very compelled by elsters gender both in a transmasc and transfem way bc well elster transmasc lesbian? beautiful wonderful 10/10. she is a robot whose body was made to fit the standards of what people consider a woman to look like, as is the case with most other replikas, so once she starts being treated more like a person of her own instead of just a worker robot, its fun to think of her chafing against it. on the other hand theres elster who was made to look like a woman/her neural pattern is copied from a woman, but is still treated like an object thats only there to do the job. shes referred to by others as 'it' in a dehumanizing way altho not purposely degrading bc they dont consider her a person enough to see this as cruel to her in any way. and slowly she ends up regaining her personhood and a concept of gender that feels right, as much as it can, considering the circumstances

^me when i am listening and i want to hear your thoughts

ok so basically i think assigning a gender binary to original nonhumans is very weird. like if youre making a character based off an already existing species with sexual dimorphism sure!! obviously im not going to side-eye like. furry comics where the clear intent is to just have humanoid animals especially when the animal also has a vague sex binary like humans do (i say vague because, well, exceptions exist very often)

but when it comes to say.. endermen. or making an alien species. or even just an original species thats not just like. a bird combined with something or whatever. i think its very boring to just give them a male/female binary anyways. and i know theres still nonbinary characters in stories like this, but i mean like.. if youre making characters that arent supposed to be human, why emulate humanity? i could understand maybe if they were made to mimic humanity, or if theyre a minority in their vague sex binary, but ive seen many stories and art etc etc where the standard is clearly. male and female binary and the occasional nonbinary character

but. nature isnt really like that. sure in many species because of how sexual reproduction works theres the sex that carries and the sex that inseminates but theres also animals whose sex changes, or you could be creative and base the species off plants, or just make them able to both carry and inseminate, or even just explore asexual reproduction

and its only even more pushed with, well, exploring queer narratives with nonhumans. this isnt to say i dont enjoy them, i definitely do, but i feel like theres much more exciting ways to explore queer narratives with nonhumans that. isnt just like, oh they have Our gender system, or oh theyre just like us but different terms, or oh they Dont have gender but then they find out about Human genders and experiment!! i do have a slight bias with that last one though because i do think its one of the least explored in actual potential just that. in most cases its a little boring. give some spice to how robots would explore the gender binary rather than just giving them the appearance of a male or female and having them be vaguely clueless about gender. explore how humans would force the gender binary on them instead of just giving each a blank state explore how humans will inevitably force our gender system onto nonhuman creatures

and in fact, that last bit is Why i think i never connect easily to like.. say, endermen but they have a gender binary even though ingame you literally cannot tell the difference between any of them. its really just. humans will often assume gender even onto species that just would not experience gender like us. even trans creators will often do this, and i get it, like. the easiest way to tell the reader what gender a character is is by giving them human gender traits, like top surgery for a character belonging to a species that. doesnt have tits. or tits on a transfem character, uh. again, on a character belonging to a species that wouldnt have tits (yes this is vaguely about binary trans cranboo/oranboo depictions not to say i dont like those headcanons but it does make me tilt my head a little to like. think about the implications of endermen having binary sexes. why would they)

but.. i dont know. as a nonbinary person who connects a lot to nonhuman narratives i guess its disheartening. it also feels like, i dont want to say white centered or like a western ideal, because that would be inaccurate and i dont want anyone to imply that those could be driving reasons, but. it can sometimes feel like a passing over of the complex gender systems in various human cultures as well

i dunno. nature is very very varied in gender/sex presentation and not even just in animals. why limit your nonhuman species to how human sexes and genders work (and how sexuality works, even). get creative. at the very least if youre going to have gender markers dont make it be the tits humans are like the only species that works like that. come on

which is basically to say why are we giving endermen fucking tits i dont think they even have nipples they might not even be mammals at all i understand projection and all and wanting to show off trans experiences even but like cant we be creative. wouldnt that be nice and fun

ok i have an incredibly lukewarm take on pan discourse and its that its unnecessarily painful to everyone i see involved and often based on presumption of universal definitions wrt labels which do not exist. like imagine person 1, is part of LGBT community A. where they are, most bi people do not include trans/nonbinary people in who they are attracted to (or at least not *all* trans/nonbinary people). instead, the label pan is typically used for that. so they realise that theyre actually pan. but then person 2 who is in lgbt community B, where bi is typically assumed to include attraction to all genders, sees this and is hurt bc it implies that bisexuality excludes certain groups. both of these ppl are using those labels in a way that makes sense. in the place they are in, it communicates what needs to be communicated. 

it would be fucking great if bisexuality didnt ever mean “only attracted to cis ppl”, but i KNOW that in some places, most ppl would not consider dating trans ppl and trans women especially. like i have heard it from the source. and even if its shit that that situation even exists, it makes sense that ppl would make words to make who theyre attracted to super clear. now theres a whole series of convos u can have abt that and the impact it can have. but its going to happen until attraction to trans people (and not just as a fetish!) is mainstream. i promise you that. the other side of that is that of course, a lot of pan ppl will make generalising statements based upon their own experience of what bi and pan have meant, which may not apply elsewhere/to other ppl. and thats deeply hurtful to say the least, esp when bi ppl as a community are so often misunderstood and stereotyped.

but i think the only way to resolve this rn is to stop presuming that what bi or pan means to you is what it must mean everywhere. once we do that we can stop trying to insist that being part of a certain group means you hold certain values etc, and instead we can focus on the important matters at hand: fighting for the rights of lgbt ppl and esp in this case trans ppl and everyone whos attracted to multiple genders. we can ask ppl to think abt what it means to be attracted to a certain gender. we can ask what preconceptions ppl have abt what a trans person looks like, what a trans person acts like, and what a relationship with a trans person would look like. we can talk abt the idea that ‘trans woman’ and ‘cis woman’ (for example) are different genders and its implications, both in terms of relationships, and in terms of the way trans ppl are treated in society more generally. bc i think that those are the questions that sit at the heart of the whole pan discourse thing and they get left unaddressed bc we get caught up on labels instead.

also leaving that aside like... i think theres legitimate things that pan might mean outside of bi (clearly including trans ppl). like it can mean sexuality without gender preference, as opposed to bi, which can mean attraction to multiple genders, with a preference. it can mean more generally that things like gender and gender presentation dont affect the way you feel attraction. and a lot of this is splitting hairs i know but like if ppl find meaning in those things, they will use the label. and if they dont, theyll stop and itll fizzle out. clearly the label pan is doing something important for a lot of ppl and communicating something bi does not for them.

(disclaimer: i identify as neither bi nor pan and therefore actually dont have a horse in this race and may be talking out of my ass. thats for u to decide. also like im not overly attached to this viewpoint its just what im settled on rn after having seen this whole argument play out like 20 times over.)

this was written several weeks ago in response to asks i was receiving i am posting it now it is very long the longest i have ever made and it is not very well edited but here it is in this final essay i talk about how shitty rae is about black people in her writing as well as just me talking about how her writing sucks in general lets begin

hello everyone 

as you may know i have received a lot of anons in the last week or so about issues of racism in the beetlejuice community both just generally speaking and also within specific spaces 

i was very frustrated to not be getting the answers i wanted because i typically do not talk about what i do not see but in an effort to be better about discourse i went looking through discourse from before my time in the fandom and i also received some receipts and information from my followers and from some friends

keep in mind that the voices and thoughts of bipoc are not only incredibly important at all times but in this circumstance it is important that if a bipoc has something to add you listen and learn and be better

i admit that when this happened i wasnt aware of the extent of what occurred and im angry at myself for not doing more at that time and i want to work harder to make sure something like this doesnt go unnoticed again

im a hesitant to talk about months old discourse because i have been criticized for bringing up quote old new unquote but this is very important and i am willing to face whatever comes from to me

lets talk about this

content from our local racist idiot that may be months old but its important

putting my thoughts under a cut to spare the dash but before i begin obviously this is awful

lets fucking unpack this folks

right out the gate op states that she supports artistic freedom but then within a couple words she goes against that statement

being entirely canon compliant isnt artistic freedom and even so if this person has so much respect for canon they wouldnt be out here erasing lydias obvious disgust for beetlejuice in the movie or ignoring lydias age for the sake of shipping that shit isnt canon either 

also we love the quick jab at the musical there hilarious we love it dont we because god forbid a licensed and successful branch on a media have any standing in this conversation but whatever

now lets scroll down and talk about the term racebending

the term racebending was coined around 2009 in response to the avatar the last airbender movie a film in which the east asian races of the characters were erased by casting white actors in the three leading roles of aang sokka and katara 

whenever the term racebending is used in a negative light it is almost always a case of whitewashing like casting scarlett johansen in ghost in the shell or the casting of white actors of the prince of persia sands of time instead of iranian ones

this kind of racebending erases minorities from beeing seen in media and is wrong

all that being said however racebending has also been noted to have very positive after effects like the 1997 adaptation of cinderella or casting samuel jackson as nick fury in the marvel movies nick fury was originally a white guy can you even imagine

i read this piece from an academic that said quote writers can change the race and cultural specificity of central characters or pull a secondary character of color from the margins transforming them into the central protagonist unquote

racebending like the kind that rae is so heated about is the kind of creative freedom that leads to more representation of bipoc in media which will never be a bad thing ever no matter how pissy you get about it

designing a version of a character as a poc isnt serving to make them necessarily better it serves to give new perspective and perhaps the opportunity to connect even more deeply with a character it doesnt marginalize or erase white people it can uplift poc and if you think uplifting poc is wrong because it tears down white people or whatever youre a fucking moron and you need to get out of your podunk white folk town and see the real world

the numbers of times a bipoc particularly a bipoc that is also lgbt+ has been represented in media are dwarfed by what i as a white dude have seen myself represented in media is and that isnt okay that isnt equality and its something that should change not only in mainstream media but in fandom spaces as well

lets move down a bit further to the part about bullying straight people which is hilarious and lets also talk about the term fetishistic as well lets start with that

this person literally writes explicit pornography of a minor and an adult are we really going to let someone like that dictate what is and what isnt fetishistic

similarly to doing a positive racebend situation people may project lgbt+ headcanons on a character because its part of who they are and it helps them feel closer to the character and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that

depicting lgbt+ subject matter on existing characters isnt an inherently fetishistic action generally things only really become fetishistic when the media is being crafted and hyped by people who are outside of lgbt+ community for example how young teens used to flip a tit about yaoi or how chasers fetishize trans people

but drawing a character with top surgery scars or headcanoning them as trans is harmless and its just another way to interpret a character literally anone could be trans unless if their character bio says theyre cis and most of them dont go that deep so it really is open to interpretation and on the whole most creators encourage this sort of exploration because it is a good thing to get healthy representation out in the world

as for it being used to bully straights thats just funny i dont have anything else on that like if youre straight and you feel threatened and bullied because of someone headcanoning someone as anything that isnt cishet youre a fucking idiot and a weak baby idiot at that like the real world must fucking suck for you because lgbt+ people are everywhere and statistically a big chunk of your favorite characters arent cishet sorry be mad about it

lets roll down a bit further about the big meat of the issue which was when several artists were drawing interpretations of lydia as a black girl which i loved but clearly this person didnt love it because they have a very narrow and very racist and problematic view of what it means to be a black person

and before i move forward i must reiderate that i am a white person and you should listen to the thoughts of poc people like @fright-of-their-lives​ or @gender-chaotic it is not my place to explain what the black experience is like and it certainly isnt this persons either

implying that the story of a black person isnt worth telling unless if the character faces struggles like racism and prejudice is downright moronic 

why use the word kissable to describe a black persons lips now thats what i call fetishistic and its to another extreme if youre talking about a black version of lydia on top of that

the author of this post says herself that shes white so clearly shes the person whos an authority on the black experience and what it means to be a black person right am i reading that right or am i having a fucking conniption

how about allowing black characters to exist without having to struggle why cant a black version of lydia just be a goth teenager with a ghost problem who likes photography and is also black like she doesnt have to move to a hick town and get abused by racist folks she doesnt have to go through any more shit than she already goes through and if you honestly think thats the only way to tell a black persons story you need to get your brain cleaned

you know nothing about the complexities about being a black person and i dont either but you know wh odo black people who are doing black versions of canon characters they fucking know 

lets squiggle down just a bit further 

so the writer has issues with giving characters traits like a broad nose or larger lips if theyre a woman but if theyre a man suddenly its totally okay to go all ryan murphy ahs coven papa legba appropriation when approaching character design like are you fucking stupid do you hear yourself is that really how you see black men like what the fuck is wrong with you

none of the shit youre spewing takes bravery it takes ignorance and supreme levels of stupidity

do you really think you with your fic where a black lgbt+ woman is tortured and abused where you use the n word with a hard r to refer to her like that shits not okay its fucking depraved and yeah we know you love being shitty but like christ on a bike thats so much 

can we also talk about this

what the fuck is this fetishistic bull roar garbage calling this black character beyonce dressing her up in quote fuck me heels unquote are you are you seriously gonna write this and say its a shining example of how to write a black character youre basically saying ope here she is shes a sex icon haha im so progressive and i clealry understand the black experience hahahaha fuck you oh my god

on top of that theres a point where this character is only referred to as curly hair or the fact that the n word is used in the fic with the hard r like thats hands down not okay for you to use especially not in a manner like this jesus christ

oop heres a little more a sampling for you of the hell i am enduring in reading this drivel

oh boy lets put a leash on the angry black woman character lets put her in a leash and have the man imply hes a master like are you kidding me are you for real and what the fuck is with calling her shit like j lo and beyonce do you actually think thats clever at all are you just thinking of any poc that comes into your head for this 

also lydia fucking tells this girl that she shouldnt have lost her temper like she got fucking leashed im so tired why is this writing so problematic and also so bad

hold up before i lose my head lets look at some of her own comments on the matter of this character and what happens to her

hi hello youre just casually tossing the word lynch out there in the wide open world as if thats not a problem that is still real like are you fucking unhinged there have been multiple cases of this exact thing happening in our firepit of a country in the last five months alone like how can you still have shit like this up for people to read how can you be proud of work like this in this climate

and also what the fuck is that last bit 

what the actual fuck

i dont speak for black people as a white person but you do!? im sorry i had to get my punctuation out for that because wow thats fucking asinine just because one black person read your fic and didnt find the torture and abuse of your one black character abhorrant doesnt mean that the vast majority of people not only in the fandom but in the human population with decency are going to think its okay because its not 

i started this post hoping to be level headed and professional but jesus fucking christ this woman is something else white nationalism is alive and well folks and its name is rae

if you defend this woman you defend some truly abhorrant raecism

editors notes 

in order to get some perspective on these issues more fully some of the writing by the author was examined and on the whole it was pretty unreadable but i want to just call back to the very beginning of this essay where the person in question talked about holding canon in high regard but then in their writing they just go around giving people magic and shit and ignoring the end of the movie entirely like are you canon compliant or nah 

the writing doesnt even read like beetlejuice fanfic it reads as self indulgent fiction you could easily change the names and its just a bad fanfic from 2007

also can we talk about writing the lesbian character as an angry man hater like its 2020 dude and als olets touch on that girl on girl pandering while beetlejuice is just there like here we go fetishizing again wee

i cant find a way to work this into this already massive post but

im going to throw up

okay so thats a lot we have covered a lot today and im sure my ask box will regret it but this definitely should have been more picked apart when it happened

please feel free to add more to this i would love more perspectives than just my own.

