Sad things

Usually Facebook is highly useful as an endless source of interesting things.  I can handily lose my entire day simply following links friends send me to articles that are excellent and interesting.  Sometimes though the links are to very sad things, like this one about 'How to be a man'.  It is an article on Business Insider about how to be a man the Goldman Sachs way.  Of course, it only applies if you are a rich, heterosexual, alcoholic, conspicuously consumptive man, one who thinks that the only pictures worth taking are ones where you are posing with a beautiful woman.  Not a gentle woman, or a woman you like, or a smart woman.  Beautiful.  Because arm candy is what matters, you see.

It irritates me greatly when publications put out this rubbish when it doesn't even have anything to do with their focus.  Is it really about business when you tell people that any attractive woman who is unaccompanied wants every man to start talking to her?  (Because who cares what the unattractive women want, amirite?)  Some of the hints in the article might actually make the atmosphere at a business better, like "Stop talking about where you went to college."  There isn't a lot of reason to intersperse "Don't be pretentious" type comments with sexist crap though, you can just stick to the good stuff.

There was one job I went to for only four days a few years ago where the culture of ritualized substance abuse was really in force.  Everybody drank heavily and mostly people went out and got high and then dragged their asses back into work again.  Work a lot, get wrecked a lot.  I certainly don't mind if that is how people want to be but when it becomes an obligation and when joining that culture is required to fit in I find it highly objectionable.  Same old deal in this article - a man is expected to be a regular at two bars so I suppose they need to be hitting the bottle seven nights a week just to keep up.

I end up somewhat stunned that big companies that focus on communication can publish this sort of crap and nobody steps in to say "Yo, this is crap." I guess if your corporate culture is suffused with people who live this way there aren't a lot of folks around who can see it for the disaster it is.  You end up with dreck being published and a bunch of good ole boys looking up from their scotch asking "What?  What's wrong with it? Damn feminists, am I right guys?"