Why does this post have 31 comments and 8 likes, and your most recent post has virtually none? I'd love to see your blog get more readers, and I don't know what I was doing for you that seemed to be working.
To a large extent I think it comes down to the subject. Ironically, posts about well-known, much-written-about subjects tend to be more appreciated than posts about subjects other people seldom talk about. People don't care that Eric Kauffman says that the religious will inherit the Earth. People also don't care when Tove K says that Eric Kauffman says that the religious will inherit the Earth. When I write about subjects people seldom talk about, it seems the reaction mostly becomes "Eeh... What?"
We have got a few subscribers through your blog. In general, we have a big marketing problem. When Scott Alexander mentioned The origins of the patriarchy post in one of his link lists it doubled our limited subscriber numbers. Obviously, even a tiny mention by a big blogger makes a huge difference for us. I'm starting to wonder if there is something I don't know but should know. There seems to be an unholy alliance between bigger blogs and smaller blogs, where the bigger blogs get cheap content through linking and the smaller blogs get much needed advertising. I don't know exactly how this alliance works and how I could get better at participating in it.
I think what you're observing about reader interest is really an observation about the Culture War in America. People know all about shoes, but they don't want to read about shoes. They want to read about the Culture War. "Patriarchy" and "Drag Queen Story Hour" are winning subjects for Americans. Your newest post would have gotten 50,000 likes if it had instead been titled "Woke Hordes Destroying Western Civilization: The Children Are Depending On You." Tove, I really, really like this blog you have with Anders as it is, but I'll forgive you if the level of clickbaitiness goes up 50%.
As for the give and take between small and large blogs, I think what you need to do is just keep leaning into AstralCodexTen, because you have a foothold there that comes from your having been linked. When a topic you know about (or just an OpenThread) is posted, comment early and often. Convince Anders to go as well to double your output. Have fun! That's why I started a blog at all, because I liked commenting.
The sad truth is that I'm a serial lurker - I'm actually not very good at commenting at all. Yes, I can chat with you rather easily, but you are part of my Dunbar number and that makes things different. In general, I'm too much of a slow thinker to be good at commenting on things.
Things are as they are. I have thought of getting better at jumping on the anti-Woke train, but I don't think I would make it in the competition with better writers. We will have to keep trying to carve out a niche of our own here, even if we are turning grey-haired in the process.
It was Anders who wrote that comment! He is much better at commenting than me. But yes, I occasionally write comments at ACX. For example, a few weeks ago I wrote about how much men jerk off these days. Just give me the right subject, and even I can produce a quick comment or two.
"[Some gay men] hunger so pathetically for the approval of assimilated straight society that they’ll show up to any gig that reeks of straightness. And what in the world is straighter than story time at a suburban library?
Meanwhile, straight progressives have their own kind of desperate aching—an aching to be seen as so abundantly tolerant that they will sit their kid down in front of a man dressed in what is clearly a sexualized imagining of a woman.
In other words, these two communities, both needy and full of self-deception, have become weird co-dependents."
Maybe I'm just too much on the left, but Drag Story Hour doesn't seem to be obviously a bad idea for me, which is a thing you assume. I can say that it is not properly thought through. The DSH website doesn't bother to persuade us why DSH is better than other ways of achieving its goal of "developing empathy, learning about gender diversity and difference, and taping into their own (children's) creativity."
Despite that, I can try to come up with some defense of how libraries, children and drag queen fit together. Libraries serves as a community space, where people can meet. Drag queens can (probably?) help some children to get somehow looser attitude towards gender.
Hm. Did I say that all people think Drag Queen Story Hour is an obviously bad idea? Maybe I did something close to that, and then I was wrong.
But I guess it is obvious to you that Drag Queen Story Hour is a provocative idea? Above all, my idea is that those who came up with this idea must have recognized its very provocative power. Everybody knows that mixing children and sexual stuff is the most provocative thing you can do. They just need to have known that. For that reason, I think people should be careful not to walk into the trap and get provoked unless it is necessary for real.
The problem is that conservatives exist, and they have their own values. Evangelical Christians might love Jesus Bible Hour, which would be a reasonable way of achieving the goals of "developing morality, learning about religion, and practicing their (children's) submission to authority." But these are not goals I agree with. Similarly, the goals met by DSH are not goals conservatives agree with, and conservatives are bound to react strongly, or even hysterically, to something like DSH which they see as threatening to their children.