Pssst.... gush about some thing you’ve wanted to for so long but haven’t found the ask to do so! I really like reading your metas or off-the-wall posts.

aw ty!

mmmh usually i just crank out a random meta when i feel like it, which i havent had the energy to do in a while. so have a lot of hcs about gem language, gem society and how it resembles a totalitarian system cause why not, this is already a dystopia. 

goes from cute to shady real quick, have fun

Gem Vocabulary

gems have no gender, they dont age, they dont reproduce. the whole vocabulary about relationships, aging and sex must be completely different in gem language. they probably lack a lot of words we commonly use, and have unique words for things we dont have (like winter duty, patrol duty... i wouldnt be surprised if gem language had unique grammatical features for those)

this is one of the reasons why its so unfair of aechmea to call cairn ‘wife’ and ‘princess.’ the gems have no concept of wife-ness, we dont know if a gem equivalent of marriage exists, but its definitely much, much different from what the lunarians (and us) perceive as one.

do gems have anything akin coming of age? this could be weird bc gems can potentially live forever, but they can also be abducted by the lunarians at any time, so who’s to say how long a lustrous will live? how do you calculate being ‘of age’? is it by calculating the average life-span of a gem? 

how do they measure time and seasons? we know they have winter and summer and phos mentions ‘spring’ in chapter 20, but what about months and lunar phases? do they have words for that or are months just too small a timeframe for the immortal lustrous to utilize? how do they measure time? in hours and seconds? weeks? different units altogether?

Gem Relationships

similarly, gem relationships are codified in a completely different way. we know they have a concept of romance bc dia ships phos and shinsha and makes comments here and there about other gems being in love. 

at the same time, the relationships btw alexandrite and chrysoberyl, padpa and rutile, ghost/cairn and lapis etc are little different from ‘pure’ sibling/sibling relationships or senpai/kohai relationships.

this is not to say that they’re all romantic in nature, but the way they’re codified in canon (especially in the way the characters grief for their partner) makes me think that even if the gems have no blood/physical kinship with one another they have a very articulated system of establishing family bonds.

dia and bort are clearly siblings, but the same can’t be said, for example, for rutile and padpa, even if they were partners and even if they display a similar junior/senior relationship. this means that relationships are predicated on something else in hnk, and kinship, family and romance are all codified in a different way.

think of vulcans in star trek: physical contact such as two fingers touching, holding hands and kissing is unknown of (save for very specific circumstances). and vulcan people have a completely different way of expressing intimacy and romance than humans. 

this makes me think: just how many canonically romantic relationships are there in hnk (if any) that we’re simply unaware of bc the way gems codify and express romance is so different from ours? is romance even common? rare? perceived as weird? useless? 

what about other relationships? the gems use ‘little brother/ older brother’ but what if this is just japanese approximations? what kind of relationships can lustrous language really express and how different are they from ours?

Imagination

as @ruddy-rutile​ pointed out some time ago, the gems lack a concept of fantasy. thats why i posted that panel about alex’s original lunarian designs. sure, it’s funny, but it also makes you think: these gems are not raised to think outside the box and they can do it without being told so only under exceptional circumstances.

of the vast library of texts that ghost (and lapis) used to take care of, just how many are novels and fiction? none of them? a small amount? a decent amount? in a society thats as focused on practicality, efficiency and conservatism as the lustrous’, how is fiction perceived if perceived at all? 

is there art? red beryl’s craft comes very close to art when they express their feelings about ‘fashion for fashion’s sake,’ but it’s an exception that the other gems find hard to grasp.

phos is often told to stop fantasizing about the world and get things done, the only tale we know the gems are told is the actual story of how their world came to be. the gems always talk about real things, stuff that happened, and make and do things that have a practical use. 

even bort’s jellyfish diary is just made up of a recollection of what happened when they tried to feed them. still, the fact that bort names the jellyfish makes you think that these rocks do have potential for fantasy, theyre just not used to it

Totalitarianism and Privacy

to make this even more shady, here’s your gentle reminder that:

- gems’ rooms have no doors. the only door ive been able to find is the one in shinsha’s room (ch 2) and that is because shinsha’s room is closed off to other people and full of mercury. its like putting a patch on smth you dont want to deal with (much like shinsha’s whole character arc tbh)

- the gems have little to no free time. or their free time can be revoked any time in case an emergency occurs, sensei is napping etc. the gems’ time is rigorously managed by jade, euc and sensei. each gem has a place to be and a time to be.

this means that a missing gem can be found at all times and slackers can be identified very easily. they all have a job and they have to follow it. this is not to say that they have no fun ever, but leisure time is rare and (at least as far as we know) its not contemplated when tasks are assigned each day.

the mere fact that there is a morning assembly and tasks are assigned each day makes you think. is this communism? is this totalitarianism? but most importantly, is this a scary dystopia that hits you in the face like a brick the third time you reread ch 2?   

- sameness > equality. i already went over this in the past. gems society underlines sameness and conformity over anything else. the gems think theyre equal but theyre actually ‘similar.’

a system based on equality emphasizes differences so that every individual can do the best with what they have got and get back what they need, according to their personal needs. 

these gems emphasize sameness: everyone is upheld to the same standards, even when those standards dont match with a gem’s unique characteristics (ie phos cannot be a fighter, no reason to keep saying stuff like ‘if only you were stronger/you’re useless’ etc. they’re a rock with an imagination in a world where dull reality is the rule. just make them write theater plays and play with slugs with shinsha, wth)

It’s real 1984 hours:

all of the above means that:

- your sense of self is subordinated to the group. if you dont belong you’re simply a nothing. at times, the gems almost display a collective consciousness (a pretty hostile one too): everything must be decided together and done together

- you are what you do. gems identify completely with their job. thats why a job is so important, thats why this system is so fucked up. self worth is not inherent, it depends on what you can do. talk about a breeding ground for mental health issues 

- you dont have a saying in picking your career or deciding for you future. thats up to sensei (and maybe euc and jade). unless you have a very strong affinity with a certain task (like red beryl and alex)

- youre expected to follow orders all the damn time. no matter how much sensei wants his gems to exert free will, they still prefer to do what theyre told. ill admit, its much easier than taking your life in your hands and decide what youre gonna do with it, but damn if it isnt depressing. and childish

- euclase and sensei are the authority. sensei and euc are the powers that be. in the sense that they assign tasks, they decide on times and battle plans, on purpose etc. lets not forget that euc was the one to take on sensei’s role after he ‘resigned.’ 

i wonder what would happen if euc were abducted and the gems had no one to follow anymore, no orders. who’d be the new leader? would there be one? lets not forget that no matter how gentle euc is, phos is shit scared of them.

- thought police is a thing. to end this meta on what is probably the shadiest note: surveillance is a thing. the gems report on each other, it’s thought police, no sugarcoating this. 

there’s no privacy, no secrets. even antarc reads rutile’s diary. this goes from cute and childish (’you did this one wrong thing, im gonna tell sensei’) to absolutely fucked up (’you did this one wrong thing, im gonna tell sensei’)

G!P characters aren't necessarily trans, it seems pretty offensive that just because they share the same genital configuration as trans people (sometimes temporarily) do, that they should be deemed trans. There is so much more to being a trans person, especially the identity struggle that is just not in these characters.

You’re literally thisclose to understanding. 

There is absolutely more to being trans than our typical genital configuration at birth. You don’t need to tell me that, I’m a trans woman, I know this intrinsically.

When it comes to the g!p trope, he’s some major points of what we know:

It became a known, if rare trope as trans porn started taking off in the late 80s and early 90s. As trans porn became more popular, it also became more prevalent in wlw fandom, solidifying its presence in the late 90s/early 00s, making a bit of a jump in popularity when the a/b/o trope took off during the height of the Supernatural fandom.

As a trope, its sexual content heavily mirrors the core elements of trans porn. It doesn’t deviate from that framework. 

The g!p characters overwhelmingly possess the major aspects of transmisogynistic stigmas that get passed off as erotic taboo elements for people who aren’t us. The same things that amplify the cis gaze’s taboo fantasy gets us abused, exploited, hurt, isolated, and killed.  

I could go on for a few hours on everything that makes g!p function as a trope, but I’ll limit myself and leave you those to chew on. You can look through my archived posts for some more detail on the nuances and specifics if you want.

But here’s what we also know:

Trans women are the overwhelming majority of women with penises. We’re virtually the only women with penises that cis people and trans people alike have come across in any form of media content. 

This means that we are the framework worked off of when people think of women with penises, and we are the ones affected by media representation of women with penises.

When people create media including women with penises, the penis generally exists in that content as a vehicle for a variety of desires. When a marginalized person is desired for various physical aspects of themselves, with the substance of their character, their lived experiences, their diversity all tossed away? That is called fetishization.

Your argument breaks down to be essentially that because people fetishize trans women’s bodies and create media content through that fetishized lens, that those g!p characters aren’t necessarily trans, because there’s more to being trans than those fetishized parts of us. It’s an argument that fetishized caricatures of marginalized people aren’t necessarily those marginalized peoples.

It’s a very cart-before-the-horse surface level perspective. Think of all the harmful media stereotypes out there and ask yourself if people shouldn’t be upset about them because they clearly don’t reflect the reality and complexity of the people they’re negatively representing.

Let’s take the well known character of Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. Hannibal Lecter, at one point, remarks that Jame isn’t a trans woman. But every frame of Buffalo Bill’s existence in that film works to play on transmisogynistic stereotypes. Every single scene with that character sends the message that trans women are delusional, dangerous sexual predators. But since an authoritative character claims Buffalo Bill isn’t trans, am I supposed to declare the film free of transmisogynistic representation? 

What about Rocky Horror Picture Show? Again, the main villain is an amalgamation of all the common transmisogynistic stigmas at that period in time, fused into a single murderous, rapist, alien entity. We also know the creator of RHPS considers (in the nicest light it can be stated) trans women to be cross dressing ‘third sex’ individuals, not actual women, and doesn’t believe anyone assigned one binary gender can actually be the other binary gender. But apparently, since it doesn’t explicitly say Frank N Furter is a trans woman, it’s not a problem? It’s not transmisogynistic representation?

No. Media literacy has taught us enough to know that there’s tremendous transmisogyny afoot in those two cases. 

So there’s parallels with g!p, obviously. You get a lot of folks literally removing part of a trans woman’s experience and playing around with it and experimenting with it through people who aren’t explicitly trans women. They’re treating trans women as a collection of ideas and kink potential to be picked apart like a berry patch instead of real human beings. Even if they say it’s not a trans woman, the result of their effort is a character that is all the fetishized trans woman elements, often a fair bit of the stigmatized elements, minus all the meaningful experiences. If I carve a pumpkin and empty all the insides out of it, and put a candle in there, it’s still a pumpkin. A Jack o Lantern, sure, but still a 100% pumpkin.

And that’s bound to happen. It’s inescapable.

I mean, when 99% of cis folks don’t understand how trans women tend to be sexually intimate… when they don’t understand what dysphoria is and how it works and how it can affect us physically and emotionally…when they don’t understand almost any of our lived experiences…then they’re not going to be able to accurately portray us even if they wanted to.

And I’ve read enough G!P fics where authors wrote those as a means of trying to add trans rep. but because they didn’t understand us at all, it wasn’t remotely representative, and it was entirely fetishistic.

So while the g!p trope was built on the foundation of trans women’s fetishization, and all such characters are inherently and implicitly trans women if not explicitly, they absolutely don’t reflect our realities, whether because of a lack of understanding, or an overriding fetish, or a cissexist & fetishistic mix-and-match approach, or what have you.

It is trans fetishization, it is transmisogyny, and they are erasing us through these works by overwhelmingly flooding the market with misinformation and messaging that ultimately does come back to bite us in the form of sexual violence, community exclusion, enhanced cissexism, .

Because it’s late and I’m exhausted after working and commuting, I’ll cut things a bit short and I’ll quote trans guy user SynthDicks here on his take on Mpreg a ways back, which was very on point and relevant to this discussion

like… you cant write about pregnant men in a way thats divorced from trans men. writing about one way in which bodies adjacent to trans manhood are sexy or fun or desirable, while writing some complicated world in which the rest of the ways trans male bodies are characterised are done away with is creepy and transphobic. all it means is that both bits of the revulsion/fetishisation complex that trans bodies are placed under happens at the same time …

and using trans manhood purely for a pregnancy arc- erasing all the experiences that come from being a trans man- for the purpose of focusing on that one aspect of trans bodies is dehumanising and fetishising. its a fetishisation of trans bodies and a revulsion at trans experiences. these arent opposing statements. theyre the same statements

I really, truly hope you’re a little closer to understanding how this all works after all this rambling. If I had the energy to make a properly structured and cohesive post, I would, but alas. 

