Saturday Commentary and Review #94
Ukraine and Escalation, Poland vs. EU Crescendo, Private Equity as "Billionaire Factory", The Ellis Island Cohort and Edward Banfield, Sluttery and Regret
Six months into the war in Ukraine and the winners and losers that I listed on the first day of the conflict remain the same today:
Big Winner: USA
Winner: Russia
Loser: European Union
Big Loser: Ukraine
There have been a few surprises though:
a) USA has failed to rally the rest of the world against Russia, leading to sanctions being entirely a western affair (including Japan)
b) Russia’s economy has shown more resilience than previously thought. How long this resilience continues to last remains to be seen
c) Russia’s campaign has been very limited in scope and Moscow has yet to escalate despite pressure on Putin to do so
All of this combined has left us with a situation in which Ukrainian forces continue to be ground down into dust, repeatedly putting off any possible counteroffensives, especially the south of the country. At the same time, the US-led West keeps upping the stakes by sending more and more powerful weapons to the Ukrainian Army in order to degrade Russian capabilities as much as possible without inviting retribution. The Americans realize that the Ukrainians cannot win the war, which is fine by them, as their objective is to weaken Russia anyway.
The government in Kiev is now wholly reliant on western and western-controlled international funding. This means that even if they were to try to pursue a negotiated peace, the rug would be pulled out from under them just as Boris Johnson has twice already succeeded in doing. This means that diplomacy is not on the radar, because neither the Russians nor the Americans (and their yapping poodles in London) have met their final objectives yet.
There is a fear of escalation by both parties, the USA and Russia (Ukraine is just the American proxy), in that they will seek a quicker end to a war that has now lasted half a year. Russia’s chain of command is more unified than that of the the Americans, who seem to have the CIA and DoD working independently at times over the past few decades, sometimes at cross-purposes like in Syria (where the CIA’s jihadi proxies ended up fighting the DoD’s Kurdish proxies). President Biden has stated that the USA will not enter the war no matter what….but are others in his administration dismissing this directive? So far, they aren’t (thank God).
One of the saner voices throughout this conflict has been John Mearsheimer, legendary IR scholar at the University of Chicago. In this piece for Foreign Affairs he tackles the dangers of escalation from all sides, and why we should still be worried despite the fact that cooler heads for now have prevailed.
Why diplomacy is off of the menu for now:
To understand the dynamics of escalation in Ukraine, start with each side’s goals. Since the war began, both Moscow and Washington have raised their ambitions significantly, and both are now deeply committed to winning the war and achieving formidable political aims. As a result, each side has powerful incentives to find ways to prevail and, more important, to avoid losing. In practice, this means that the United States might join the fighting either if it is desperate to win or to prevent Ukraine from losing, while Russia might use nuclear weapons if it is desperate to win or faces imminent defeat, which would be likely if U.S. forces were drawn into the fighting.
Furthermore, given each side’s determination to achieve its goals, there is little chance of a meaningful compromise. The maximalist thinking that now prevails in both Washington and Moscow gives each side even more reason to win on the battlefield so that it can dictate the terms of the eventual peace. In effect, the absence of a possible diplomatic solution provides an added incentive for both sides to climb up the escalation ladder. What lies further up the rungs could be something truly catastrophic: a level of death and destruction exceeding that of World War II.
Expanded ambitions:
What’s more, the United States has tied its own reputation to the outcome of the conflict. U.S. President Joe Biden has labelled Russia’s war in Ukraine a “genocide” and accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of being a “war criminal” who should face a “war crimes trial.” Presidential proclamations such as these make it hard to imagine Washington backing down; if Russia prevailed in Ukraine, the United States’ position in the world would suffer a serious blow.
Russian ambitions have also expanded. Contrary to the conventional wisdom in the West, Moscow did not invade Ukraine to conquer it and make it part of a Greater Russia. It was principally concerned with preventing Ukraine from becoming a Western bulwark on the Russian border. Putin and his advisers were especially concerned about Ukraine eventually joining NATO. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made the point succinctly in mid-January, saying at a press conference, “the key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward.” For Russian leaders, the prospect of Ukrainian membership in NATO is, as Putin himself put it before the invasion, “a direct threat to Russian security”—one that could be eliminated only by going to war and turning Ukraine into a neutral or failed state.