Another possible explanation for Tove's unbridled publishing might be that I have been on "vacation" for the last week, with the kids, leaving her home alone with nothing to do but a house to build and a blog to write for.
Also - even though I doubt you'll pay much attention to this advice - I don't think you should rely on me to generate traffic for you. I'm happy to give you the publicity I can, but considering my numbers, you'll be lucky if I end up directing two people to Wood From Eden.
That’s crazy, I didn’t know that even Sweden had these events now. It seems like American ideology is very influential in the developed Western world. I’ve heard French politicians attack “wokisme” as well.
About DQSH, the idea that it is not a big deal would alarm a lot of parents. Many anti-drag parents here believe in conspiracy theories that DQSH is composed of pedophiles and “groomers” that want to brainwash kids. QAnon played a big part in pushing these theories too.
Fundamentally, I think Sweden was Woke long before America, although it wasn't called Woke then, but political correctness. It is a curiously national phenomenon. We had it in Sweden while they didn't have much of it in Denmark. In Sweden it peaked around 2013. Germany was about five years later. In 2015, with the big migrant wave from the Middle East, Swedes were already getting a bit wary. The Germans, on the other hand, spoke about this new opportunity to show their goodness as enthusiastically as Swedes had done several years before.
I guess that a man wearing a lot of make-up should be no more harmful to children than a woman wearing a lot of make-up, as long as he is not a pedophile for real. If people believe that the drag queen story hour is a child molesting scheme, then the provocation was really successful. Maybe more successful than anyone intended.
The meaning of Wokeness is somewhat fluid. In America, it originally meant being aware of discrimination and inequality, particularly regarding police violence against African Americans. The term broadened over time; I first heard it used by Hispanics in the mid 2010's to describe Generation Z, but transgenderism still wasn't a part of things until recently. Even today, I wouldn't say Islam is really related to Wokeness in the United States, though I can imagine people speaking about the Muslim-American experience in the context of Wokeness.
The term woke is very American, but due to America's cultural hegemony it is probably spreading through the world with unknown consequences. In Sweden, woke (in English) entered the vocabulary a few years ago and it is almost always used as a slur by right-wingers wanting to denigrate some leftist (usually, but not necessarily, related to LGBTQ...-rights). The Swedish establishment has no label they want to be known under, that I can think of. Probably because the Swedish establishment is rather small and have not had much reason to differentiate among themselves. No need to be "woker than thou" there. The preferred anti-establishment slur in Sweden has traditionally always been politically correct ("politiskt korrekt", PK). A phrase that has seen its meaning slide with the political opinions of the establishment. Originally it stood for tax and spend socialism, then it was feminism and then third world immigration. These days it is a bit of all that but also wokeish trans-rights. In contrast to Tove I would not say the terms woke and politically correct are interchangeable.
"Politiskt korrekt?" That's a lot of unvoiced plosives! And a different environment.
Political correctness here in America has a very different flavor from Wokeness; Political correctness was always a sort of gray, soft-core Orwellian Newspeak that made thoughts outside of the center-left bubble unthinkable. Wokeness, by contrast, feels like a loose coalition of passionate idealists on the far left.
The two things aren't incompatible, but if it weren't for cancel culture, I'd actually prefer Wokeness to political correctness. I'm a fan of socialism, and I grew up with communists, anarchists, pagans, and even Satanists, but since around 2015 whenever I've tried to hang around with hardcore leftists, it usually comes out that they want to do me genuine harm, and I just end up avoiding them. The lesson is: Don't yell about killing people or getting them fired, because then, they won't like you anymore.
They are not interchangeable. Woke is a name on a certain brand of political correctness. I just think that the political correctness that evolved in Europe before Woke arose in America is close enough to Woke to share its name.
In Sweden we never used the term Woke. We said political correctness, or, more often, the abbreviation, PC. In the anglosphere, however, people talk about Woke, which I think is a later version of the political correctness phenomenon. Some details differ, but I think the two phenomena are similar enough be roughly translated into each other.
Woke is a more specific term, describing a particular brand of political correctness. The Swedish language just lacks any word for that specific type of PC.