I CAN'T REPLY BC I'M ON DESKTOP AND I DON'T KNOW HOW TO REPLY ON DESKTOP (is that even an option??) but i agree!!! what are you thoughts, feel free to Discuss i will defend you from Bad

so the discussion here will be on people who dig stuff up from the past to use to shit on other people if that makes sense?? ill just be sharing my opinion and probably what caused me to share in the first place,,

first of all if anyone other than falen reads this id like to say that im all for discussing opinions so if you have one that differs from mine please do share as well! and if you think my opinion is wrong/incorrect let me know too!! id love to hear what others think honestly

next!! onto the actual topic of bringing up the past,, i understand that if whatever was done is relevant and if they havent apologised then it’d make sense to include it when “calling out” to add to the sources of whatever behaviour but if the person (whos being targeted) has shown visible remorse/changes/understanding then i feel like there’s no need to bring it up again? there’s also the thing where people don’t check the dates of sources so if let’s say a tweet was brought up and it was from 2015 people don’t bother to check and immediately assume that whatever said is true in present times 

in the event that whoever’s opinion hasn’t changed and they’re still quite clearly bad then bringing up the past is fine since, it helps to indicate how theyve been consistently racist, homophobic, etc. whatever the topic is then thats alright of course

however, in my opinion id rather if shit from the past wasnt brought up if the person has apologized for it,, i know it still doesnt change the fact that they used to be like such but at least theyve learnt from their mistake so theres no need to call them out for that?? if what youre calling them out for is e.g. racism then use something thats from the present and something thats accurate ensure that what youre using cannot be taken out of context. its always better to check multiple sources and see what others say first before jumping to conclusions - unless the cold hard truth is stated there then yeah. theyre problematic and are doing shit things. 

idk if this is a relevant example but you know. im sure because of the way we’re brought up, we were all homop/hobic at one point of our lives (usually when we were younger) thats because of how in media all we see are het relationships,, because everyone we know is in a straight relationship and being gay was “not normal” thats what everyone thought. its what i thought. if you dug shit up from me from the past youd probably be able to see me making fun of people who’re gay and yeah i admit i was probably against the idea of dating someone of the same gender because of the way everyone would put it 

but thats because of the environment i was put in, as soon as i started using tumblr it was evident that being gay was not wrong and that it was okay to be bisexual, asexual, whatever it is! so idk what i want to say i went off tangent its just that its better to fact check before anything else because,, throwing false information wont do anyone good. 

despite saying this i know that itll hurt seeing your faves do something you dont stan for,, and even if they have apologized for it itll really suck to see such behaviour coming from someone you love - feelings of anger/sadness are normal in such cases as long as you know that what theyre doing is wrong and want to educate them,, people who blindly defend their faves arent helping anyone especially not themselves,, thats what i think anyway!! 

i know its hard to accept when your fave does something wrong but i chose to see the good, and even if its been a few months, i wont forgive my fave for doing whatever wrong thing theyve done and thats fine! you dont have to force yourself to unstan because theyve done something problematic!! likewise, you dont have to force yourself to keep stanning because if they make you feel worse than happy then theres no point sticking around!! do whatever you think is best for yourself. 

@circusbabys HOLEY MOLEY okay here i go!!!!! thabk u my sweet friend.. also lets hope tumblr doesnt mess up the spacing since im on mobile xD A- i have a few autie friends!!! most of them are on here (like u thwompus!!!) but otherwise i dont have many autistic friends irl. i have a friend at the b&g club but we are very different and i had 2 friends from my old school but we dont rlly talk anymore. if i do have any more autie friends irl, theyre undiagnosed i guess ? B- i love visual stimming so much!!! i have a blog dedicated to just visual stimmy videos @pokemonyello (shameless self promo lol) also i love tactile stimming even though my skin picking makes it restricting to tactile stim much. i also totally dig chewing on things from food to.. not food. i wish i had a chew necklace that i could wear in public :P i have one but its big and meant for babies so.. needless to say i dont wear it much C- i kkkkind of answered this in the last one? but more specifically i like stims like rocking when i can, rubbing silky textures like my lanyard/baby blanket (i like smooth textures like the silicone charm on my lanyard i have to stop myself from chewing on it haha) and i love rubbing my fingers together i was literally just doing it while i was trying to think of another example lol!! D. when i was rlly young just barely before i was introduced to pokemon i was really fixated on animals, specifically like insects (like satoshi tajiri!!) and dinosaurs! i looooved dinosaurs and owned lots of books on them. i also really loved steve irwin the crocodile hunter i sent a letter to him when i was 5ish :3 and of course pokemon came around eventually lol! E. four fun facts!!! hmm heck. im bad at this, i can usually come up with facts depending on random context better,, 1. did u know that the Official pokemon mascot was almost clefairy? they eventually decided pikachu was more gender neutral i gues (u kno... bc clefairy is Pink... thas for gorls only everyone knows) 2. did u know pokemon stadium in the us was actually technically the intended expansion to japanese pokemon stadium? it was meant for the nintendo 64 disc drive as an upgrade to the original game but the disc drive did not do well so they just sold it as pokemon stadium (1) in the us as a separate game. 3. super smash brothers for the 64 actually started out as just a plain ole fighting game! the liscensed characters came into the picture later because the makers thought it would make the game more appealing to have it star characters like mario, link, pikachu, and captain falcon. 4. (this one i just learned a couple days ago!) in super monkey ball 2, in the name selection before you start story mode, there is every letter in the alphabet except for lower case w! you can type a capital w but no lower case. also some levels have background things removed to compensate for space, like how the fish is removed in the level "URL" and the vegetables in the soup are gone from... the level with the multiple wormholes and the tilty small paths? i forgot the name of that level :'3 also in one of the levels one of the background assets is randomly yellow, even though that part isnt yellow anywhere else. i forgot which level this one was too haha. F. im a mixture of being loud and quiet! around people i dont know im usually quiet and avoid talking/interacting with people but if youre someone im comfortable with its hard to get me to even stop talking and i can get accidentally pretty loud xD G. usually avoider? i think? if im alone at home i seek sensory input but i avoid unexpected/uncontrolled noise or overwhelming feeling textures a lot H. lots!!!! i love big sweaters, shirts, pants, stuff like that! sometimes stuff like skinny jeans or leggings is okay but not too tight. same with shirts. i end up feeling really uncomfortable in tight clothes I. honestly i dont get many autistic related accomodations from people since im not diagnosed and im not out to most people.. but sometimes my mom will give me apples in my lunch but when she does she peel s the skins off of the slices because she knows i cant stand the texture of the skins. she is so kind :) J. https://youtu.be/rUEVjLvO6FA this video of me when i was about 11? very much me very much an autie child... if u watch it u can tell i clearly havent changed much hahaha K. usually my fav sensory outfit is about what im wearing now, except im wearing not as comfortable tightish pants also my shirt isnt as comfortable but i wore it bc its a pokemon shirt... so thats good. but my hoodie rn is a Good L. when i was little i always kinda thought they looked like hamster paws but i didnt really call them that? i used to do that with my hands bc my friend did it too but my mom stopped me lol. now i like raptor hands and kitty hands thats rlly good M. i always loved imitating animal noises, especially cats! i love meowing at my cat back when she does it :P also this isnt Animal mannerisms, but my mom said i used to try to make facial expressions and talk like i was a cartoon character which is still kinda how i see myslef haha! also i used to pretend i was pikachu even if i was just alone also one day i only talked to my mom in pikachu speak (pika pika!) N. i used to love mac and cheese but Only the kraft kind with the skinny noodles, i would not eat any other shape of noodles haha. also i went through a phase where i wouldnt eat anything with melted cheddar on it (which is weird bc now i love cheese) also one of my favorite foods in the whole world when i was in 1st grade were these little mexican chocolate cake treats they had jelly in them and my friend roberto used to give me them at lunch i wanted them all the time!! i tried looking up the name of them i found buba lubas and they were rlly similar but i dont think it was exactly those O. now i dont rlly? have "same foods" mostly because im less picky now and i will eat most things... but i think anything with dairy is kind of a comforting constant, like if we have rice and curry or soup or smth i always put sour cream/greek yogurt/ranch in it otherwise it feels like a chore to eat lmao? P. already answered!! Q. time for my own question!!! for my autie followers: did u guys ever have stuffed animals/toys you really loved or love now? u should share abt ur favorite toy in the replies!! infodumping is fun, feel free to tell me abt ur favorite pal as much as u want my dudes thank u thwomp for the ask!!! i spent so much time answering this it was a lot of fun :3

Why do we feel so guilty all the time?

The long read: Food, sex, money, work, family, friends, health, politics: theres nothing we cant feel guilty about, including our own feelings of guilt

I feel guilty about everything. Already today Ive felt guilty about having saidthe wrong thing to a friend. Then Ifeltguilty about avoiding that friend because of the wrong thing Id said. Plus, I havent called my mother yet today: guilty. And I really should have organised something special for my husbands birthday: guilty. I gave the wrong kind of food to my child: guilty. Ive been cutting corners at work lately: guilty. I skipped breakfast: guilty. I snacked instead: double guilty. Im taking up all this space in a world with not enough space in it: guilty, guilty, guilty.

Nor am I feeling good about feeling bad. Not whensophisticated friends never fail toremind me how selfinvolved, self-aggrandising, politically conservative and morally stunted the guilty are. Poor me. Guilty about guilty. Filial guilt, fraternal guilt, spousal guilt, maternal guilt, peer guilt, work guilt, middle-class guilt, whiteguilt, liberal guilt, historical guilt, Jewish guilt: Im guilty of them all.

Thankfully, there are those who say they can save us from guilt. According to the popular motivational speaker Denise Duffield-Thomas, author of Get Rich, Lucky Bitch!, guilt is one of the most common feelings women suffer. Guilty women, lured by guilt into obstructing their own paths to increased wealth, power, prestige and happiness, just cant seem to take advantage of their advantages.

You might feel guilty, Duffield-Thomas writes, for wanting more, or for spending money on yourself, or for taking time out of your busy family life to work on improving yourself. You might feel guilty that other people are poor, thatyour friend is jealous, that there are starving people in theworld. Sure enough, I do feel guilty for those things. So,itis something of a relief to hear that I can be helped thatI can be self-helped. But, for that to happen, what I must first understand is that a) Im worth it, and b) none of these structures of global inequality, predicated on historical injustices, are my fault.

My guilt, in other words, is a sign not of my guilt but of myinnocence even my victimhood. Its only by forgiving myself for the wrongs for which I bear no direct responsibility that I can learn to release my money blocks and live afirstclass life, according to Duffield-Thomas.

Imagine that: a first-class life. This sort of advice, which frames guilt as our most fundamentally inhibiting emotion, takes insights from psychoanalytic and feminist thinking and transforms them into the language of business motivation. The promise is that our guilt can be expiated by making money.

Its an idea that might resonate especially in the German language, where guilt and debt arethe same word, schuld. One thinks, for example, of Max Webers thesis about how the spirit of capitalism conflates our worldly and heavenly riches, on the basis that what you earn in this world also serves as a measure of your spiritual virtue, since it depends on your capacity for hard work, discipline and self-denial.

But what Weber calls salvation anxiety within the Protestant work ethic has the opposite effect to the self-help manuals promise to liberate entrepreneurs from their guilt. For Weber, in fact, the capitalist pursuit of profit does not reduce ones guilt, but actively exacerbates it for, in an economy that admonishes stagnation, there can be no rest forthe wicked.

So, the guilt that blocks and inhibits us also propels us to work, work, work, to become relentlessly productive in the hope that we might by our good works rid ourselves of guilt. Guilt thus renders us productive and unproductive, workaholic and workphobic a conflict that might explain theextreme and even violent lengths to which people sometimes will go, whether by scapegoating others or sacrificing themselves, to be rid of what many people considerthe mostunbearable emotion.

What is the potency of guilt? With its inflationary logic, guiltlooks, if anything, to have accumulated over time. Although we tend to blame religion for condemning man tolife as a sinner, the guilt that may once have attached tospecific vices vices for which religious communities couldprescribe appropriate penance now seems, in a more secular era, to surface in relation to just about anything: food, sex, money, work, unemployment, leisure, health, fitness, politics, family, friends, colleagues, strangers, entertainment, travel, the environment, you name it.

Equally, whoever has been tempted to suppose that rituals of public humiliation area macabre relic of the medieval past clearly hasnt been paying much attention to our life online. You cant expect to get away for long on social media without someone pointing an accusatory finger at you. Yet its hard to imagine that the presiding spirit of our age, the envious and resentful troll, would have such easy pickings if he could not already sense awhiff of guilt-susceptibility emanating from his prey.

It wasnt meant to be like this. The great crusaders of modernity were supposed to uproot our guilt. The subject ofcountless high-minded critiques, guilt was accused by modern thinkers of sapping the life out of us and causing ourpsychological deterioration. It was said to make us weak(Nietzsche), neurotic (Freud), inauthentic (Sartre).

In thelatter part of the 20th century, various critical theories gained academic credibility, particularly within the humanities. These were theories that sought to show whether with reference to class relations, race relations, gender relations how we are all cogs in a larger system ofpower. We may play our parts in regimes of oppression, but we are also at the mercy of forces larger than us.

But this raises questions about personal responsibility: if its true that our particular situation is underpinned by a complex network of social and economic relations, how can any individual really claim to bein control or entirely responsible for her own life? Viewed in such an impersonal light, guilt can seem an unhelpful hangover fromless selfaware times.

As a teacher of critical theory, I know how crucial and revelatory its insights can be. But Ive occasionally also suspected that our desire for systematic and structural formsof explanation may be fuelled by our anxiety at the prospect of discovering were on the wrong side of history.When wielded indelicately, explanatory theories can offer their adherents afoolproof system for knowing exactly what view to hold, with impunity, about pretty much everything as if one could take out an insurance policy to be sure of always being right. Often, too, thats as far as such criticism takes you into a right-thinking that doesnt necessarily organise itself into right-acting.

The notion that our intellectual frameworks might be as much a reaction to our guilt as a remedy for it might sound familiar to a religious person. In the biblical story, after all, man falls when hes tempted by fruit from the tree of knowledge. Its knowledge that leads him out of the Gardenof Eden into an exile that has yet to end. His guilt isaconstant, nagging reminder that he has taken this wrongturn.

