Living with Heat
If I concentrate hard enough, I can trigger one. No, not an SJW—although wouldn’t that be fun? A hot flash.
Oh, look, here it comes.
I got the first one about a year ago, but they hit full force only in April, after my meeting with my chair of department about my promotion review. For weeks after that, I could barely sleep. Every night would mean waking up, not just in sweats, but in panic.
Why is the apartment so fucking hot?!
The night sweats are bad, but the worst are the ones that come when I am trying to think. My guess—based on a quick surf around the menopause sites—is that it has something to do with testosterone, but maybe I got that from a book I was reading about motivation for winning.
Aha, found it:
On the one hand, I find the hot flashes aversive. When they hit, I just want to wallow in the heat until it passes.
But on the other hand, since they hit whenever I set myself to a challenging task, wallowing means I get nothing done except surfing the internet—clearly a low testosterone activity, if ever there was one.
I want to be in the fight. There is, quite literally, nothing I enjoy more. It doesn’t need to be a physical fight—chess players get huge testosterone boosts, too—but it needs to be something competitive, something real.
But how can I be in the fight when I am drained by a hot flash every time I step on the strip?
If only there were a lesson here....
You will have gathered that I have been listening to a fair number of Vox Day livestreams this past month or so, following my usual inquisitorial method of not condemning someone as a heretic without a proper inquisition. The other week Vox was talking about fighting and the difference between fighting and training. I think it had something to do with Joe Rogan.
(You remember Joe Rogan? The one who got Milo to talk about his sex life as an adolescent? That Joe Rogan. No, I won’t link that video for you. I am sure you can find it yourself with a bit of surfing.)
According to Vox, while Joe clearly trains hard and is in good physical condition, he has zero experience with actual fighting, which Vox, as an experienced fighter, can see instantly in the videos of his training that Joe posted online. To be sure, I am not an experienced fighter (I’ll wait, I know these revelations catch one by surprise), but I am an experienced competitor. I know the difference between being good in practice and good in tournaments—between having lovely form as you are taking a lesson with your coach and being utterly unable to do anything against a seasoned competitor. I have spent years on strip watching my opponents. I doubt I can see as much as Vox, but I saw instantly what he was talking about in the videos that he showed of Joe—the ridiculously lengthy attacks, the tells. Whether I could do anything with that information is another matter; I am, after all, a nearly 54-year-old woman, trained as a fencer, not a fighter. But I could see what Vox was describing; I knew what he meant.
I also understand now why Vox comes off as arrogant.
He is arrogant—he admits it!—but it is the arrogance that comes from having been in a fight—and lost.
And then having picked himself up off the floor, bloodied and bruised, and gotten back into the fight again.
Let’s call it living with heat.
Living with heat is being willing to step into the fire even though you know it will burn you because you have been there before.
I know some of my friends are frustrated with me. I know because they have been calling me names, warning me about getting too close to the source of the flame. I look crazy to them—obsessed, delusional—being so willing to step back into the fray. It makes no sense to invite further attacks just when it seems like they have finally died down.
What do they think I am, an old woman?!
Fighters know that the only way to grow stronger is to be willing to fight.
Vox even made a rule about it. It is number eleven in his “12 Real Rules for Life”:
Another benefit of testosterone is that it enhances your ability to think critically. As Po Bronson and Ashely Merriman put it in Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing (also quoted above):
Is this toxic masculinity—or fortitude and strength in the face of a challenge?
I have a plan now.
Welcome the heat.
Welcome the surge of testosterone as you step up to the strip.
Welcome the burning as a sign that you have acknowledged the challenge as salient and the fight as worth taking.
Welcome the chance to stand close to the fire, possibly even get burned.
Because the alternative is to be beaten before you even begin—and that is how the SJWs win.
Oh, look, here it comes.
I got the first one about a year ago, but they hit full force only in April, after my meeting with my chair of department about my promotion review. For weeks after that, I could barely sleep. Every night would mean waking up, not just in sweats, but in panic.
Why is the apartment so fucking hot?!
The night sweats are bad, but the worst are the ones that come when I am trying to think. My guess—based on a quick surf around the menopause sites—is that it has something to do with testosterone, but maybe I got that from a book I was reading about motivation for winning.
Aha, found it:
“Testosterone is motivation,” said Dr. Jack von Honk, in a presentation to his colleagues.... “Without testosterone, there is no motivation at all. When you take some testosterone sublingually, you’re ready to go, you’re up for it, there’s no fear, no hesitation.”