Toward that end, it appears that Russia’s territorial goals have expanded markedly since the war started. Until the eve of the invasion, Russia was committed to implementing the Minsk II agreement, which would have kept the Donbas as part of Ukraine. Over the course of the war, however, Russia has captured large swaths of territory in eastern and southern Ukraine, and there is growing evidence that Putin now intends to annex all or most of that land, which would effectively turn what is left of Ukraine into a dysfunctional rump state.
The war continues because the fundamental question underpinning this conflict has not been resolved: what is to be Ukraine’s status: de jure/de facto NATO? Or neutral state?
American escalation:
Once the Biden administration concluded that Russia could be beaten in Ukraine, it sent more (and more powerful) arms to Kyiv. The West began increasing Ukraine’s offensive capability by sending weapons such as the HIMARS multiple launch rocket system, in addition to “defensive” ones such as the Javelin antitank missile. Over time, both the lethality and quantity of the weaponry has increased. Consider that in March, Washington vetoed a plan to transfer Poland’s MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine on the grounds that doing so might escalate the fight, but in July it raised no objections when Slovakia announced that it was considering sending the same planes to Kyiv. The United States is also contemplating giving its own F-15s and F-16s to Ukraine.
The United States and its allies are also training the Ukrainian military and providing it with vital intelligence that it is using to destroy key Russian targets. Moreover, as The New York Times has reported, the West has “a stealthy network of commandos and spies” on the ground inside Ukraine. Washington may not be directly engaged in the fighting, but it is deeply involved in the war. And it is now just a short step away from having its own soldiers pulling triggers and its own pilots pressing buttons.
The U.S. military could get involved in the fighting in a variety of ways. Consider a situation where the war drags on for a year or more, and there is neither a diplomatic solution in sight nor a feasible path to a Ukrainian victory. At the same time, Washington is desperate to end the war—perhaps because it needs to focus on containing China or because the economic costs of backing Ukraine are causing political problems at home and in Europe. In those circumstances, U.S. policymakers would have every reason to consider taking riskier steps—such as imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine or inserting small contingents of U.S. ground forces—to help Ukraine defeat Russia.
Possible Russian escalation:
Although Russia’s military has done enormous damage to Ukraine, Moscow has, so far, been reluctant to escalate to win the war. Putin has not expanded the size of his force through large-scale conscription. Nor has he targeted Ukraine’s electrical grid, which would be relatively easy to do and would inflict massive damage on that country. Indeed, many Russians have taken him to task for not waging the war more vigorously. Putin has acknowledged this criticism but has let it be known that he would escalate if necessary. “We haven’t even yet started anything in earnest,” he said in July, suggesting that Russia could and would do more if the military situation deteriorated.
What about the ultimate form of escalation? There are three circumstances in which Putin might use nuclear weapons. The first would be if the United States and its NATO allies entered the fight. Not only would that development markedly shift the military balance against Russia, greatly increasing the likelihood of its defeat, but it would also mean that Russia would be fighting a great-power war on its doorstep that could easily spill into its territory. Russian leaders would surely think their survival was at risk, giving them a powerful incentive to use nuclear weapons to rescue the situation. At a minimum, they would consider demonstration strikes intended to convince the West to back off. Whether such a step would end the war or lead it to escalate out of control is impossible to know in advance.
In his February 24 speech announcing the invasion, Putin strongly hinted that he would turn to nuclear weapons if the United States and its allies entered the war. Addressing “those who may be tempted to interfere,” he said, “they must know that Russia will respond immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history.”
Mearsheimer lays out the possible scenarios for escalation by both sides very, very carefully, but states that open conflict between the USA and Russia remains a distant prospect for now.
In the meantime, Ukraine continues to take a beating while it is being held hostage by its western backers who keep forcing Zelensky to hand over more and more of the country’s natural wealth to western financial interests like BlackRock (read this entire piece before addressing it in the comments, please).