Illustration: A Richard Allen

Yet even within that source we see how mans guilt can bedeceptive as slippery and seductive as the serpent who led him astray. For if man has sinned by tasting of knowledge, the guilt that punishes him repeats his crime: with all its finger-wagging and tenor of I told you so, guilt itself comes over as awfully knowing. It keeps us, as the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has written, in thrall to that boring and repetitive voice inside our head that endlessly corrects, criticises, censors, judges and finds fault with us, but never brings usany news about ourselves. In our feelings of guilt, we seemalready to have the measure of who it is we are and whatit is were capable of.

Could that be the reason for our guilt? Not our lack of knowledge but rather our presumption of it? Our desperate need to be sure of ourselves, even when what we think of ourselves is that were worthless, useless, the pits? When we feel guilty we at least have the comfort of being certain ofsomething of knowing, finally, the right way to feel, whichis bad.

This may be why were addicted to crime dramas: they satisfy our wish for certainty, no matter how grim that certainty is. At the beginning of a detective story, were conscious of a crime, but we dont know who did it. By the end of the story, ithas been discovered which culprit is guilty: case closed. Thus guilt, inits popular rendering, is what converts our ignorance intoknowledge.

For a psychoanalyst, however, feelings of guilt dont necessarily have any connection tobeing guiltyin the eyes of the law.Our feelings of guilt may be a confession, but they usually precede the accusation of any crime the details ofwhich not even the guilty person can be sure.

So, while the stories we prefer may be the ones that uncover guilt, its equally possible that our own guilt is a cover story forsomething else.

Although the fall is originally a biblical story, forget religion for a moment. One can just as well recount a more recent and assuredly secular story of the fall of man. Its a story that has had countless narrators, perhaps none finer or more emphatic than the German Jewish postwar critic Theodor Adorno. Writing in the wake of the Holocaust, Adorno argued famously that whoever survives in a world that could produce Auschwitz is guilty, at least insofar as theyre still party to the same civilisation that created the conditions for Auschwitz.

Inother words, guilt is our unassailable historical condition. Its our contract as modern people. As such, says Adorno, we all have a shared responsibility after Auschwitz to be vigilant,lest we collapse once more into the ways of thinking, believing and behaving that brought down this guilty verdict upon us. To make sense after Auschwitz is to risk complicity with its barbarism.

For Adorno too, then, our knowledge renders us guilty, rather than keeping us safe. For a modern mind, this could well seem shocking. That said, perhaps the more surprising feature of Adornos representation of guilt is the idea expressed in his question whether after Auschwitz you cango on living especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there couldhave been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of himwho was spared.

For Adorno, the guilt of Auschwitz belongs to all of western civilisation, but its a guilt he assumed would be felt most keenly by one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed the Jewish survivor of the second world war.

Adorno, who had left Europe for New York in early 1938, was probably attesting to his own sense of guilt. Yet his insight is one we alsoget from psychologists who worked with concentration camp survivors after the war; they found that feelings of guiltaccompanied by shame, self-condemnatory tendencies and self-accusations are experienced by the victims of the persecution and apparently much less (if at all) bythe perpetrators of it.

What can it mean if victims feel guilty and perpetrators areguilt-free? Are objective guilt (being guilty) and subjective guilt (feeling guilty) completely at odds with each other?

In the years after the war, the concept of survival guilt tended to be viewed as the byproduct of the victims identification with their aggressor. The survivor who may subsequently find it hard to forgive herself because others have diedin her place why am I still here when they are not? may also feel guilty because of what she was forced to collude withfor the sake of her survival. This need not imply any incriminating action on her part; her guilt may simply be anunconscious way of registering her past preference that others suffer instead of her.

On this basis, then, it may be possible to think of survivors guilt as a special case of the guilt we all bear when, aware or unaware, were glad when others, rather than ourselves, suffer. Obviously, thats not a pleasant feeling, but neither is ita hard one to understand. Still, there remains something deeply uncomfortable about accepting that survivors of the worst atrocities should feel any guilt for their own survival. Instead, shouldnt we be trying to save the survivor from her (in our view) mistaken feelings of guilt andthus establish, without smirch or quibble, her absolute innocence?

This understandable impulse, according to the intellectual historian Ruth Leys, saw the figure of the survivor emerge in the period after the second world war, alongside a shift in focus from the victims feelings of guilt toward an insistence on the victims innocence. This transformation, Leys argues, involved replacing the concept of guilt with its close cousin, shame.

The difference is crucial. The victim who feels guilt evidently has an inner life, with intentions and desires while the victim who feels shame seems to have had it bestowed from outside. The victims of trauma consequently appear to be the objects rather than the subjects ofhistory.

Shame, then, tells us something about what one is, not what one does or would like to do. And so the effect of this well-intentioned shift in emphasis may have been to rob the survivor of agency.

It may be tempting to assume that survival guilt is an extraordinary case, given the abject powerlessness of the victims of such traumas. But, as we will see, attempts to deny the validity of the guilt of others often have the similar effect of denying their intentions as well. Consider the case of liberal guilt, the guilt we all love to hate.

Liberal guilt has become a shorthand for describing those who feel keenly a lack of social, political and economic justice, but are not the ones who suffer thebrunt of it. According to the cultural critic Julie Ellison, it first took hold in the US in the 1990s, on the back of a post-cold-war fragmentation of theleft, and a loss of faith in the utopian politics of collective action that had characterised an earlier generation of radicals. The liberal who feels guilty has given up on the collective and recognises herself to be acting out of self-interest. Her guilt is thus a sign of the gap between what she feels for the others suffering and what she will do actively to alleviate it which isnot, it turns out, a great deal.

As such, her guilt incites much hostility in others, not least in the person who feels himself the object of the liberals guilt. This person, AKA the victim, understands only too well how seldom the pity he elicits in the guilty liberal is likely to lead toany significant structural or political changes for him.

Rather, the only power to be redirected his way is not political power, but the moral or affective power to make those more fortunate than he is feel even more guilty about the privileges they are nonetheless not inclined to give up.

But just how in control of her feelings is the guilty liberal? Not very, thinks Ellison. Since feelings arent easily confected, her guilt tends to assail her unbidden, rendering her highly performative, exhibitionist, even hysterical. In her guilt, she experiences a loss of control, although she remains conscious at all times of an audience, before whom she feels she must show how spectacularly sorry she is. Her guilt, then, is her way of acting out, marking a disturbance in the liberal who doesnt know herself quite as well as her guilt would haveher think.

The idea of guilt as aninhibiting emotion corroborates the common critique of liberal guilt: that, for all the suffering it produces, it fails completely to motivate the guilty subject tobring about meaningful political change.

But what if the liberals guilt actually has another purpose, to allow the liberal respite from the thing she may (unconsciously) feel even worse about: the lack of a fixed identity that tells her who she is, what her responsibilities are and where these come to an end.

If anything can be said to characterise the notoriously woolly liberal, guilt may be it. Liberal guilt suggests a certain class (middle), race (white) and geopolitical (developed world) situation. As such, despite the torment it brings to those who suffer it, it might, paradoxically (and, again, unconsciously), be reassuring for someone whose real neurosis is that she feels her identity is so mobile and shiftingthat she can never quite be surewhere she stands.

If this is what chiefly concerns her, then one might envisage her guilt as a feeling that tells her who she is, by virtue of telling her who she is failing to be for others. Who is the liberal? She who suffers on account of those who suffer morethan she. (I know whereof I speak.)

This may suggest why, in recent years, there has been mounting criticism of the liberals sensibilities. To her critics, the liberal really is guilty. Shes guilty of a) secretly resenting victims for how their sufferings make her feel, b) drawing attention away from them and back towards her, c) having theaudacity to make an exhibition out of her self-lacerations and d) doing practically nothing to challenge the status quo.

For critics of the guilty liberal, in other words, feeling guiltyis part of the problem, rather than the solution. And yetthis criticism is itself subject to the same accusation. Giventhat criticising someone for feeling guilty is only going to make them feel guiltier, guilt has, asweve seen, proved atricky opponent one that its various modern combatants have yetto defeat.

Once again, therefore, in the case of liberal guilt, we encounter a feeling so devilishly slippery that it repeats the problem in the course of confessing it. Because there is, of course, aform of guilt that does not inspire us to act, but prevents us from acting. This type of guilt takes the uncertainty of our relations with others (and our responsibility for others) and turns them into an object of certainty and knowledge.

But since the object in this case is our own self, we can see how liberal guilt, too, mutates guilt into a version of shame.Shame, infact, could well be a more accurate appellation for what motivates the guilty liberal in her public and private self-condemnations.

However, before we declare the liberal guilty as charged as in guilty of the wrong kind of guilt its worth reminding ourselves of the survival guilt that has likewise been viewed by many as guilt of the wrong kind. For as we observed in that case, in seeking to save the victim from her guilt, the victim becomes deprived of the very thing that might distinguish herfrom the objectifying aggression that has assailed her: asense of her own intentions and wishes, however aggressive, perverse or thwarted these might be.

For this reason, then, its vital to preserve the notion of survivors guilt (and, despite obvious differences, liberal guilt) as that which could yet return to the survivor (or the liberal) apower of agency such as must be absolutely necessary if sheis to have a future that isnt bound, by the resolving or absolving of her guilt, to repeat the past ad infinitum.

If religion often gets the blame for framing man as sinner, thesecular effort to release man from his guilt hasnt offered much relief. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggests that subjective innocence belongs to a bygone age, the age of the tragic hero. Oedipus, for example, is someone whose objective guilt (parricide, incest) is matched by the subjective innocence of the man who acts before he knows. Today, however, says Agamben, we find the opposing situation: modern man is objectively innocent (for he has not, like Oedipus, murdered with his own hands), but subjectively guilty (he knows that his comforts and securities have been paid for by someone, somewhere, probably in blood).

By falsely promising a tabula rasa bound to his historical and intellectual emancipation, modernity may not only have failed to obliterate mans subjective guilt, but may even have exacerbated it. For what many a modern man is guilty of is less his actions than his addiction to a version of knowledge that seems to have inhibited his capacity for action. As such, the religious assignation of man as sinner a fallen, abject, endlessly compromised, but also active, effective andchangeable creature begins to look comforting bycomparison.

Such a view also shares much in common with a certain psychoanalytic conception of guilt as a blocked form of aggression or anger toward those we need and love (God, parents, guardians, whomever we depend on for our own survival). But if guilt is the feeling that typically blocks all other (buried, repressed, unconscious) feelings, that is not initself areason to block feelings of guilt. Feelings, after all, are what you must be prepared to feel if they are to move you,or if you are to feel something else.

Main illustration by A Richard Allen

Adapted from Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone) by Devorah Baum, which will be published by Yale University Press on 19 October at 18.99. To buy it for 16.15, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

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I'm rly sorry I'm so unclear. I'm a bit of a mess rn haaah. What I mean is, i know for a fact that i am ace. Long story short things happened and I'm,, very very uncomfortable with the idea of sex in its entirety (regarding myself ofc). I know heteronormativity forces the ideals of being 'pure' onto women, but that is really not the case with me. I'm just,, not good with it to say it like that. The thing is, that girl is out for being bi. She's kind rly, but she's said smth that made me rly (1)

(2) anxious. I know there's a lot going on w the ace and lgbt community (as ace ppl are outing themselves against individuals out of the cishet system). She herself is proud of her sexuality and is actively supporting her rights, but she's also uttered her disgust against the ace com. It's confusing? There are so many ppl saying that ace ppl are entirely schismatic from the lgbt com, regardless of their romantic orientation and I rly don't want to say anything wrong and I will not say that im

(3) in any way eligible to call myself a part of it but,, it scares me. I haven't come out to anyone and she clearly doesn't like the idea of asexuals in any way.. I'm just a rly confused 16 yr old that doesn't know what to do coz that's the first time ive actually fallen for anyone bc I'm extremely closed up and I just don't know where I stand in all of this chaos. Idk whether it's even valid what I'm trying to say and I'm sry if I'm burdening u w my rambling I think I took too many pills,,,,,,

ahhhhhhhhhh i see alright lemme see well first of all i am one of those of the belief that if ur a cishet ace you arent lgbt like for many many reasons that i wont get into BUT the difference here being that i mean youve said that you like her right? meaning youd be same gender attracted (attracted is a poor word here but u get what i mean like u like girls). so that inherently qualifies you for being lgbt. now if you didnt and were just ace and were talking to me about some cishet guy u liked then no i would tell u that that did not apply but if youre attracted/have romantic feelings for someone of your same gender (in whatever way youd be identifying here) youre lgbt end of. now as for the girl u like i cant really speak for her but if she like. hates all aces period even if theyre lgbt as well then.......mmm i dont know rly what to say to that it seems pretty shitty in my estimation. and if the way shed react to you for being ace would be negative then.....she seems like not that nice of a person especially if youre close. either way its ok that you like her honey its not the end of the world and more than likely youll fall for other people too (if u want to that is). i do see that youre in a bit of a muddled situation here but youre young and its not the end of the world either way i promise. theres not much advice i can rly offer you here tho. personally id avoid broaching the subject with her (if u wanted to) just bc i dont want u to be in a position of danger (or at least discomfort) if she’d react negatively. either way hon i do wanna reiterate that if you experience same gendered romantic attraction you are certainly lgbt! i know plenty of ace lesbians and ace pans and ace bis and they are every bit lgbt being ace doesnt disqualify u from the community automatically.... i mean it does. if youre cishet. but by your very situation you arent that so dont worry about it on that end sweetie!