I wonder if there is tension between the new migrants and Wokeness itself? I know that in the Netherlands, a politician named Geert Wilders has argued that Muslims should not be allowed because they are intolerant, especially of gay rights. So in a way that is a Woke framing of anti-immigration.
Is that happening in Sweden too? Are the Muslim immigrants that come to Sweden less tolerant to Woke ideas? Is there any Geert Wilders type politician that pushes back?
There has always been a tension between third-world immigrants and Wokeness. In the 2000s and the early 2010s, denying that tension was a national sport. People bent over backwards to explain how feminist and modern Islam really is. There were also people stating the obvious, that homosexualy carries the death penalty in Islam. The Sweden Democrats tend to say such things, but they haven't managed to make an issue of it like Geert Wilders, I think. In general, public debate in Sweden is extremely tame and streamlined.
I don't think Muslim immigrants who come to Sweden know what Woke is. They have their own systems of beliefs and their own issues and they are many enough to be able to ignore the majority society a great deal. The savvier of them pick up concepts like Islamophobia, but in general they are mostly isolationist.
I've never heard that they are shy one way or the other, but if the penalty for homosexuality is death, I can certainly see why they might be about that. And in the countries which sequester their women away from social contact with other non-related men, I can also imagine why porn might appeal to non-homosexual men. I don't know anything about Syria in terms of how they treat their women. The data I read about was from big ISPs analyzing traffic via IP addresses, so it's likely true.
Why does this post have 31 comments and 8 likes, and your most recent post has virtually none? I'd love to see your blog get more readers, and I don't know what I was doing for you that seemed to be working.
To a large extent I think it comes down to the subject. Ironically, posts about well-known, much-written-about subjects tend to be more appreciated than posts about subjects other people seldom talk about. People don't care that Eric Kauffman says that the religious will inherit the Earth. People also don't care when Tove K says that Eric Kauffman says that the religious will inherit the Earth. When I write about subjects people seldom talk about, it seems the reaction mostly becomes "Eeh... What?"
We have got a few subscribers through your blog. In general, we have a big marketing problem. When Scott Alexander mentioned The origins of the patriarchy post in one of his link lists it doubled our limited subscriber numbers. Obviously, even a tiny mention by a big blogger makes a huge difference for us. I'm starting to wonder if there is something I don't know but should know. There seems to be an unholy alliance between bigger blogs and smaller blogs, where the bigger blogs get cheap content through linking and the smaller blogs get much needed advertising. I don't know exactly how this alliance works and how I could get better at participating in it.
I think what you're observing about reader interest is really an observation about the Culture War in America. People know all about shoes, but they don't want to read about shoes. They want to read about the Culture War. "Patriarchy" and "Drag Queen Story Hour" are winning subjects for Americans. Your newest post would have gotten 50,000 likes if it had instead been titled "Woke Hordes Destroying Western Civilization: The Children Are Depending On You." Tove, I really, really like this blog you have with Anders as it is, but I'll forgive you if the level of clickbaitiness goes up 50%.
As for the give and take between small and large blogs, I think what you need to do is just keep leaning into AstralCodexTen, because you have a foothold there that comes from your having been linked. When a topic you know about (or just an OpenThread) is posted, comment early and often. Convince Anders to go as well to double your output. Have fun! That's why I started a blog at all, because I liked commenting.
The sad truth is that I'm a serial lurker - I'm actually not very good at commenting at all. Yes, I can chat with you rather easily, but you are part of my Dunbar number and that makes things different. In general, I'm too much of a slow thinker to be good at commenting on things.
Things are as they are. I have thought of getting better at jumping on the anti-Woke train, but I don't think I would make it in the competition with better writers. We will have to keep trying to carve out a niche of our own here, even if we are turning grey-haired in the process.
You posted something somewhere, at some time. I will bet it was at Astral Codex Ten. That is how I learned about your blog.
It was Anders who wrote that comment! He is much better at commenting than me. But yes, I occasionally write comments at ACX. For example, a few weeks ago I wrote about how much men jerk off these days. Just give me the right subject, and even I can produce a quick comment or two.
Jesus, Tove! I was eating!