Meanwhile, the conflict between Warsaw and Brussels is moving towards a crescendo.
Poland, the western bulwark against Russia, has received no grace from the EU and the US State Department despite doing the heavy lifting in terms of housing Ukrainian refugees, and providing the forward base for western support for Kiev in its war against Russia. Instead, it continues to be on the receiving end of threats from the Eurocrats in Brussels over its refusal to roll back its judicial reforms. At the same time, economic recovery funds continue to be held back from the Poles due to this fight. Poland is now knee-deep in conflicts with Russia, the European Union, and the US State Department.
On its conflict with the US State Department, I will quote from a piece that appeared in Saturday Commentary and Review #88:
The principal American in Poland Ambassador Marek (Mark) Brzezinski, has recently called for regime change in Warsaw. He said it this way: “I look at the way we cooperate with the Polish government in a completely different way. We have been consistent in our commitment to security, democracy, values, the economy and people-to-people contacts. One is not subordinate to the other. And we can do several things at the same time. There is no doubt that we unequivocally support Poland in terms of security. There is also no doubt that our approach to the issue of Polish democracy is the same…The priority issues that we see in Poland are equal for us in terms of value. We have worked together as friends in each of these areas: security, democracy, the rule of law, the economy, people-to-people contacts. We are grateful to President Andrzej Duda for some of the actions taken. As President Biden said in Poland, each of us has a job to do. In the Biden administration, we are also working on our democracy and the rule of law. ”
What the Polish audience understands Brzezinski is saying is that “democracy and the rule of law” mean the replacement of the PiS and its leader, Jarosław Kaczynski. By Polish “democracy” Brzezinski doesn’t mean Lewica, the coalition of Poland’s left parties, which are currently drawing 10% in the polls. The US, according to Brzezinski, is as ungrateful to President Duda for most of what he and the PiS are doing as the US is grateful for “some”. As for the Polish economy, it is going to pay $14.1 billion for its new F-35 fighter aircraft, Abrams tanks and Patriot missiles without discounts or domestic production offsets. By “people-to-people” contacts, what the US ambassador means is his special relationship with the sworn rival of the PiS in next year’s campaign, Rafał Trzaskowski; he is the Warsaw city major since 2018 and PO presidential candidate in 2020, when Duda narrowly defeated him.
I said then: "Thanks for holding the line, Poland. BTW, we’re gonna change your government too.”
Flash forward almost two months later and both the Poles and the Eurocrats are upping the temperature in the war of words between the two:
Poland's de facto leader Jarosław Kaczyński is vowing that his government will take no further steps to meet the European Commission's rule of law demands to unlock €35 billion in grants and loans from the EU pandemic relief program.
"We have shown maximum goodwill, but concessions have yielded nothing," Kaczyński told the pro-government Sieci news portal. He insisted that Poland has met its side of a deal with Brussels to backtrack on some aspects of judicial system reforms in return for the EU cash, but the agreement was "broken" by the other side. "It's time to learn lessons," he added.
"Since the European Commission is not fulfilling its obligations to Poland in this area, we have no reason to fulfill our obligations to the European Union," Kaczyński said.
The Commission demanded that Poland meet a series of "milestones" in rolling back changes to the court system seen as bringing judges under tighter political control in violation of the EU's democratic standards before it will agree to pay out the recovery funds.
The Polish parliament last month passed legislation that took some steps toward those targets, but those measures haven’t gone far enough, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told Poland’s Dziennik Gazeta Prawna newspaper.
Poland also faces a €1 million a day fine from the Court of Justice of the EU for not complying with an EU court order to suspend the country’s controversial disciplinary mechanism for judges — amounting to more than €280 million.
But Kaczyński insisted that the nationalist government led by his Law and Justice (PiS) party will do no more. He accused the Commission of trying to undermine rule of law in Poland and reminded Polish judges that their first loyalty is to Polish law.
He also added in some boomerbait that plays well to his base:
He sees the issue as part of a broader conspiracy aimed at subverting Poland and accused the Commission of trying "to break Poland and force it into full submission to Germany."