also wtf who designed rune factory 4 this way THIS IS MY ONLY COMPLAINT IN AN AMAZING GAME why are all the romance routes entirely random?? even after youve reached the relationship milestones its COMPLETELY RANDOM whether the event will start every day same for every friendship event and town event and even some plot events you just have to sit there at your bed constantly skipping days for multiple years til the random number god gives you the marriage scene you did EVERYTHING to earn this marriage scene and you have nothing left to do but wait and youll never see any new events with that character until it happens, and you have a very limited amount of dates to go on while youre waiting, and they all do NOTHING except raise the relationship bar over maximum which does nothing. doesnt even increase the chance of the random event?? why even LET me increase it over maximum if it does nothing? thats just tricking me into thinking i havent unlocked the marriage event yet! when I HAVE and i just need to WAIT A BAZILLION YEARS OF RANDOM

anyway i finally got Leon’s random marriage quest and it was Awesome and So Many Tears and now im even more conflicted on who to marry gahhhhh its such a shame you cant resolve everyone’s plot unless you date them, i feel so bad dating all these people when im not able to marry them all, just cos i wanna fix their lives and make them happy but then theyre gon be sad that we didnt get married aaaa

and Leon is especially saddddd

now cos his whole plot is that he had a depressing scenario with a friend as a kid. She loved him but he saw her as just a little sister, and he jokingly promised to marry her once when they were too young to understand. And he didnt know she took it seriously until after he DIED and reincarnated as a fox monster person centuries later too late to do anything about it. And he’s crushed full of guilt that he somehow led her on, and he was never able to apologise, and he’s scared she spent her whole life waiting for him to come back. and then you get this very cool series of sidequests thatre a realistic look at translating languages, and its really motivational how leon is able to help bring knowledge of a dead language back to life and preserve the ancient culture that people thought was lost BUT THEN ENDLESS FUCKIN TRAGEDY kiel accidentally finds an old diary of leon’s friend (WHAT ARE THE ODDS) and he has frickin detailed anxiety attacks unable to even hold the damn paper cos he’s shaking so much and you go on a big treasure hunt to find all the pages and he’s just CRYING SO MUCH mr playboy man! mr flirty asshole! mr stoic! he’s fuckin crying and he cant hold a book without your help and aaaa and his whole story is about how he isnt really the negative stereotypes of a flirty character, he really REALLY values love and he feels depressed he cant love everyone who loves him, so he tries to fake it. And he tries to push people away whenever it seems genuine, but also like... entertain them enough that they dont feel he doesnt love them, i guess? and no matter how promiscuous a person is, they still cant love EVERYONE, you cant just force a relationship on them and say they must be asking for it cos they date other people and enjoy sex. its so depressing that he considers his biggest flaw that he wasnt able to force himself to love someone he didnt, especially when he did care about her, just as a best friend instead! if theyd just talked about it, it would have saved all this heartache for both of them! so then we start piecing together this book and it looks like his worst fears are confirmed, she spent her whole life waiting for him and hating him and its really fucking EXPLODINGLY SAD and then the quest is a bit confusing so i spent several days stuck on this point not knowing who to talk to next, going through random dungeons in case that somehow helped. turned out i did find the right spot but the quest just doesnt progress until you talk to the right person first GAH! stuck for five days on crying leon scene!! NOOOOOO but I finally got past it and CLIMACTIC HAPPY END or bittersweet end more like we find out we mistranslated one bit which was actually PAGE NUMBERS, and we were missing a page all along! and then the final page reveals that she actually moved on and found a new love and had a happy family and grew old together, and her only frustration with leon was imagining that he couldnt find the same thing, worrying that she’d betrayed him. So this wasnt a diary, it was actually a letter she wrote for him to find, having confidence he’d wake up someday and have another chance at happiness! She just wanted him to know that she kept his memory alive and she’s sorry and she was happy and AAAAAAUUUGH im tearing up again the bit that really got me was that we find out that leon’s favourite romance novel was actually written by her. It was so popular it survived into the modern day as a literature classic, and it convinces him that she really was happy with her new boyfriend if she could write something as beautiful as this. And he wants to embody the spirit of the book with you, and keep his new promise to her to have a happy family of his own :) ... AGHHHHHHHHAAAAAHHHHH why cant i marry everyone why do so many of them have plots where it seems like they wont be happy unless i love them... even now i dont really think the leon pairing is my favourite, i wish i could have had this plot as a friendship route! i think it would have resonated just as much since the whole backstory is about him being friends with someone who had unrequited love for him. i wanna be leon’s bestie and ultimate wingman! I like him a lot but I dont really think i wanna marry him! IM SO SORRY LEON AAAA he’s such a soulful beefcake dammit I’m sure he’d find a bazillion better lovers! I’m sure a lot of players did marry him! WHY DO I FEEL SO GUILTY AAAAA its not fair, aaaa arthur was the first one i dated and i also really care about him but in his case his way of acting in the romance isnt very different to when youre just friends so i dont think i wanna commit to that relationship maybe? it might change when i see his final random event but i dont get much ‘he’ll be happy with you’ vibes, its just strengthening their powerful brotp that they had from the start of the game. he feels like someone protagonist would indeed date, but theyd part again on friendly terms after it didnt work out, and then be amicable exes who still care a lot about each other. and I just feel like I wanna marry dylas even though he’s had the least tragic events so far. gahhhh! he just seems SO HAPPY dating you, and has loads of character development since it started, unlike the other two ive seen the dates for. he feels like he’s actually getting something out of this that he wouldnt if we were just friends? its so hard trying to weigh up the pros and cons of romance options in games when im inacapble of actually being attracted to anyone, its just ‘i care about you all and i wanna give you the best possible ending’. I haaaaate when games have it so that romance is always the best possible ending for every single character and they all suffer forever if you dont pick them :P and I havent even seen the romances with the other three dudes yet! GAHHHHH!! Theyre all the ones I wasnt immediately interested in dating, but that opinion could totally change, i could end up with a six way tie :P ... ALSO RANDOM BUT is anyone else really uncomfortable with the queerbaiting in this game? there is a LOt, a LOT of ‘lol maybe gay’, sometimes so clear that it seems the game is outright canonically stating this character is gay or bisexual yet you have no option to marry them unless youre the opposite sex. It gets REALLY uncomfortable with Dylas, he just,,, does not express any interest in women at all unless the player pursues him. And his mutual crush with doug is CONSTANTLY REFERENCED, and called out very clearly for what it is. IOf the game didnt keep pointing it out i would have been able to shrug it off as just accidental chemistry from a failed rivalry plotline or something, but we have EVERYONE saying ‘oh a lover’s quarrel’ and ‘be honest about your feelings’ and ‘i bet you wanna see doug in a swimsuit’ and ‘gee i really wanna see doug in a swimsuit’ and IT CANT BE ANY MORE CANON THAN THIS. And.. like.. Dylas even says he DOESNT wanna see women in swimsuits, he’s just here at the beach cos Doug might come along. He does not express any interest in women at all except the protagonist! It makes me feel SO uncomfortable! it feels like he’s actually gay, when with most other characters they seem bisexual?? I dunno how to explain it, thats just how it comes off to me. Why is there no option for him and doug to date, why cant i date him as the male protagonist?? His romance route is so totally gender neutral, i did the postgame protagonist swap cheat and it just feels more in-character for him this way. if im gonna steal him away from Doug i dont want it to be a weird gay conversion therapy type thing, it just feels so WEIRD. The one and ONLY stated crush he has on another character, and its gay, and theres NO OPTION FOR IT TO HAPPEN and then he suddenly becomes 100% straight and never talks about doug again if a fem protagonist dates him. SO WEEEEEIRD... I’m just gonna sit here on the non-canon bonus feature dylas x male protag train and never leave. If you cant have doug you shall have the transitioned me! Its funny cos he’s like the only batchelor i very vehemently cannot ship with fem protag, yet do with male protag :P but GAHHH leon deserves a family and i could give him a child and aaaaa SO HARD TO CHOOSE also i am sad that the postgame cheatmode lets you switch to any character but if its not one of the two protags its only your overworld model and not your face portraits. Its weird because every batchelor and batchelorette has the exact same full set of emotions and costumes, so why cant i access that?? its also a shame cos it means i cant roleplay my doug and dylas marriage properly :P CMON MAN WHY U EVEN TELL ME THEY IN LOVE IF THEY CANT BE IN LOVE :P they have the best portmanteau ship name too! douglas! :P

Why do we feel so guilty all the time?

The long read: Food, sex, money, work, family, friends, health, politics: theres nothing we cant feel guilty about, including our own feelings of guilt

I feel guilty about everything. Already today Ive felt guilty about having saidthe wrong thing to a friend. Then Ifeltguilty about avoiding that friend because of the wrong thing Id said. Plus, I havent called my mother yet today: guilty. And I really should have organised something special for my husbands birthday: guilty. I gave the wrong kind of food to my child: guilty. Ive been cutting corners at work lately: guilty. I skipped breakfast: guilty. I snacked instead: double guilty. Im taking up all this space in a world with not enough space in it: guilty, guilty, guilty.

Nor am I feeling good about feeling bad. Not whensophisticated friends never fail toremind me how selfinvolved, self-aggrandising, politically conservative and morally stunted the guilty are. Poor me. Guilty about guilty. Filial guilt, fraternal guilt, spousal guilt, maternal guilt, peer guilt, work guilt, middle-class guilt, whiteguilt, liberal guilt, historical guilt, Jewish guilt: Im guilty of them all.

Thankfully, there are those who say they can save us from guilt. According to the popular motivational speaker Denise Duffield-Thomas, author of Get Rich, Lucky Bitch!, guilt is one of the most common feelings women suffer. Guilty women, lured by guilt into obstructing their own paths to increased wealth, power, prestige and happiness, just cant seem to take advantage of their advantages.

You might feel guilty, Duffield-Thomas writes, for wanting more, or for spending money on yourself, or for taking time out of your busy family life to work on improving yourself. You might feel guilty that other people are poor, thatyour friend is jealous, that there are starving people in theworld. Sure enough, I do feel guilty for those things. So,itis something of a relief to hear that I can be helped thatI can be self-helped. But, for that to happen, what I must first understand is that a) Im worth it, and b) none of these structures of global inequality, predicated on historical injustices, are my fault.

My guilt, in other words, is a sign not of my guilt but of myinnocence even my victimhood. Its only by forgiving myself for the wrongs for which I bear no direct responsibility that I can learn to release my money blocks and live afirstclass life, according to Duffield-Thomas.

Imagine that: a first-class life. This sort of advice, which frames guilt as our most fundamentally inhibiting emotion, takes insights from psychoanalytic and feminist thinking and transforms them into the language of business motivation. The promise is that our guilt can be expiated by making money.

Its an idea that might resonate especially in the German language, where guilt and debt arethe same word, schuld. One thinks, for example, of Max Webers thesis about how the spirit of capitalism conflates our worldly and heavenly riches, on the basis that what you earn in this world also serves as a measure of your spiritual virtue, since it depends on your capacity for hard work, discipline and self-denial.

But what Weber calls salvation anxiety within the Protestant work ethic has the opposite effect to the self-help manuals promise to liberate entrepreneurs from their guilt. For Weber, in fact, the capitalist pursuit of profit does not reduce ones guilt, but actively exacerbates it for, in an economy that admonishes stagnation, there can be no rest forthe wicked.

So, the guilt that blocks and inhibits us also propels us to work, work, work, to become relentlessly productive in the hope that we might by our good works rid ourselves of guilt. Guilt thus renders us productive and unproductive, workaholic and workphobic a conflict that might explain theextreme and even violent lengths to which people sometimes will go, whether by scapegoating others or sacrificing themselves, to be rid of what many people considerthe mostunbearable emotion.

What is the potency of guilt? With its inflationary logic, guiltlooks, if anything, to have accumulated over time. Although we tend to blame religion for condemning man tolife as a sinner, the guilt that may once have attached tospecific vices vices for which religious communities couldprescribe appropriate penance now seems, in a more secular era, to surface in relation to just about anything: food, sex, money, work, unemployment, leisure, health, fitness, politics, family, friends, colleagues, strangers, entertainment, travel, the environment, you name it.

Equally, whoever has been tempted to suppose that rituals of public humiliation area macabre relic of the medieval past clearly hasnt been paying much attention to our life online. You cant expect to get away for long on social media without someone pointing an accusatory finger at you. Yet its hard to imagine that the presiding spirit of our age, the envious and resentful troll, would have such easy pickings if he could not already sense awhiff of guilt-susceptibility emanating from his prey.

It wasnt meant to be like this. The great crusaders of modernity were supposed to uproot our guilt. The subject ofcountless high-minded critiques, guilt was accused by modern thinkers of sapping the life out of us and causing ourpsychological deterioration. It was said to make us weak(Nietzsche), neurotic (Freud), inauthentic (Sartre).

In thelatter part of the 20th century, various critical theories gained academic credibility, particularly within the humanities. These were theories that sought to show whether with reference to class relations, race relations, gender relations how we are all cogs in a larger system ofpower. We may play our parts in regimes of oppression, but we are also at the mercy of forces larger than us.

But this raises questions about personal responsibility: if its true that our particular situation is underpinned by a complex network of social and economic relations, how can any individual really claim to bein control or entirely responsible for her own life? Viewed in such an impersonal light, guilt can seem an unhelpful hangover fromless selfaware times.

As a teacher of critical theory, I know how crucial and revelatory its insights can be. But Ive occasionally also suspected that our desire for systematic and structural formsof explanation may be fuelled by our anxiety at the prospect of discovering were on the wrong side of history.When wielded indelicately, explanatory theories can offer their adherents afoolproof system for knowing exactly what view to hold, with impunity, about pretty much everything as if one could take out an insurance policy to be sure of always being right. Often, too, thats as far as such criticism takes you into a right-thinking that doesnt necessarily organise itself into right-acting.

The notion that our intellectual frameworks might be as much a reaction to our guilt as a remedy for it might sound familiar to a religious person. In the biblical story, after all, man falls when hes tempted by fruit from the tree of knowledge. Its knowledge that leads him out of the Gardenof Eden into an exile that has yet to end. His guilt isaconstant, nagging reminder that he has taken this wrongturn.

Illustration: A Richard Allen

Yet even within that source we see how mans guilt can bedeceptive as slippery and seductive as the serpent who led him astray. For if man has sinned by tasting of knowledge, the guilt that punishes him repeats his crime: with all its finger-wagging and tenor of I told you so, guilt itself comes over as awfully knowing. It keeps us, as the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has written, in thrall to that boring and repetitive voice inside our head that endlessly corrects, criticises, censors, judges and finds fault with us, but never brings usany news about ourselves. In our feelings of guilt, we seemalready to have the measure of who it is we are and whatit is were capable of.