Quillette has a hilarious article on this by Sky Gilbert:
https://quillette.com/2023/02/26/the-sad-spectacle-of-drag-queen-story-hour/
"[Some gay men] hunger so pathetically for the approval of assimilated straight society that they’ll show up to any gig that reeks of straightness. And what in the world is straighter than story time at a suburban library?
Meanwhile, straight progressives have their own kind of desperate aching—an aching to be seen as so abundantly tolerant that they will sit their kid down in front of a man dressed in what is clearly a sexualized imagining of a woman.
In other words, these two communities, both needy and full of self-deception, have become weird co-dependents."
Maybe I'm just too much on the left, but Drag Story Hour doesn't seem to be obviously a bad idea for me, which is a thing you assume. I can say that it is not properly thought through. The DSH website doesn't bother to persuade us why DSH is better than other ways of achieving its goal of "developing empathy, learning about gender diversity and difference, and taping into their own (children's) creativity."
Despite that, I can try to come up with some defense of how libraries, children and drag queen fit together. Libraries serves as a community space, where people can meet. Drag queens can (probably?) help some children to get somehow looser attitude towards gender.
Hm. Did I say that all people think Drag Queen Story Hour is an obviously bad idea? Maybe I did something close to that, and then I was wrong.
But I guess it is obvious to you that Drag Queen Story Hour is a provocative idea? Above all, my idea is that those who came up with this idea must have recognized its very provocative power. Everybody knows that mixing children and sexual stuff is the most provocative thing you can do. They just need to have known that. For that reason, I think people should be careful not to walk into the trap and get provoked unless it is necessary for real.
Exactly. Sexualizing children is wrong on a level any parent understands.
Well, you're definitely on the left!
The problem is that conservatives exist, and they have their own values. Evangelical Christians might love Jesus Bible Hour, which would be a reasonable way of achieving the goals of "developing morality, learning about religion, and practicing their (children's) submission to authority." But these are not goals I agree with. Similarly, the goals met by DSH are not goals conservatives agree with, and conservatives are bound to react strongly, or even hysterically, to something like DSH which they see as threatening to their children.
Another possible explanation for Tove's unbridled publishing might be that I have been on "vacation" for the last week, with the kids, leaving her home alone with nothing to do but a house to build and a blog to write for.
I finally have a response; it's up at https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/are-the-woke-machiavellian
Also - even though I doubt you'll pay much attention to this advice - I don't think you should rely on me to generate traffic for you. I'm happy to give you the publicity I can, but considering my numbers, you'll be lucky if I end up directing two people to Wood From Eden.
Reading!
You have already directed eight! Maybe not people, but visits, according to Substack. I rarely do better myself with my attempts at being interesting.
...What? How did this happen?
I have a response, but it's too big for a comment; I'll let you know when it's posted
That’s crazy, I didn’t know that even Sweden had these events now. It seems like American ideology is very influential in the developed Western world. I’ve heard French politicians attack “wokisme” as well.
About DQSH, the idea that it is not a big deal would alarm a lot of parents. Many anti-drag parents here believe in conspiracy theories that DQSH is composed of pedophiles and “groomers” that want to brainwash kids. QAnon played a big part in pushing these theories too.
Fundamentally, I think Sweden was Woke long before America, although it wasn't called Woke then, but political correctness. It is a curiously national phenomenon. We had it in Sweden while they didn't have much of it in Denmark. In Sweden it peaked around 2013. Germany was about five years later. In 2015, with the big migrant wave from the Middle East, Swedes were already getting a bit wary. The Germans, on the other hand, spoke about this new opportunity to show their goodness as enthusiastically as Swedes had done several years before.
I guess that a man wearing a lot of make-up should be no more harmful to children than a woman wearing a lot of make-up, as long as he is not a pedophile for real. If people believe that the drag queen story hour is a child molesting scheme, then the provocation was really successful. Maybe more successful than anyone intended.
The meaning of Wokeness is somewhat fluid. In America, it originally meant being aware of discrimination and inequality, particularly regarding police violence against African Americans. The term broadened over time; I first heard it used by Hispanics in the mid 2010's to describe Generation Z, but transgenderism still wasn't a part of things until recently. Even today, I wouldn't say Islam is really related to Wokeness in the United States, though I can imagine people speaking about the Muslim-American experience in the context of Wokeness.