"We do not fit into German-Russian plans to rule Europe," he warned. "An independent, economically, socially and militarily strong Poland is an obstacle for them."
Threats of retaliation:
"If the European Commission tries to push us against the wall, we will have no choice but to pull out all the cannons in our arsenal and open fire," Krzysztof Sobolewski, the party's secretary-general, warned in an interview Monday with Polish state radio. He said Warsaw would adopt a "tooth for a tooth" strategy by vetoing EU initiatives, building a coalition to fire von der Leyen and dismiss the whole Commission as well as take legal action against Brussels to get the recovery fund money.
"We aren't excluding any actions," he said.
Polish conservatives have for some time worked under the assumption that they would have more freedom to maneuver within the EU, unlike the Magyars, because of their role as the anti-Russian rampart of the West. It seems that they may have miscalculated.
One of the funniest things that happened at the beginning of the war in Ukraine was the suggestion that the oligarchs in Russia be used to pressure Putin and to possibly cobble together a coalition to overthrow him. This displayed a complete lack of understanding of recent Russian history and the prevailing climate in Moscow politics. Mikhail Fridman, one of the original seven oligarchs of the Yeltsin Era and the only survivor alongside Vladimir Potanin to make it through the Putin Era, laughed off these requests in an interview with the Financial Times back in March. It seems that western journos thought Russia was run the same way as the USA.
One of the stories of the USA is how private equity is allowed to run amok. Matt Stoller suggests that this may change (although I am highly skeptical) thanks to the arrival of SEC regulator Gary Gensler who has indicated that he wants to take the sector head on. Stoller has allowed an anonymous piece to be posted at this Substack that sheds some light on why he is rather confident on this topic:
Over the last five years, the public has noticed private equity. If you mentioned that word to a doctor a few years ago, some would say they had heard the term. Today, it’s likely that fire comes out of their ears; even the stodgy American Medical Association warns of the perils of private equity. People are angry that rents are skyrocketing, as private investors from large investment shops buy up housing en masse. More broadly, the public is noticing that while their pensions seem to be empty, the people who manage them – like Schwarzman – throw multimillion-dollar parties with acrobats, camels and pretend Mongolian soldiers.
One result of anger from voters is that there’s increasing interest by politicians in addressing how out of control private equity has become, from eliminating tax concessions like the ‘carried interest loophole’ that let financiers get taxed at a lower rate, to legislation like the Stop Wall Street Looting Act that would force them to assume liability for the debt they put on companies and protect worker pensions in bankruptcy. But ground zero in the attack on corrupt forms of private equity, is now an agency that has been sleepy and corrupt for decades, until a serious regulator named Gary Gensler took it over last year: the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Just what is ‘private equity’?
Unlike a mutual fund, in which a manager collects money from investors and buys publicly traded stocks and bonds, private equity is private because it raises its money behind closed doors, instead of selling shares or floating bonds that can be traded on exchanges. (An LBO of an exchange-listed company is referred to as “going private.”) Investors put the money into funds administered by private equity firms, which then buy companies, under the pretense that they are fixing them up (not impossible, but not demonstrably the norm either), then selling them. The stated goal is to deliver returns to their investors. Private equity firms take fees and expenses, plus a percentage of the profits when companies are sold. That’s really all it is, a kind of finance that channels retirement savings into the purchase of real assets, the way a bank uses money in savings accounts to lend to companies.
So how did this significant industry come to be? In the 1970s, Americans saved for retirement in different ways. They had some personal savings, they used Social Security, but mostly had pensions through their corporate or government employer. Pension fund administration used to be straightforward. Pension managers took a pool of employee money and invested it in fixed-income products (mostly bonds, both government and corporate) or held in cash, with maturities calculated to meet the fund’s obligations as people retired. It wasn’t sexy, or particularly complicated. But it helped ensure a comfortable retirement for tens of millions of people. The country’s deregulatory turn in the 1980s changed all that.