Could that be the reason for our guilt? Not our lack of knowledge but rather our presumption of it? Our desperate need to be sure of ourselves, even when what we think of ourselves is that were worthless, useless, the pits? When we feel guilty we at least have the comfort of being certain ofsomething of knowing, finally, the right way to feel, whichis bad.

This may be why were addicted to crime dramas: they satisfy our wish for certainty, no matter how grim that certainty is. At the beginning of a detective story, were conscious of a crime, but we dont know who did it. By the end of the story, ithas been discovered which culprit is guilty: case closed. Thus guilt, inits popular rendering, is what converts our ignorance intoknowledge.

For a psychoanalyst, however, feelings of guilt dont necessarily have any connection tobeing guiltyin the eyes of the law.Our feelings of guilt may be a confession, but they usually precede the accusation of any crime the details ofwhich not even the guilty person can be sure.

So, while the stories we prefer may be the ones that uncover guilt, its equally possible that our own guilt is a cover story forsomething else.

Although the fall is originally a biblical story, forget religion for a moment. One can just as well recount a more recent and assuredly secular story of the fall of man. Its a story that has had countless narrators, perhaps none finer or more emphatic than the German Jewish postwar critic Theodor Adorno. Writing in the wake of the Holocaust, Adorno argued famously that whoever survives in a world that could produce Auschwitz is guilty, at least insofar as theyre still party to the same civilisation that created the conditions for Auschwitz.

Inother words, guilt is our unassailable historical condition. Its our contract as modern people. As such, says Adorno, we all have a shared responsibility after Auschwitz to be vigilant,lest we collapse once more into the ways of thinking, believing and behaving that brought down this guilty verdict upon us. To make sense after Auschwitz is to risk complicity with its barbarism.

For Adorno too, then, our knowledge renders us guilty, rather than keeping us safe. For a modern mind, this could well seem shocking. That said, perhaps the more surprising feature of Adornos representation of guilt is the idea expressed in his question whether after Auschwitz you cango on living especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there couldhave been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of himwho was spared.

For Adorno, the guilt of Auschwitz belongs to all of western civilisation, but its a guilt he assumed would be felt most keenly by one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed the Jewish survivor of the second world war.

Adorno, who had left Europe for New York in early 1938, was probably attesting to his own sense of guilt. Yet his insight is one we alsoget from psychologists who worked with concentration camp survivors after the war; they found that feelings of guiltaccompanied by shame, self-condemnatory tendencies and self-accusations are experienced by the victims of the persecution and apparently much less (if at all) bythe perpetrators of it.

What can it mean if victims feel guilty and perpetrators areguilt-free? Are objective guilt (being guilty) and subjective guilt (feeling guilty) completely at odds with each other?

In the years after the war, the concept of survival guilt tended to be viewed as the byproduct of the victims identification with their aggressor. The survivor who may subsequently find it hard to forgive herself because others have diedin her place why am I still here when they are not? may also feel guilty because of what she was forced to collude withfor the sake of her survival. This need not imply any incriminating action on her part; her guilt may simply be anunconscious way of registering her past preference that others suffer instead of her.

On this basis, then, it may be possible to think of survivors guilt as a special case of the guilt we all bear when, aware or unaware, were glad when others, rather than ourselves, suffer. Obviously, thats not a pleasant feeling, but neither is ita hard one to understand. Still, there remains something deeply uncomfortable about accepting that survivors of the worst atrocities should feel any guilt for their own survival. Instead, shouldnt we be trying to save the survivor from her (in our view) mistaken feelings of guilt andthus establish, without smirch or quibble, her absolute innocence?

This understandable impulse, according to the intellectual historian Ruth Leys, saw the figure of the survivor emerge in the period after the second world war, alongside a shift in focus from the victims feelings of guilt toward an insistence on the victims innocence. This transformation, Leys argues, involved replacing the concept of guilt with its close cousin, shame.

The difference is crucial. The victim who feels guilt evidently has an inner life, with intentions and desires while the victim who feels shame seems to have had it bestowed from outside. The victims of trauma consequently appear to be the objects rather than the subjects ofhistory.

Shame, then, tells us something about what one is, not what one does or would like to do. And so the effect of this well-intentioned shift in emphasis may have been to rob the survivor of agency.

It may be tempting to assume that survival guilt is an extraordinary case, given the abject powerlessness of the victims of such traumas. But, as we will see, attempts to deny the validity of the guilt of others often have the similar effect of denying their intentions as well. Consider the case of liberal guilt, the guilt we all love to hate.

Liberal guilt has become a shorthand for describing those who feel keenly a lack of social, political and economic justice, but are not the ones who suffer thebrunt of it. According to the cultural critic Julie Ellison, it first took hold in the US in the 1990s, on the back of a post-cold-war fragmentation of theleft, and a loss of faith in the utopian politics of collective action that had characterised an earlier generation of radicals. The liberal who feels guilty has given up on the collective and recognises herself to be acting out of self-interest. Her guilt is thus a sign of the gap between what she feels for the others suffering and what she will do actively to alleviate it which isnot, it turns out, a great deal.

As such, her guilt incites much hostility in others, not least in the person who feels himself the object of the liberals guilt. This person, AKA the victim, understands only too well how seldom the pity he elicits in the guilty liberal is likely to lead toany significant structural or political changes for him.

Rather, the only power to be redirected his way is not political power, but the moral or affective power to make those more fortunate than he is feel even more guilty about the privileges they are nonetheless not inclined to give up.

But just how in control of her feelings is the guilty liberal? Not very, thinks Ellison. Since feelings arent easily confected, her guilt tends to assail her unbidden, rendering her highly performative, exhibitionist, even hysterical. In her guilt, she experiences a loss of control, although she remains conscious at all times of an audience, before whom she feels she must show how spectacularly sorry she is. Her guilt, then, is her way of acting out, marking a disturbance in the liberal who doesnt know herself quite as well as her guilt would haveher think.

The idea of guilt as aninhibiting emotion corroborates the common critique of liberal guilt: that, for all the suffering it produces, it fails completely to motivate the guilty subject tobring about meaningful political change.

But what if the liberals guilt actually has another purpose, to allow the liberal respite from the thing she may (unconsciously) feel even worse about: the lack of a fixed identity that tells her who she is, what her responsibilities are and where these come to an end.

If anything can be said to characterise the notoriously woolly liberal, guilt may be it. Liberal guilt suggests a certain class (middle), race (white) and geopolitical (developed world) situation. As such, despite the torment it brings to those who suffer it, it might, paradoxically (and, again, unconsciously), be reassuring for someone whose real neurosis is that she feels her identity is so mobile and shiftingthat she can never quite be surewhere she stands.

If this is what chiefly concerns her, then one might envisage her guilt as a feeling that tells her who she is, by virtue of telling her who she is failing to be for others. Who is the liberal? She who suffers on account of those who suffer morethan she. (I know whereof I speak.)

This may suggest why, in recent years, there has been mounting criticism of the liberals sensibilities. To her critics, the liberal really is guilty. Shes guilty of a) secretly resenting victims for how their sufferings make her feel, b) drawing attention away from them and back towards her, c) having theaudacity to make an exhibition out of her self-lacerations and d) doing practically nothing to challenge the status quo.

For critics of the guilty liberal, in other words, feeling guiltyis part of the problem, rather than the solution. And yetthis criticism is itself subject to the same accusation. Giventhat criticising someone for feeling guilty is only going to make them feel guiltier, guilt has, asweve seen, proved atricky opponent one that its various modern combatants have yetto defeat.

Once again, therefore, in the case of liberal guilt, we encounter a feeling so devilishly slippery that it repeats the problem in the course of confessing it. Because there is, of course, aform of guilt that does not inspire us to act, but prevents us from acting. This type of guilt takes the uncertainty of our relations with others (and our responsibility for others) and turns them into an object of certainty and knowledge.

But since the object in this case is our own self, we can see how liberal guilt, too, mutates guilt into a version of shame.Shame, infact, could well be a more accurate appellation for what motivates the guilty liberal in her public and private self-condemnations.

However, before we declare the liberal guilty as charged as in guilty of the wrong kind of guilt its worth reminding ourselves of the survival guilt that has likewise been viewed by many as guilt of the wrong kind. For as we observed in that case, in seeking to save the victim from her guilt, the victim becomes deprived of the very thing that might distinguish herfrom the objectifying aggression that has assailed her: asense of her own intentions and wishes, however aggressive, perverse or thwarted these might be.

For this reason, then, its vital to preserve the notion of survivors guilt (and, despite obvious differences, liberal guilt) as that which could yet return to the survivor (or the liberal) apower of agency such as must be absolutely necessary if sheis to have a future that isnt bound, by the resolving or absolving of her guilt, to repeat the past ad infinitum.

If religion often gets the blame for framing man as sinner, thesecular effort to release man from his guilt hasnt offered much relief. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggests that subjective innocence belongs to a bygone age, the age of the tragic hero. Oedipus, for example, is someone whose objective guilt (parricide, incest) is matched by the subjective innocence of the man who acts before he knows. Today, however, says Agamben, we find the opposing situation: modern man is objectively innocent (for he has not, like Oedipus, murdered with his own hands), but subjectively guilty (he knows that his comforts and securities have been paid for by someone, somewhere, probably in blood).

By falsely promising a tabula rasa bound to his historical and intellectual emancipation, modernity may not only have failed to obliterate mans subjective guilt, but may even have exacerbated it. For what many a modern man is guilty of is less his actions than his addiction to a version of knowledge that seems to have inhibited his capacity for action. As such, the religious assignation of man as sinner a fallen, abject, endlessly compromised, but also active, effective andchangeable creature begins to look comforting bycomparison.

Such a view also shares much in common with a certain psychoanalytic conception of guilt as a blocked form of aggression or anger toward those we need and love (God, parents, guardians, whomever we depend on for our own survival). But if guilt is the feeling that typically blocks all other (buried, repressed, unconscious) feelings, that is not initself areason to block feelings of guilt. Feelings, after all, are what you must be prepared to feel if they are to move you,or if you are to feel something else.

Main illustration by A Richard Allen

Adapted from Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone) by Devorah Baum, which will be published by Yale University Press on 19 October at 18.99. To buy it for 16.15, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

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Everybody lies: how Google search reveals our darkest secrets

What can we learn about ourselves from the things we ask online? Seth StephensDavidowitz analysed anonymous Google search data, uncovering disturbing truths about our desires, beliefs and prejudices

Everybody lies. People lie about how many drinks they had on the way home. They lie about how often they go to the gym, how much those new shoes cost, whether they read that book. They call in sick when theyre not. They say theyll be in touch when they wont. They say its not about you when it is. They say they love you when they dont. They say theyre happy while in the dumps. They say they like women when they really like men. People lie to friends. They lie to bosses. They lie to kids. They lie to parents. They lie to doctors. They lie to husbands. They lie to wives. They lie to themselves. And they damn sure lie to surveys. Heres my brief survey for you:

Have you ever cheated in an exam?

Have you ever fantasised about killing someone?

Were you tempted to lie?

Many people underreport embarrassing behaviours and thoughts on surveys. They want to look good, even though most surveys are anonymous. This is called social desirability bias. An important paper in 1950 provided powerful evidence of how surveys can fall victim to such bias. Researchers collected data, from official sources, on the residents of Denver: what percentage of them voted, gave to charity, and owned a library card. They then surveyed the residents to see if the percentages would match. The results were, at the time, shocking. What the residents reported to the surveys was very different from the data the researchers had gathered. Even though nobody gave their names, people, in large numbers, exaggerated their voter registration status, voting behaviour, and charitable giving.

Has anything changed in 65 years? In the age of the internet, not owning a library card is no longer embarrassing. But, while whats embarrassing or desirable may have changed, peoples tendency to deceive pollsters remains strong. A recent survey asked University of Maryland graduates various questions about their college experience. The answers were compared with official records. People consistently gave wrong information, in ways that made them look good. Fewer than 2% reported that they graduated with lower than a 2.5 GPA (grade point average). In reality, about 11% did. And 44% said they had donated to the university in the past year. In reality, about 28% did.

Then theres that odd habit we sometimes have of lying to ourselves. Lying to oneself may explain why so many people say they are above average. How big is this problem? More than 40% of one companys engineers said they are in the top 5%. More than 90% of college professors say they do above-average work. One-quarter of high school seniors think they are in the top 1% in their ability to get along with other people. If you are deluding yourself, you cant be honest in a survey.

The more impersonal the conditions, the more honest people will be. For eliciting truthful answers, internet surveys are better than phone surveys, which are better than in-person surveys. People will admit more if they are alone than if others are in the room with them. However, on sensitive topics, every survey method will elicit substantial misreporting. People have no incentive to tell surveys the truth.

How, therefore, can we learn what our fellow humans are really thinking and doing? Big data. Certain online sources get people to admit things they would not admit anywhere else. They serve as a digital truth serum. Think of Google searches. Remember the conditions that make people more honest. Online? Check. Alone? Check. No person administering a survey? Check.

The power in Google data is that people tell the giant search engine things they might not tell anyone else. Google was invented so that people could learn about the world, not so researchers could learn about people, but it turns out the trails we leave as we seek knowledge on the internet are tremendously revealing.

I have spent the past four years analysing anonymous Google data. The revelations have kept coming. Mental illness, human sexuality, abortion, religion, health. Not exactly small topics, and this dataset, which didnt exist a couple of decades ago, offered surprising new perspectives on all of them. I am now convinced that Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche.

The Truth About Sex

How many American men are gay? This is a regular question in sexuality research. Yet it has been among the toughest questions for social scientists to answer. Psychologists no longer believe Alfred Kinseys famous estimate based on surveys that oversampled prisoners and prostitutes that 10% of American men are gay. Representative surveys now tell us about 2% to 3% are. But sexual preference has long been among the subjects upon which people have tended to lie. I think I can use big data to give a better answer to this question than we have ever had.