This ability to get “up for it” is partially set by prenatal brain development in the womb... and it’s partially also a trained response. Competitors learn to recognize a future contest, and their minds need to mark it as a salient challenge in order for the testosterone response to set in...
This could be one reason why positive thinking can backfire... If you envision yourself cruising to victory, false overconfidence fails to trigger the testosterone response. If you envision a close, contested race where every bit of aretas will be needed to win, the mind will mark the event as salient, and your body will start producing the needed testosterone....
Success in competition requires taking risks that are normally constrained by fear. This is one way testosterone works, by acting on the amygdala and dampening the fear response. At the same time, it binds to androgen receptors in the brain’s reward system, making the brain more responsive to the rewards of competition, helping it mount enough desire to overcome inhibitions. The result: less fear of risk, more drive for reward...
Testosterone increases motivation, but it’s equally true that motivation increases testosterone. When you care—really care—testosterone responds.Not quite about menopause, but I think it is relevant, since what I have been struggling with most these past ten or twelve months is motivation.
On the one hand, I find the hot flashes aversive. When they hit, I just want to wallow in the heat until it passes.
But on the other hand, since they hit whenever I set myself to a challenging task, wallowing means I get nothing done except surfing the internet—clearly a low testosterone activity, if ever there was one.
I want to be in the fight. There is, quite literally, nothing I enjoy more. It doesn’t need to be a physical fight—chess players get huge testosterone boosts, too—but it needs to be something competitive, something real.
But how can I be in the fight when I am drained by a hot flash every time I step on the strip?
If only there were a lesson here....
You will have gathered that I have been listening to a fair number of Vox Day livestreams this past month or so, following my usual inquisitorial method of not condemning someone as a heretic without a proper inquisition. The other week Vox was talking about fighting and the difference between fighting and training. I think it had something to do with Joe Rogan.
(You remember Joe Rogan? The one who got Milo to talk about his sex life as an adolescent? That Joe Rogan. No, I won’t link that video for you. I am sure you can find it yourself with a bit of surfing.)
According to Vox, while Joe clearly trains hard and is in good physical condition, he has zero experience with actual fighting, which Vox, as an experienced fighter, can see instantly in the videos of his training that Joe posted online. To be sure, I am not an experienced fighter (I’ll wait, I know these revelations catch one by surprise), but I am an experienced competitor. I know the difference between being good in practice and good in tournaments—between having lovely form as you are taking a lesson with your coach and being utterly unable to do anything against a seasoned competitor. I have spent years on strip watching my opponents. I doubt I can see as much as Vox, but I saw instantly what he was talking about in the videos that he showed of Joe—the ridiculously lengthy attacks, the tells. Whether I could do anything with that information is another matter; I am, after all, a nearly 54-year-old woman, trained as a fencer, not a fighter. But I could see what Vox was describing; I knew what he meant.
I also understand now why Vox comes off as arrogant.
He is arrogant—he admits it!—but it is the arrogance that comes from having been in a fight—and lost.
And then having picked himself up off the floor, bloodied and bruised, and gotten back into the fight again.
Let’s call it living with heat.
Living with heat is being willing to step into the fire even though you know it will burn you because you have been there before.
I know some of my friends are frustrated with me. I know because they have been calling me names, warning me about getting too close to the source of the flame. I look crazy to them—obsessed, delusional—being so willing to step back into the fray. It makes no sense to invite further attacks just when it seems like they have finally died down.
What do they think I am, an old woman?!
Fighters know that the only way to grow stronger is to be willing to fight.
Vox even made a rule about it. It is number eleven in his “12 Real Rules for Life”:
Get back on the horse. Perseverance is one of the most important skills a man can develop. There is absolutely no substitute for the confidence and the courage that comes from the certain knowledge that you will get up again after an opponent, or life, knocks you down.Plus, of course, it increases your testosterone, training your mind to recognize the fight and mark it as an appropriate challenge.
Another benefit of testosterone is that it enhances your ability to think critically. As Po Bronson and Ashely Merriman put it in Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing (also quoted above):
Even though testosterone makes you take more risks, it doesn’t cause you to take stupid risks... This chemical, originally assumed to make people irrational and primitive, actually helps you be more rational.
It removes the emotional wariness we have toward uncertainty.... Though we often become very emotional during a competition, testosterone keeps those emotions from interfering with cognitive processing....
Under the spell of testosterone, you think more analytically, almost hyperrationally—so rationally, in fact, that the higher your testosterone, the more strongly you are likely to react if someone breaks the rules. Like, for example, an SJW, who has accused you of being a white supremacist for being in favor of nations and God.