Tighter budgets meant that states, which came under intense fiscal pressure in the 1982 recession even as Washington dialed back revenue-sharing, were less able to make contributions to pension funds on behalf of their employees. The declining power of unions played a role as well; they were less able (or willing) to force states to keep up contributions to pension funds. So, states began giving their pension fund managers more leeway to invest in publicly traded equities (stocks), a trend that the bull market of the 1980s only hastened. The Dow Jones looked like an easy ticket to greater pension fund assets.
Meanwhile, private equity – known as leveraged buyouts (LBOs) before a very conscious rebranding – was taking shape as a new form of financial engineering, in part because of legal changes in the 1970s and 1980s to deregulate finance. One episode in particular caught the attention of Wall Street. William Simon, a former Treasury secretary, bought Gibson Greeting Cards by putting up (with a partner and a few others) $1 million and borrowing the rest of the $80 million purchase price, then selling into a rising market 18 months later for $270 million. Suddenly, Simon was worth $100 million. (Schwarzman was one of the bankers on the sale; he described it as “the perfect case study” of what he wanted to do later at Blackstone.)
The 1980s were the Wild West:
In the 1980s, the LBO industry really took off thanks to the emerging junk bond empire created by Michael Milken. Private equity firms raised money from banks, insurance companies, and wealthy individuals, and put up a small share of a target company’s purchase price; the rest was debt, with which the company, not the private equity firm, was saddled. The real force behind the rise of high finance was a set of regulatory changes, occurring either through wholesale shifts in laws – like the 1982 deregulation of savings and loan banks that let S&L’s buy Milken’s junk debt – or the refusal of Reagan-era enforcers to enforce securities rules.
The peak of the 1980s frenzy came when Kohlberg Kravis & Roberts (KKR) purchased RJR Nabisco in 1988 for $25 billion, and put up only 0.06 percent (!) of its own money. By then, LBOs were about 30 percent of the overall market for mergers and acquisitions. The recession of the early 1990s, the bankruptcy of Drexel Burnham Lambert, and Milken’s conviction for illegal securities trading, took the steam out of the LBO market. But KKR had already taken the step that would draw public pension funds into Wall Street’s orbit.
And now:
The post-2000 explosion in pension fund allocations to private equity meant Wall Street no longer needed to persuade pension managers to allocate funds. Instead, managers desperately needed higher returns, thanks to low interest rates, fiscal pressure, and lagging contributions that have left many pension funds wary of their ability to support future retirees. Wall Street had begged pension funds for cash 20 years earlier; now pension funds begged for the chance to kick money into the latest hot fund.
Put simply, Wall Street’s private equity no longer had to compete for capital. It was there for the taking, from the retirement savings of Americans lucky enough to have a pension. Predictably, as competition waned in the battle for funds, private equity firms started upping the fees they charged pension funds. As one report documented, pension funds doubled the money they allocated to “alternatives,” the category that included private equity, between 2006 and 2012. And “these changes in investment practice have coincided with an increase in fees as well as uncertainty about future realized returns, both of which may have significant implications for public pension funds’ costs and long-term sustainability.” In plain English: at a time when the outlook for fully funded pensions was darkening, Wall Street was harvesting higher fees from them.
There are now more private equity-owned companies than there are companies listed on public stock exchanges like NYSE and Nasdaq. Last year, they bought up $1.2 trillion worth of companies in the United States, smashing the previous record of less than a trillion, set before the 2008 financial crisis, which marked but a brief interruption in the rise of private equity. The pandemic-induced economic contraction in 2021 was a boon to private equity because the Federal Reserve’s interventions in financial markets lowered the cost of debt.
Gensler and the ‘Billionaire Factory’:
Ludovic Phalippou, the University of Oxford scholar who coined the term “billionaire factory” to describe private equity, estimates that the industry harvested $370 billion in fees and expenses since 2015. A recent investigation by Bloomberg found that major public pension funds do not or cannot keep track of the fees and expenses they pay to private equity titans like Blackstone, Apollo, and the like. The common denominator is that private equity firms report data in scattershot ways, allowing for no comparability across companies. And they are notorious for padding expenses, such as charging their clients when they fly on private jets. SEC probes have resulted in warnings to this effect.