First, more on that survey data. Surveys tell us there are far more gay men in tolerant states than intolerant states. For example, according to a Gallup survey, the proportion of the population that is gay is almost twice as high in Rhode Island, the state with the highest support for gay marriage, than Mississippi, the state with the lowest support for gay marriage. There are two likely explanations for this. First, gay men born in intolerant states may move to tolerant states. Second, gay men in intolerant states may not divulge that they are gay. Some insight into explanation number one gay mobility can be gleaned from another big data source: Facebook, which allows users to list what gender they are interested in. About 2.5% of male Facebook users who list a gender of interest say they are interested in men; that corresponds roughly with what the surveys indicate.

How, therefore, can we learn what our fellow humans are really thinking and doing? Big data. Photograph: Thomas M Scheer/Getty Images/EyeEm

And Facebook too shows big differences in the gay population in states with high versus low tolerance: Facebook has the gay population more than twice as high in Rhode Island as in Mississippi. Facebook also can provide information on how people move around. I was able to code the home town of a sample of openly gay Facebook users. This allowed me to directly estimate how many gay men move out of intolerant states into more tolerant parts of the country. The answer? There is clearly some mobility from Oklahoma City to San Francisco, for example. But I estimate that men moving to someplace more open-minded can explain less than half of the difference in the openly gay population in tolerant versus intolerant states.

If mobility cannot fully explain why some states have so many more openly gay men, the closet must be playing a big role. Which brings us back to Google, with which so many people have proved willing to share so much.

Countrywide, I estimate using data from Google searches and Google AdWords that about 5% of male porn searches are for gay-male porn. Overall, there are more gay porn searches in tolerant states compared with intolerant states. In Mississippi, I estimate that 4.8% of male porn searches are for gay porn, far higher than the numbers suggested by either surveys or Facebook and reasonably close to the 5.2% of pornography searches that are for gay porn in Rhode Island.

So how many American men are gay? This measure of pornography searches by men roughly 5% are same-sex seems a reasonable estimate of the true size of the gay population in the United States. Five per cent of American men being gay is an estimate, of course. Some men are bisexual; some especially when young are not sure what they are. Obviously, you cant count this as precisely as you might the number of people who vote or attend a movie. But one consequence of my estimate is clear: an awful lot of men in the United States, particularly in intolerant states, are still in the closet. They dont reveal their sexual preferences on Facebook. They dont admit it on surveys. And, in many cases, they may even be married to women.

It turns out that wives suspect their husbands of being gay rather frequently. They demonstrate that suspicion in the surprisingly common search: Is my husband gay? The word gay is 10% more likely to complete searches that begin Is my husband… than the second-place word, cheating. It is eight times more common than an alcoholic and 10 times more common than depressed.

Most tellingly perhaps, searches questioning a husbands sexuality are far more prevalent in the least tolerant regions. The states with the highest percentage of women asking this question are South Carolina and Louisiana. In fact, in 21 of the 25 states where this question is most frequently asked, support for gay marriage is lower than the national average.

What do our searches reveal about us? Photograph: Michael Gottschalk/Photothek via Getty Images

Closets are not just repositories of fantasies. When it comes to sex, people keep many secrets about how much they are having, for example. Americans report using far more condoms than are sold every year. You might therefore think this means they are just saying they use condoms more often during sex than they actually do. The evidence suggests they also exaggerate how frequently they are having sex to begin with. About 11% of women between the ages of 15 and 44 say they are sexually active, not currently pregnant, and not using contraception. Even with relatively conservative assumptions about how many times they are having sex, scientists would expect 10% of them to become pregnant every month. But this would already be more than the total number of pregnancies in the United States (which is one in 113 women of childbearing age).

In our sex-obsessed culture it can be hard to admit that you are just not having that much. But if youre looking for understanding or advice, you have, once again, an incentive to tell Google. On Google, there are 16 times more complaints about a spouse not wanting sex than about a married partner not being willing to talk. There are five-and-a-half times more complaints about an unmarried partner not wanting sex than an unmarried partner refusing to text back.

And Google searches suggest a surprising culprit for many of these sexless relationships. There are twice as many complaints that a boyfriend wont have sex than that a girlfriend wont have sex. By far, the number one search complaint about a boyfriend is My boyfriend wont have sex with me. (Google searches are not broken down by gender, but since the previous analysis said that 95% of men are straight, we can guess that not many boyfriend searches are coming from men.)

How should we interpret this? Does this really imply that boyfriends withhold sex more than girlfriends? Not necessarily. As mentioned earlier, Google searches can be biased in favour of stuff people are uptight talking about. Men may feel more comfortable telling their friends about their girlfriends lack of sexual interest than women are telling their friends about their boyfriends. Still, even if the Google data does not imply that boyfriends are really twice as likely to avoid sex as girlfriends, it does suggest that boyfriends avoiding sex is more common than people let on.

Google data also suggests a reason people may be avoiding sex so frequently: enormous anxiety, with much of it misplaced. Start with mens anxieties. It isnt news that men worry about how well endowed they are, but the degree of this worry is rather profound. Men Google more questions about their sexual organ than any other body part: more than about their lungs, liver, feet, ears, nose, throat, and brain combined. Men conduct more searches for how to make their penises bigger than how to tune a guitar, make an omelette, or change a tyre. Mens top Googled concern about steroids isnt whether they may damage their health but whether taking them might diminish the size of their penis. Mens top Googled question related to how their body or mind would change as they aged was whether their penis would get smaller.

Do women care about penis size? Rarely, according to Google searches. For every search women make about a partners phallus, men make roughly 170 searches about their own. True, on the rare occasions women do express concerns about a partners penis, it is frequently about its size, but not necessarily that its small. More than 40% of complaints about a partners penis size say that its too big. Pain is the most Googled word used in searches with the phrase ___ during sex. Yet only 1% of mens searches looking to change their penis size are seeking information on how to make it smaller.

Mens second most common sex question is how to make their sexual encounters longer. Once again, the insecurities of men do not appear to match the concerns of women. There are roughly the same number of searches asking how to make a boyfriend climax more quickly as climax more slowly. In fact, the most common concern women have related to a boyfriends orgasm isnt about when it happened but why it isnt happening at all.

We dont often talk about body image issues when it comes to men. And while its true that overall interest in personal appearance skews female, its not as lopsided as stereotypes would suggest. According to my analysis of Google AdWords, which measures the websites people visit, interest in beauty and fitness is 42% male, weight loss is 33% male, and cosmetic surgery is 39% male. Among all searches with how to related to breasts, about 20% ask how to get rid of man breasts.

The Truth About Hate and Prejudice

Sex and romance are hardly the only topics cloaked in shame and, therefore, not the only topics about which people keep secrets. Many people are, for good reason, inclined to keep their prejudices to themselves. I suppose you could call it progress that many people today feel they will be judged if they admit they judge other people based on their ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. But many Americans still do. You can see this on Google, where users sometimes ask questions such as Why are black people rude? or Why are Jews evil?

A few patterns among these stereotypes stand out. For example, African Americans are the only group that faces a rude stereotype. Nearly every group is a victim of a stupid stereotype; the only two that are not: Jews and Muslims. The evil stereotype is applied to Jews, Muslims, and gay people but not black people, Mexicans, Asians, and Christians. Muslims are the only group stereotyped as terrorists. When a Muslim American plays into this stereotype, the response can be instantaneous and vicious. Google search data can give us a minute-by-minute peek into such eruptions of hate-fuelled rage.

Consider what happened shortly after the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, on 2 December, 2015. That morning, Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik entered a meeting of Farooks co-workers armed with semi-automatic pistols and semi-automatic rifles and murdered 14 people. That evening, minutes after the media first reported one of the shooters Muslim-sounding names, a disturbing number of Californians decided what they wanted to do with Muslims: kill them. The top Google search in California with the word Muslims in it at the time was kill Muslims. And overall, Americans searched for the phrase kill Muslims with about the same frequency that they searched for martini recipe and migraine symptoms.

In the days following the San Bernardino attack, for every American concerned with Islamophobia, another was searching for kill Muslims. While hate searches were approximately 20% of all searches about Muslims before the attack, more than half of all search volume about Muslims became hateful in the hours that followed it. And this minute-by-minute search data can tell us how difficult it can be to calm this rage.

Four days after the shooting, President Obama gave a prime-time address to the country. He wanted to reassure Americans that the government could both stop terrorism and, perhaps more importantly, quiet this dangerous Islamophobia. Obama appealed to our better angels, speaking of the importance of inclusion and tolerance. The rhetoric was powerful and moving. The Los Angeles Times praised Obama for [warning] against allowing fear to cloud our judgment. The New York Times called the speech both tough and calming. The website ThinkProgress praised it as a necessary tool of good governance, geared towards saving the lives of Muslim Americans. Obamas speech, in other words, was judged a major success. But was it?

Google search data suggests otherwise. Together with Evan Soltas, then at Princeton, I examined the data. In his speech, the president said: It is the responsibility of all Americans of every faith to reject discrimination. But searches calling Muslims terrorists, bad, violent, and evil doubled during and shortly after the speech. President Obama also said: It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country. But negative searches about Syrian refugees, a mostly Muslim group then desperately looking for a safe haven, rose 60%, while searches asking how to help Syrian refugees dropped 35%. Obama asked Americans to not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear. Yet searches for kill Muslims tripled during his speech. In fact, just about every negative search we could think to test regarding Muslims shot up during and after Obamas speech, and just about every positive search we could think to test declined.

In other words, Obama seemed to say all the right things. But new data from the internet, offering digital truth serum, suggested that the speech actually backfired in its main goal. Instead of calming the angry mob, as everybody thought he was doing, the internet data tells us that Obama actually inflamed it. Sometimes we need internet data to correct our instinct to pat ourselves on the back.

So what should Obama have said to quell this particular form of hatred currently so virulent in America? Well circle back to that later. First were going to take a look at an age-old vein of prejudice in the United States, the form of hate that in fact stands out above the rest, the one that has been the most destructive and the topic of the research that began this book. In my work with Google search data, the single most telling fact I have found regarding hate on the internet is the popularity of the word nigger.

Either singular or in its plural form, the word is included in 7m American searches every year. (Again, the word used in rap songs is almost always nigga, not nigger, so theres no significant impact from hip-hop lyrics to account for.) Searches for nigger jokes are 17 times more common than searches for kike jokes, gook jokes, spic jokes, chink jokes, and fag jokes combined. When are these searches most common? Whenever African Americans are in the news. Among the periods when such searches were highest was the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when television and newspapers showed images of desperate black people in New Orleans struggling for their survival. They also shot up during Obamas first election. And searches rose on average about 30% on Martin Luther King Jr Day.

The frightening ubiquity of this racial slur throws into doubt some current understandings of racism. Any theory of racism has to explain a big puzzle in America. On the one hand, the overwhelming majority of black Americans think they suffer from prejudice and they have ample evidence of discrimination in police stops, job interviews, and jury decisions. On the other hand, very few white Americans will admit to being racist. The dominant explanation among political scientists recently has been that this is due, in large part, to widespread implicit prejudice. White Americans may mean well, this theory goes, but they have a subconscious bias, which influences their treatment of black Americans.

Academics invented an ingenious way to test for such a bias. It is called the implicit association test. The tests have consistently shown that it takes most people milliseconds longer to associate black faces with positive words, such as good, than with negative words, such as awful. For white faces, the pattern is reversed. The extra time it takes is evidence of someones implicit prejudice a prejudice the person may not even be aware of.

There is, though, an alternative explanation for the discrimination that African Americans feel and whites deny: hidden explicit racism. Suppose there is a reasonably widespread conscious racism of which people are very much aware but to which they wont confess certainly not in a survey. Thats what the search data seems to be saying. There is nothing implicit about searching for nigger jokes. And its hard to imagine that Americans are Googling the word nigger with the same frequency as migraine and economist without explicit racism having a major impact on African Americans. Prior to the Google data, we didnt have a convincing measure of this virulent animus. Now we do. We are, therefore, in a position to see what it explains. It explains why Obamas vote totals in 2008 and 2012 were depressed in many regions. It also correlates with the black-white wage gap, as a team of economists recently reported. The areas that I had found make the most racist searches underpay black people.

And then there is the phenomenon of Donald Trumps candidacy. When Nate Silver, the polling guru, looked for the geographic variable that correlated most strongly with support in the 2016 Republican primary for Trump, he found it in the map of racism I had developed. To be provocative and to encourage more research in this area, let me put forth the following conjecture, ready to be tested by scholars across a range of fields. The primary explanation for discrimination against African Americans today is not the fact that the people who agree to participate in lab experiments make subconscious associations between negative words and black people; it is the fact that millions of white Americans continue to do things like search for nigger jokes.

The Truth About Girls

The discrimination black people regularly experience in the United States appears to be fuelled more widely by explicit, if hidden, hostility. But, for other groups, subconscious prejudice may have a more fundamental impact. For example, I was able to use Google searches to find evidence of implicit prejudice against another segment of the population: young girls. And who, might you ask, would be harbouring bias against girls? Their parents.

Its hardly surprising that parents of young children are often excited by the thought that their kids might be gifted. In fact, of all Google searches starting Is my two-year-old, the most common next word is gifted. But this question is not asked equally about boys and girls. Parents are two-and-a-half times more likely to ask Is my son gifted? than Is my daughter gifted? Parents show a similar bias when using other phrases related to intelligence that they may shy away from saying aloud, like Is my son a genius?

Are parents picking up on legitimate differences between young girls and boys? Perhaps young boys are more likely than young girls to use big words or show objective signs of giftedness? Nope. If anything, its the opposite. At young ages, girls have consistently been shown to have larger vocabularies and use more complex sentences. In American schools, girls are 9% more likely than boys to be in gifted programmes. Despite all this, parents looking around the dinner table appear to see more gifted boys than girls. In fact, on every search term related to intelligence I tested, including those indicating its absence, parents were more likely to be inquiring about their sons rather than their daughters. There are also more searches for is my son behind or stupid than comparable searches for daughters. But searches with negative words like behind and stupid are less specifically skewed toward sons than searches with positive words, such as gifted or genius.

