other blog posts. Women who are dating may be frustrated by how porn-driven many men's sexual taste is now, and that it's not compatible with what they want. Some of them have given up because of it, or are afraid to dive back in if they've come out of a long relationship. It's not something I've encountered to an extent that I minded it, but it's out there.

[causticus]

I'd guess it's from the fact that affluent, liberal men (i.e. the men in their social circle) have become quite emasculated and beta over the past several decades. A gun-toting conservative guy who knows how to fix lots of things around the house isn't typically going to be wimpy pushover who is always going out of the way to avoid offending anyone. Especially as of late liberal/progressive men have been told that (normal) masculinity is "toxic masculinity."