Is this toxic masculinity—or fortitude and strength in the face of a challenge?
I have a plan now.
Welcome the heat.
Welcome the surge of testosterone as you step up to the strip.
Welcome the burning as a sign that you have acknowledged the challenge as salient and the fight as worth taking.
Welcome the chance to stand close to the fire, possibly even get burned.
Because the alternative is to be beaten before you even begin—and that is how the SJWs win.
Bonfire, New Year’s Eve, Santa Fe Plaza
Welcome to the club of True Masculinity, and it's not just limited to the male of the species, think Mama Grizzly -- the defender of the poor, the helpless, the children, and the damsel in distress, those who practice dark deeds in the night to keep the peaceful safe; who stoically accept their fate and tap the magazine to make sure the last few rounds will do their jobs, or run the sharpening stone down the blade one last time as they try to hold the gates of civilization against the barbarian hordes. Testosterone: the fuel of Texas Rangers, Military Operators, and Sheepdogs -- they're not the toxic masculine types. The toxic masculine types bully and domineer, they jeer the brave and are ruthless in oppressing the weak, usually while promising them things they can't deliver. Really Masculine men, bleed for their friends and neighbors, they fight for what they are told is the right and sometimes the Toxically Masculine men lie about why they are asking the real Masculine Men to act like the hunters and warriors men naturally are. Real men know that life can be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ they are pessimists because they know the corruption of the human soul, yet they are optimists because there's always morning if they can live that long. Most know the real fight, the important fight is not against someone or something, it's not even a fight against evil; instead it is the fight within, the fight to be a good man or a good woman when everything in the culture tells them to be weak and mediocre, that exerting the effort to excel is foolish when everyone can be a winner. Real Men and Real Women know that not everyone wins and while on the soccer field that might not be important, on the fields of life it is -- not every one wins -- be a winner -- feel the testosterone, become the beserker!
ReplyDeleteWarrior bears! Thanks, Uncle Bear!
DeleteI get you, Dr. Brown. I just read your other post (from last year) about hot flashes. I get your work, that one has to participate in the devotion of those medieval Christians in order to see what their devotions were truly like (rather than just look at what they were doing). I also get the way your menopause experience is inseparable from your professional experience. Menopause depends upon a unsolicited, uninvited and shakes our very image of who we are as women. Who does a woman become when she no longer has the ability to bear a child (even though ideas of child-bearing may be long past)? Is she still a girl, a woman? How related to a woman's child bearing ability is a woman's sexual appeal (a question even married women have). I've been having severe hot flashes and night sweats for eight years now, with no signs of these symptoms abating (my doctor says 1/3 of menopausal women have them for life). My symptoms have led me to question many aspects of my life as a woman, but I have to say that I found you via your podcast with Patrick Coffin, and then listened to your Getting Feminine Symbolism Right with Jonathan Pageau. The academic response to your book may have you in some sort of doubt since scholars don't understand what you're saying, but discovering you and your work is helping me find myself as a woman again. I, like you, was Presbyterian before converting to Catholicism. I am 57 years old, and converted to the Catholic church when I was 45 years old. By an act that can only be attributed to the Holy Spirit, my husband was drawn to convert at the same time I had inklings that God was calling me to be Catholic. Neither of us wanted to admit as much to the other, both having been raised in anti-Catholic families. We did convert, however, and discovered Mary. Mary who is Everything, and who is now also helping me through my menopause doubts as I listened to you discuss her appearance throughout the Bible. Mary who is everything a woman needs to be, Mary but for whom we would not have an image of Jesus to ponder - which I knew before, but now know better after having listened to your discussion with Patrick Coffin and Jonathan Pageau. I could go on in this comment, but my mind does have that menopausal not-enough-sleep brain fog going on so I will stop here but I thank you for your work. I think you for being trained and for being a competitor. I'll continue to watch your engagement with dark, ignorant, and often malevolent forces in society and academia. I believe in the end you will win. Truth always wins.
ReplyDeleteBless you, and thank you for sharing your experience! I am so happy you have enjoyed my interviews with Patrick and Jonathan! I hope you have a chance to read my book—did you find the links on my homepage?
DeleteIt seems SJW males are afflicted with 'low T' while SJW females might have a bit more testosterone. These sorts of males are evidently attracted to that sort of female? Both can be overpowered by normal men and normal women, provided they know their adversary and how to bring the fight.
ReplyDeleteRobert