The term woke is very American, but due to America's cultural hegemony it is probably spreading through the world with unknown consequences. In Sweden, woke (in English) entered the vocabulary a few years ago and it is almost always used as a slur by right-wingers wanting to denigrate some leftist (usually, but not necessarily, related to LGBTQ...-rights). The Swedish establishment has no label they want to be known under, that I can think of. Probably because the Swedish establishment is rather small and have not had much reason to differentiate among themselves. No need to be "woker than thou" there. The preferred anti-establishment slur in Sweden has traditionally always been politically correct ("politiskt korrekt", PK). A phrase that has seen its meaning slide with the political opinions of the establishment. Originally it stood for tax and spend socialism, then it was feminism and then third world immigration. These days it is a bit of all that but also wokeish trans-rights. In contrast to Tove I would not say the terms woke and politically correct are interchangeable.
"Politiskt korrekt?" That's a lot of unvoiced plosives! And a different environment.
Political correctness here in America has a very different flavor from Wokeness; Political correctness was always a sort of gray, soft-core Orwellian Newspeak that made thoughts outside of the center-left bubble unthinkable. Wokeness, by contrast, feels like a loose coalition of passionate idealists on the far left.
The two things aren't incompatible, but if it weren't for cancel culture, I'd actually prefer Wokeness to political correctness. I'm a fan of socialism, and I grew up with communists, anarchists, pagans, and even Satanists, but since around 2015 whenever I've tried to hang around with hardcore leftists, it usually comes out that they want to do me genuine harm, and I just end up avoiding them. The lesson is: Don't yell about killing people or getting them fired, because then, they won't like you anymore.
That's interesting. I'm also a former leftist. I was even active in a communist youth organization during most of my teens, but quit at 18.
Wow Tove! Marx or Lenin?
They are not interchangeable. Woke is a name on a certain brand of political correctness. I just think that the political correctness that evolved in Europe before Woke arose in America is close enough to Woke to share its name.
In Sweden we never used the term Woke. We said political correctness, or, more often, the abbreviation, PC. In the anglosphere, however, people talk about Woke, which I think is a later version of the political correctness phenomenon. Some details differ, but I think the two phenomena are similar enough be roughly translated into each other.
In the U.S. the terms "political correctness" and "PC" have been around since the nineties. Woke started up when people were becoming injured to PC.
Woke is a more specific term, describing a particular brand of political correctness. The Swedish language just lacks any word for that specific type of PC.
I wonder if there is tension between the new migrants and Wokeness itself? I know that in the Netherlands, a politician named Geert Wilders has argued that Muslims should not be allowed because they are intolerant, especially of gay rights. So in a way that is a Woke framing of anti-immigration.
Is that happening in Sweden too? Are the Muslim immigrants that come to Sweden less tolerant to Woke ideas? Is there any Geert Wilders type politician that pushes back?
There has always been a tension between third-world immigrants and Wokeness. In the 2000s and the early 2010s, denying that tension was a national sport. People bent over backwards to explain how feminist and modern Islam really is. There were also people stating the obvious, that homosexualy carries the death penalty in Islam. The Sweden Democrats tend to say such things, but they haven't managed to make an issue of it like Geert Wilders, I think. In general, public debate in Sweden is extremely tame and streamlined.
I don't think Muslim immigrants who come to Sweden know what Woke is. They have their own systems of beliefs and their own issues and they are many enough to be able to ignore the majority society a great deal. The savvier of them pick up concepts like Islamophobia, but in general they are mostly isolationist.
I read awhile back that porn traffic - particularly homosexual porn - is most heavy in the Middle East. Curious, if true.
I lived in Syria for three months when I was 20 years old. I never got the impression that Arab men were shy about sexuality.
WTF you lived in Syria? What season?
And more critically, have you ever heard this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpoTtUnd7s4&list=OLAK5uy_nLwrcZJLKqwkwW1k3GLuic1hA9NUchja8
I've never heard that they are shy one way or the other, but if the penalty for homosexuality is death, I can certainly see why they might be about that. And in the countries which sequester their women away from social contact with other non-related men, I can also imagine why porn might appeal to non-homosexual men. I don't know anything about Syria in terms of how they treat their women. The data I read about was from big ISPs analyzing traffic via IP addresses, so it's likely true.