And that’s where SEC Chair Gensler, a white-collar sheriff type who knows finance well, comes in. In broad strokes, Gensler has proposed reviving the market for capital, in which those who would use the money actually compete for it. Under the plan, which is now the subject of public comment, private funds (private equity, hedge, and others) would be required to provided information to potential investors (like pension funds) about their fees and expenses, and their track records, in a standardized format. And it would prevent private funds from using their existing market power to force investors to surrender their rights to clear information, or to force them into sweetheart deals for the private equity firm.
Gensler is aiming at fees on the theory that transparency can result in more competition for money from pension funds, lower fees for private equity barons, and better capital allocation, as investors realize their money would work better elsewhere. (You can actually have an impact here, by offering your thoughts to the SEC. If you’d like to offer comments, email rule-comments@sec.gov and indicate file S7-03-22 or go to https://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed.shtml and click through the link on S7-03-22. Or follow instructions here.)
Systemic excess caused 2008. Is Gensler the real deal? I certainly don’t know.
Edward C. Banfield, San Francisco, 1945. Photograph by John Collier.
One of the great joys of reading older books (whether fiction or non-fiction) is that they are often very candid and present not just viewpoints, but descriptions and biases that would not be allowed in polite company today. This gives us, the reader, a peek into how some people thought back then, and what was acceptable to say as well.
My friend Second City Bureaucrat is digging through a lot of historical material with a focus on what he refers to as “ethnic narcissism”, and how it has helped shape US politics over the decades. In this short piece, he takes a look at Edward Banfield, an American Political Scientist, who cast his gaze on some of the differences between the various ethnic groups who formed the Ellis Island Cohort of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
On Banfield:
Edward Banfield’s The Unheavenly City[ seems rather quaint now given the advances in data collection and science since publication. Nonetheless, I’m still very fond of it because it preserves some of the frankness and accessibility that was once widespread in non-Marxist social science, and because it contains some of the qualitative speculation upon moral genealogy that’s so controversial (and thus so entertaining to talk about) today. Banfield, it should be noted, was one of the first professors to be “cancelled”, in his case by feminist students and professors, and seems to have inspired a lot of irrational rage that persists even to this day. Indeed, I’ve heard a mainstream academic complain of how irritating he found Banfield’s habit of limply dangling a cigarette from his lips during lectures.
and
The Unheavenly City presents an informal “logic” of metropolitan growth explaining the incentives and feedback loops which entice immigrants into cities, push upper classes out, create new upper classes and permanent lower classes, and invite old upper classes back in. While developing this logic, Banfield employs the concept of time orientation beloved by contemporary economists and libertarians to explain historic trends, one of which was the inconsistent rates of assimilation among white ethnic immigrants.
Banfield notes that by the 1830s, most of the American lower and working classes consisted of Catholic immigrants. For instance, in 1832, the South Boston Almshouse held twice as many immigrants as natives.[ii] By 1840, immigration increased rapidly, mostly from peasant cultures like the Irish and then later Italians and Eastern Europeans. Banfield speculates about the immigrant psychology of the time:
Coming from places where ordinary people had never had opportunities to rise by effort and enterprise, these immigrants, it is plausible to conjecture, tended to see the world as a place ruled by fate or luck. Most were probably more concerned with survival from day to day than with getting ahead, and the idea that one might get ahead by saving and investing – by some form of self-improvement – must have been unfamiliar to most and unintelligible to some. On the other hand, that they chose to emigrate strongly implies that they were not all present-oriented.[iii]
In contrast with old-stock American day laborers, illiteracy and innumeracy were common for these peasants, and many speculated that, despite the free resources afforded them, such as the “free mechanics libraries”, the peasants would end up in slums. This eventually spurred Massachusetts to pass the first compulsory schooling law in 1852, about which Banfield dryly adds, “[u]ntil then it had been taken for granted that anyone able to go to school would not fail to do so.”[iv]
Banfield indicates that the peasants rarely took advantage of the free services or became skilled laborers. While he concedes in the latter case that discrimination and prejudice could have been one obstacle, he remains convinced that the present-oriented time orientation of these immigrants was the primary culprit. His proof? Jewish immigrants:
The Jewish immigrants were very different from the peasant peoples. Like the Old Stock Americans, they were future-oriented. They believed, as had the Puritans, who were in many ways like them, that they were under a special obligation to assist in the realization of God’s plan for the future. The idea of making sacrifices in the expectation of future rewards came naturally to them. Even more than the Old Stock Americans, the Jewish immigrant worked to acquire the capital (not only money and other material goods but also knowledge, skill, character, attachment to family and community, and so on), that would enable him to rise.[v]
Banfield bolstered this argument by noting that from 1885 to 1890, Irish immigrants comprised 12.6 of the population but accounted for 60.4% of the almshouse population (13 do 60), 36.7% of the workhouse, and 15.5% of prison inmates. Eastern European Jews, in contrast, while comprising only 3% of the population, were not found in the almshouses and only made up 1% of the workhouse and 1% of the prison population.[vi]
Banfield speculates that the “Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite” probably discriminated against people who “showed little disposition to get ahead and in favor of those who showed much”, suggesting that it was the time orientation of the peasants that induced this discriminatory treatment by the elites.[vii]
This subject will often produce very fun discussion in circles that are bound by trust. Elsewhere, they will definitely result in cancellation.
