There are many, many things in the world which can be changed and many others which cannot, and those who learn to tell the difference are a lot better-adjusted and fundamentally happier. - “That Is So Hot!”
In the first week of this month, my blog was discovered by the men’s rights community and linked at a rate I had never before seen; my total traffic for the month was one and a half times what it was in March, and my average per day was almost as high as my total traffic for the previous August. Unfortunately, that also meant an influx of new commenters who were used to the ruder, more trollish, less civilized atmosphere which characterizes much of the internet outside of my walled garden here. Two columns grew directly out of that; in “Pendulum” I made it clear to the new arrivals what my views on feminism and men’s rights actually are, and in “House Rules” I laid down a clear set of behavioral standards for commenters. Even so, it took some time for things to settle down, and “That Is So Hot!” – a simple meditation on why men find certain things attractive in women – had the most active comment thread of all time until it was finally surpassed last August. “What the Hell Were You Thinking?” and “Neither Cold nor Hot” touched on similar subjects, attacking poorly-considered feminist thought in the process.
Since statistical columns had proven popular, I turned out several of them this month: “A Tale That Grew in the Telling” introduced the awful Estes & Weiner study and the plethora of prohibitionist garbage which has sprung from it; “Out of Context” demonstrated how other such numbers are derived from similarly poor and inapplicable studies; “Who Watches the Watchmen?” exposed the truth about “child abduction” statistics; “The Pro-Rape Coalition” showed statistical evidence of the positive effects of porn; “By the Numbers” examined a way of verifying my American sex worker estimate; and “A Narrow View” introduced the John Jay study’s findings on underage streetwalkers. Of course, there were also the usual monthly features: an updates column, a two-part miscellanea column, a Q & A, a fictional interlude (“Faerie Tale”), and a harlotography (“Valeria Messalina”). And I did both a serious column for Easter and a hoax (which almost nobody caught) for April Fool’s Day.
By April, we were nearing the end of a feature that had existed since the beginning, monthly biographies of people I knew personally; this month’s installment was “Lost Friends”. Another profile-type column was “The Coffee Klatsch”, describing three bloggers I often chatted with in those days who have since retired; one of them, Brandy Devereux, is discussed at length in “Feminine Pragmatism” and provided me a lot of material back then. But we also had a few firsts: “Subtle Pimping” was the first appearance of AHF’s crusade to turn porn into condom commercials, “Creeping Rot” documented the introduction of the Swedish model into France, and “Real Men Support Sex Worker Rights” was my first discussion of how hard it is for men to openly do that of late. Rounding out the month were “An Island of Sanity” (an anti-sex law is defeated); “They Just Don’t Get It” (police attempt to make ordinary business practices look sinister); Their Lips are Moving (cops try to pin the Long Island murders on “hobbyists”); “…And Don’t Forget To Wash Behind Your Ears” (the nanny state invades online dating); and “Dr. Schrödinger and His Amazing Pussycat” (which defies simple explanation).