My cousin lumps attention seekers of all descriptions into the general heading of beat me, bore me, but never ignore me.
The crowd living under that tent grows with each passing day, particularly here in America, enabled by the liberals’ control of education, government and the LameStream media.
This is a nation populated by way too many people light on actual accomplishments, but very long on the desperate need to attract attention from their fellow travelers.
It’s not exactly a new phenomenon, only much more widespread these days. When I was a young man, boys tried to gain attention and “rebel” with long hair and strange attire such as whale bellbottom jeans, tie dye T-shirts and Nehru jackets.
That’s mild stuff compared to 2022 when we’re witnessing an explosion of narcissism aided and abetted by social media.
Somewhere along the line, the average person began to suffer under the delusion that the world needs to know that they are standing in line at the grocery store, sitting at home listening to music, or conducting any of the other menial operations that make up a typical day.
Social media, megaphone of morons, gives them a chance to share their ennui.
Add in the digital, look-at-me brag photos of kids, dogs, new clothes, the food one is about to consume, the scene out their car window, or – again – just about anything designed to elicit the random “cute,” “awesome,” “wow,” or other insipid responses designed to act as both acknowledgement and contribution to the discourse.
One poster seen just today asked for digital hugs due to having a bad day. Ahhhh. Too bad. Hang in there. Life’s a bitch and then you die.
Repeat, ours is a society of aspiring attention grabbers and a booming business to meet that demand is to be found in the previously mundane subject of gender.
I heard just two days back that there are officially 72 genders now. Where have I been?
I recall when it was just two and, incredibly, a look at a definition from the Oxford Languages dictionary online (and presumably up to date) reads as follows:
“Either of the two sexes (male and female), especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones. The term is also used more broadly to denote a range of identities that do not correspond to established ideas of male and female.”
What are the other 70 genders? I don’t want to know.
What I do know is that before long there will be 172 as troubled people looking for a bit of exclusivity have to create more niche genders.
There are a lot of people who might be described as gender confused – several teen-aged versions live on my street.
The difference now is that there is an institutional effort to identify, even recruit, these confused types and to encourage them to use this condition to make a statement.
I have learned a lot about attention-seeking from raising a son, dealing almost daily with granddaughters, and working briefly in group home settings for intellectually disabled adults.
All seek attention and it is up to the authority figure to channel that behavior away from the absurd. This sentiment, once the norm, now is the exception.
When you create a market for aberrant behavior, you get more of it. That’s why we have so many gender-confused males doing their best to dominate women’s sports, why we have gender-confused males raping girls in the female bathrooms, why we have a general attitude of pandering to those behaving oddly, lest they feel discriminated against and seek redress in courts, those courts often being populated by judges somewhere to the left of Vladimir Lenin on the political spectrum.
The powers-that-be are feeding the addiction for attention and we’re all poorer for it.
It reminds me of the famous Sybil multiple-personality case that was all the rage in the 1970s. See if this sounds familiar. The attention-seeking woman concocted a series of alternate personalities in order to get more time with her psychiatrist.
The girl knew the psychiatrist was pushing the multiple-personality phenomenon, so the girl obliged. A book and at least one movie followed. Along the way, the girl tired of the game and wrote a letter to the psychiatrist, telling her she’d been faking all along.
But there was too much momentum, so the letter was considered to be a case of the girl, or one of her personalities, trying to avoid deeper therapy.
You can read about this on npr.org, in a posting dated Oct. 20, 2011. I repeat, NPR, not exactly a right-wing reactionary media outlet.
The gender genie is out of the bottle and will serve its attention-seeking advocates well, up to such time as the general public gets fed up, sort of like with COVID masks and mandates. Until then, prepare to be bombarded with the agenda and a lot of negative consequences.
Sam Ross Jr's site 