We end this weekend’s Substack with a piece that has gotten a lot of views thanks to its title and the raunchy subject matter in it. Bridget Phetasy ‘regrets being a slut’. I guess it’s a PSA to younger women to not do what she did when she was their age……but I would hate to be her boyfriend or husband now, to be honest.
Unlike many other people who have read and reviewed Perry’s work, reading her book wouldn’t be some academic exercise in contemplating how liberal feminism has let women down. It wouldn’t be evaluating what those poor sluts over there have endured in the wake of the sexual revolution. Reading her book was personal.
I’m one of those sluts.
I’m a case study for her thesis. A cautionary tale. I knew this book was going to be difficult. And it made me realize it’s time to finish this essay –– one I’ve been trying to write for four years.
It’s a tough needle to thread. I’m grateful for the ability to control my reproductive cycle and make my own money. But that freedom has come at a price. The dark side of the sexual revolution is that even though it liberated women—unyoking sex from consequences has primarily benefited men.
I was first inspired to write this piece when a 19-year-old woman I used to wait tables with asked me: “Bridget, have you ever regretted having sex with a man?”
I laughed. “Yeah. All of them.”
That’s not entirely true. There was my first love in high school. And my first husband. But if I’m honest with myself, of the dozens of men I’ve been with (at least the ones I remember), I can only think of a handful I don’t regret. The rest I would put in the category of “casual,” which I would define as sex that is either meaningless or mediocre (or both). If I get really honest with myself, I’d say most of these usually drunken encounters left me feeling empty and demoralized. And worthless.
I wouldn’t have said that at the time, though. At the time, I would have told you I was “liberated” even while I tried to drink away the sick feeling of rejection when my most recent hook-up didn’t call me back. At the time, I would have said one-night stands made me feel “emboldened.” But in reality, I was using sex like a drug; trying unsuccessfully to fill a hole inside me with men. (Pun intended.)
I know regretting most of my sexual encounters is not something a sex-positive feminist who used to write a column for Playboy is supposed to admit. And for years, I didn’t. Let me be clear, being a “slut” and sleeping with a lot of men is not the only behavior I regret. Even more damaging was what I told myself in order to justify the fact that I was disposable to these men: I told myself I didn’t care.
I didn’t care when a man ghosted me. I didn’t care when he left in the middle of the night or hinted that he wanted me to leave. The walks of shame. The blackouts. The anxiety.
The lie I told myself for decades was: I’m not in pain—I’m empowered.
Looking back, it isn’t a surprise that I lied to myself. Because from a young age, sex was something I was lied to about.
She seems to have come to a realization.
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Next entry in the HIV/AIDS series should be up tomorrow or Monday.
When they get to «building coalitions» they may find out there is a non-zero number of people in Eastern Europe who view «strong Poland» with more suspicion than any «German-Russian plans». These people might of course be wrong in the long run (just as they were wrong in 1930ies) but still, they exist.