The 'male group bond' isn't needed?

Maybe not. What other bonds can we do without -- bonds of friendship? bonds of family? and of course, bonds of love -- most particularly in our case bonds of love between older and younger males. (I've been reading Kipling's Kim -- awestruck at the way he portrays the origins of man/boy love -- how it functions, how it works, and well, what purpose it serves. But the Raj is gone so I guess we don't need such bonds any more. Whatever; no writer today could get away with what he pulled off as did Mark Twain a few decades earlier -- there's another bond for ya! Expect a post on the subject in a few weeks.) Sorry for displaying flashes of irritation. I am touched and even moved that you would find my posts essential reading. I read all of yours. We start from different premises but engaging with someone who disagrees with me so intelligently helps me to refine -- and sometimes revise -- my thinking. Thank you. You'll be aware (since you read my posts!) of my fascination with the Boyz Laabu phenomenon that has arisen in the East Much of my irritation expressed here was triggered by the latest writing (and one you tube) of an Australian faggot and "scholar" of Japanese pop culture, one Thomas Baudinette. I've been aware of him for some time but never took him seriously since everything that I had seen was weighed down in queer theory/feminist jargon. Women and "queers" are always right, straight men and "heternormativity" are responsible for all the world's evils. He discovered Thailand a few years ago and has produced the first "scholarly" work on how the Thais stumbled onto this Japanese art form and turned it into a global industry with great and influential inroads into places like Latin America. He taught himself Thai and has just recently come out with a book on the subject: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/boys-love-media-in-thailand-celebrity-fans-and-transnational-asian-queer-popular-culture_thomas-baudinette/ I was able to read some of it in a preview. It's not just that it's weighed down by all the queer theory/post-modernist jargon but that it reads like some piece of Marxist "scholarship" out of Honecker's East Germany -- we already know the broad outlines of the truth and our job is to fill in the holes. Propaganda and good writing cannot co-exist. I looked at his X/Twitter feed -- he announced that he is no longer assigning Murakami in his modern Japanese literature class because Murakami managed to get some feminists' noses out of joint for supposedly stereotypical women's characters -- this is the most important Japanese writer of the last 50 years and the first one ever to be read by millions of people outside Japan. It's like teaching a course on the Elizabethan theater and deciding not to assign Shakespeare because of the Merchant of Venice. I can't get the guy out of my head -- it's so enraging and yet at the same time, I can't fault him for noticing what is happening and being the first credentialed academic to call attention to its importance. Yet leaving it up to him means interpreting what has happened as some sort of LGBTQ+ strike against patriarchy and hetero-normativity instead of the way I see it: the re-emergence of the pederastic bond and an open celebration of romantic love, courtship, and commitment, albeit among beautiful young males. So when I see the word "queering" bandied about I ask myself, what do these people mean? Aside from being a code word to signify that one is member of the "good" tribe, it seems to be based on an underlying assumption that if one can "disrupt" various bonds (e.g., male group bonds; family bonds) then somehow a more equitable society can come into being that will allow everyone (except perhaps pederasts and straight males) to be who they want to be! These people think they are on the side of "progress" and all that is good -- but what I see is propaganda aimed at cementing the power of the rising managerial elite. Your mention of the rich women -- well, here's where we agree! The "rich" women you speak of are the primary beneficiaries of the managerial revolution of the last two generations - and the wielders of power. One thing I found so deliciously subversive in the Boyz Laabu genre was the way it portrays romance, courtship, commitment -- all those "bonds" that entitled women seek to "free" themselves from. It bears remembering that the genre was started by women for women and girls -- was it a way of protesting a world without bonds? Why do stadiums full of young women scream in ecstasy when beautiful Korean young men kiss and fondle each other on stage? What's going on here? What is being celebrated? What are they, well, "queering" if it isn't a world without bonds, without commitment, without friendship and love, a hell of a world of where nothing matters but cash, status, ambition, and "freedom" from all constraints, whether imposed by history, culture, or nature itself? Just because the emerging global slave state of late capitalism has no need for male bonds doesn't mean they go away. Sure, you can get rid of boy choirs, boy scouts, boys schools, little league, fraternities -- but you can't get rid of the underlying motive power beyond these institutions -- it keeps coming back -- often, to be sure, in feral forms. I grew up as a sissy, faggy boy who couldn't keep my mouth shut -- today, I would probably have been frogmarched into "transitioning" with ceaseless propaganda and the lure, as TPKA diogenes put it so well, of solving all my adolescent angst with a pill. Most male groups rejected me -- I was too faggy -- but I finally did find one (led, of course, by a pederast) and it saved my life -- it was the greatest experience of my life. So I'm not interested in a world without human bonds, in particular male group bonds, and will do all I can to prevent that from happening. (When you do follow my recommendation and watch I Told Sunset About You, please post your reaction. The series speaks directly to what we've been debating in ways that I think make both of us uncomfortable -- group-based male bonding plays a central role as does, well, "queering" this and that.) SR