What then are parents overriding concerns regarding their daughters? Primarily, anything related to appearance. Consider questions about a childs weight. Parents Google Is my daughter overweight? roughly twice as frequently as they Google Is my son overweight? Parents are about twice as likely to ask how to get their daughters to lose weight as they are to ask how to get their sons to do the same. Just as with giftedness, this gender bias is not grounded in reality. About 28% of girls are overweight, while 35% of boys are. Even though scales measure more overweight boys than girls, parents see or worry about overweight girls much more frequently than overweight boys. Parents are also one-and-a-half times more likely to ask whether their daughter is beautiful than whether their son is handsome.

Liberal readers may imagine that these biases are more common in conservative parts of the country, but I didnt find any evidence of that. In fact, I did not find a significant relationship between any of these biases and the political or cultural makeup of a state. It would seem this bias against girls is more widespread and deeply ingrained than wed care to believe.

Can We Handle the Truth?

I cant pretend there isnt a darkness in some of this data. It has revealed the continued existence of millions of closeted gay men; widespread animus against African Americans; and an outbreak of violent Islamophobic rage that only got worse when the president appealed for tolerance. Not exactly cheery stuff. If people consistently tell us what they think we want to hear, we will generally be told things that are more comforting than the truth. Digital truth serum, on average, will show us that the world is worse than we have thought.

But there are at least three ways this knowledge can improve our lives. First, there can be comfort in knowing you are not alone in your insecurities and embarrassing behaviour. Google searches can help show you are not alone. When you were young, a teacher may have told you that if you have a question you should raise your hand and ask it, because if youre confused, others are too. If you were anything like me, you ignored your teacher and sat there silently, afraid to open your mouth. Your questions were too dumb, you thought; everyone elses were more profound. The anonymous, aggregate Google data can tell us once and for all how right our teachers were. Plenty of basic, sub-profound questions lurk in other minds, too.

The second benefit of digital truth serum is that it alerts us to people who are suffering. The Human Rights Campaign has asked me to work with them in helping educate men in certain states about the possibility of coming out of the closet. They are looking to use the anonymous and aggregate Google search data to help them decide where best to target their resources.

The final and, I think, most powerful value in this data is its ability to lead us from problems to solutions. With more understanding, we might find ways to reduce the worlds supply of nasty attitudes. Lets return to Obamas speech about Islamophobia. Recall that every time he argued that people should respect Muslims more, the people he was trying to reach became more enraged. Google searches, however, reveal that there was one line that did trigger the type of response Obama might have wanted. He said: Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbours, our co-workers, our sports heroes and, yes, they are our men and women in uniform, who are willing to die in defence of our country.

After this line, for the first time in more than a year, the top Googled noun after Muslim was not terrorists, extremists, or refugees. It was athletes, followed by soldiers. And, in fact, athletes kept the top spot for a full day afterwards. When we lecture angry people, the search data implies that their fury can grow. But subtly provoking peoples curiosity, giving new information, and offering new images of the group that is stoking their rage may turn their thoughts in different, more positive directions.

Two months after that speech, Obama gave another televised speech on Islamophobia, this time at a mosque. Perhaps someone in the presidents office had read Soltass and my Times column, which discussed what had worked and what hadnt, for the content of this speech was noticeably different.

Obama spent little time insisting on the value of tolerance. Instead, he focused overwhelmingly on provoking peoples curiosity and changing their perceptions of Muslim Americans. Many of the slaves from Africa were Muslim, Obama told us; Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had their own copies of the Koran; a Muslim American designed skyscrapers in Chicago. Obama again spoke of Muslim athletes and armed service members, but also talked of Muslim police officers and firefighters, teachers and doctors. And my analysis of the Google searches suggests this speech was more successful than the previous one. Many of the hateful, rageful searches against Muslims dropped in the hours afterwards.

There are other potential ways to use search data to learn what causes, or reduces, hate. For example, we might look at how racist searches change after a black quarterback is drafted in a city, or how sexist searches change after a woman is elected to office. Learning of our subconscious prejudices can also be useful. We might all make an extra effort to delight in little girls minds and show less concern with their appearance. Google search data and other wellsprings of truth on the internet give us an unprecedented look into the darkest corners of the human psyche. This is at times, I admit, difficult to face. But it can also be empowering. We can use the data to fight the darkness. Collecting rich data on the worlds problems is the first step toward fixing them.

Extracted from: Everybody Lies: What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, published by Bloomsbury, 20. To order for 17 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846 Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz will be speaking in London at the Royal Society of Arts on Tuesday and at Second Home on Wednesday

Q&A with Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

The degree to which people are self-absorbed is pretty shocking: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. Photograph: Christopher Lane for the Observer

Whats your background? Id describe myself as a data scientist, but my PhD is in economics. When I was doing my PhD, in 2012, I found this tool called Google Trends that tells you what people are searching, and where, and I became obsessed with it. I know that when people first see Google data, they say Oh this is weird, this isnt perfect data, but I knew that perfect data didnt exist. The traditional data sets left a lot to be desired.

What would your search records reveal about you? They could definitely tell Im a hypochondriac because Im waking up in the middle of the night doing Google searches about my health. There are definitely things about me that you could figure out. When making claims about a topic, its better to do it on aggregate, but I think you can figure out a lot, if not everything, about an individual by what theyre searching on Google.

You worked at Google? For about a year and a half. I was on the economics team and also the quantitative marketing team. Some was analysis of advertising, which I got bored of, which is one of the reasons I stopped working there.

Did working there give you an understanding that helped this book? Yeah, I think it did. All this data Im talking about is public. But from meeting the people who know more about this data than anyone in the world, Im much more confident that it means what I think it means.

Does it change your view of human nature? Are we darker and stranger creatures than you realised? Yeah. I think I had a dark view of human nature to begin with, and I think now its gotten even darker. I think the degree to which people are self-absorbed is pretty shocking.

When Trump became president, all my friends said how anxious they were, they couldnt sleep because theyre so concerned about immigrants and the Muslim ban. But from the data you can see that in liberal parts of the country there wasnt a rise in anxiety when Trump was elected. When people were waking up at 3am in a cold sweat, their searches were about their job, their health, their relationship theyre not concerned about the Muslim ban or global warming.

Was the Google search data telling you that Trump was going to win? I did see that Trump was going to win. You saw clearly that African American turnout was going to be way down, because in cities with 95% black people there was a collapse in searches for voting information. That was a big reason Hillary Clinton did so much worse than the polls suggested.

Whats next? I want to keep on exploring this, whether in academia, journalism or more books. Its such an exciting area: what people are really like, how the world really works. I may just research sex for the next few months. One thing Ive learned from this book, people are more interested in sex than I thought they were.

Interview by Killian Fox

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Everybody lies: how Google search reveals our darkest secrets

What can we learn about ourselves from the things we ask online? Seth StephensDavidowitz analysed anonymous Google search data, uncovering disturbing truths about our desires, beliefs and prejudices

Everybody lies. People lie about how many drinks they had on the way home. They lie about how often they go to the gym, how much those new shoes cost, whether they read that book. They call in sick when theyre not. They say theyll be in touch when they wont. They say its not about you when it is. They say they love you when they dont. They say theyre happy while in the dumps. They say they like women when they really like men. People lie to friends. They lie to bosses. They lie to kids. They lie to parents. They lie to doctors. They lie to husbands. They lie to wives. They lie to themselves. And they damn sure lie to surveys. Heres my brief survey for you:

Have you ever cheated in an exam?

Have you ever fantasised about killing someone?

Were you tempted to lie?

Many people underreport embarrassing behaviours and thoughts on surveys. They want to look good, even though most surveys are anonymous. This is called social desirability bias. An important paper in 1950 provided powerful evidence of how surveys can fall victim to such bias. Researchers collected data, from official sources, on the residents of Denver: what percentage of them voted, gave to charity, and owned a library card. They then surveyed the residents to see if the percentages would match. The results were, at the time, shocking. What the residents reported to the surveys was very different from the data the researchers had gathered. Even though nobody gave their names, people, in large numbers, exaggerated their voter registration status, voting behaviour, and charitable giving.

Has anything changed in 65 years? In the age of the internet, not owning a library card is no longer embarrassing. But, while whats embarrassing or desirable may have changed, peoples tendency to deceive pollsters remains strong. A recent survey asked University of Maryland graduates various questions about their college experience. The answers were compared with official records. People consistently gave wrong information, in ways that made them look good. Fewer than 2% reported that they graduated with lower than a 2.5 GPA (grade point average). In reality, about 11% did. And 44% said they had donated to the university in the past year. In reality, about 28% did.

Then theres that odd habit we sometimes have of lying to ourselves. Lying to oneself may explain why so many people say they are above average. How big is this problem? More than 40% of one companys engineers said they are in the top 5%. More than 90% of college professors say they do above-average work. One-quarter of high school seniors think they are in the top 1% in their ability to get along with other people. If you are deluding yourself, you cant be honest in a survey.

The more impersonal the conditions, the more honest people will be. For eliciting truthful answers, internet surveys are better than phone surveys, which are better than in-person surveys. People will admit more if they are alone than if others are in the room with them. However, on sensitive topics, every survey method will elicit substantial misreporting. People have no incentive to tell surveys the truth.

How, therefore, can we learn what our fellow humans are really thinking and doing? Big data. Certain online sources get people to admit things they would not admit anywhere else. They serve as a digital truth serum. Think of Google searches. Remember the conditions that make people more honest. Online? Check. Alone? Check. No person administering a survey? Check.

The power in Google data is that people tell the giant search engine things they might not tell anyone else. Google was invented so that people could learn about the world, not so researchers could learn about people, but it turns out the trails we leave as we seek knowledge on the internet are tremendously revealing.

I have spent the past four years analysing anonymous Google data. The revelations have kept coming. Mental illness, human sexuality, abortion, religion, health. Not exactly small topics, and this dataset, which didnt exist a couple of decades ago, offered surprising new perspectives on all of them. I am now convinced that Google searches are the most important dataset ever collected on the human psyche.

The Truth About Sex

How many American men are gay? This is a regular question in sexuality research. Yet it has been among the toughest questions for social scientists to answer. Psychologists no longer believe Alfred Kinseys famous estimate based on surveys that oversampled prisoners and prostitutes that 10% of American men are gay. Representative surveys now tell us about 2% to 3% are. But sexual preference has long been among the subjects upon which people have tended to lie. I think I can use big data to give a better answer to this question than we have ever had.

First, more on that survey data. Surveys tell us there are far more gay men in tolerant states than intolerant states. For example, according to a Gallup survey, the proportion of the population that is gay is almost twice as high in Rhode Island, the state with the highest support for gay marriage, than Mississippi, the state with the lowest support for gay marriage. There are two likely explanations for this. First, gay men born in intolerant states may move to tolerant states. Second, gay men in intolerant states may not divulge that they are gay. Some insight into explanation number one gay mobility can be gleaned from another big data source: Facebook, which allows users to list what gender they are interested in. About 2.5% of male Facebook users who list a gender of interest say they are interested in men; that corresponds roughly with what the surveys indicate.

How, therefore, can we learn what our fellow humans are really thinking and doing? Big data. Photograph: Thomas M Scheer/Getty Images/EyeEm

And Facebook too shows big differences in the gay population in states with high versus low tolerance: Facebook has the gay population more than twice as high in Rhode Island as in Mississippi. Facebook also can provide information on how people move around. I was able to code the home town of a sample of openly gay Facebook users. This allowed me to directly estimate how many gay men move out of intolerant states into more tolerant parts of the country. The answer? There is clearly some mobility from Oklahoma City to San Francisco, for example. But I estimate that men moving to someplace more open-minded can explain less than half of the difference in the openly gay population in tolerant versus intolerant states.

If mobility cannot fully explain why some states have so many more openly gay men, the closet must be playing a big role. Which brings us back to Google, with which so many people have proved willing to share so much.

Countrywide, I estimate using data from Google searches and Google AdWords that about 5% of male porn searches are for gay-male porn. Overall, there are more gay porn searches in tolerant states compared with intolerant states. In Mississippi, I estimate that 4.8% of male porn searches are for gay porn, far higher than the numbers suggested by either surveys or Facebook and reasonably close to the 5.2% of pornography searches that are for gay porn in Rhode Island.

So how many American men are gay? This measure of pornography searches by men roughly 5% are same-sex seems a reasonable estimate of the true size of the gay population in the United States. Five per cent of American men being gay is an estimate, of course. Some men are bisexual; some especially when young are not sure what they are. Obviously, you cant count this as precisely as you might the number of people who vote or attend a movie. But one consequence of my estimate is clear: an awful lot of men in the United States, particularly in intolerant states, are still in the closet. They dont reveal their sexual preferences on Facebook. They dont admit it on surveys. And, in many cases, they may even be married to women.

It turns out that wives suspect their husbands of being gay rather frequently. They demonstrate that suspicion in the surprisingly common search: Is my husband gay? The word gay is 10% more likely to complete searches that begin Is my husband… than the second-place word, cheating. It is eight times more common than an alcoholic and 10 times more common than depressed.

Most tellingly perhaps, searches questioning a husbands sexuality are far more prevalent in the least tolerant regions. The states with the highest percentage of women asking this question are South Carolina and Louisiana. In fact, in 21 of the 25 states where this question is most frequently asked, support for gay marriage is lower than the national average.

What do our searches reveal about us? Photograph: Michael Gottschalk/Photothek via Getty Images

Closets are not just repositories of fantasies. When it comes to sex, people keep many secrets about how much they are having, for example. Americans report using far more condoms than are sold every year. You might therefore think this means they are just saying they use condoms more often during sex than they actually do. The evidence suggests they also exaggerate how frequently they are having sex to begin with. About 11% of women between the ages of 15 and 44 say they are sexually active, not currently pregnant, and not using contraception. Even with relatively conservative assumptions about how many times they are having sex, scientists would expect 10% of them to become pregnant every month. But this would already be more than the total number of pregnancies in the United States (which is one in 113 women of childbearing age).

In our sex-obsessed culture it can be hard to admit that you are just not having that much. But if youre looking for understanding or advice, you have, once again, an incentive to tell Google. On Google, there are 16 times more complaints about a spouse not wanting sex than about a married partner not being willing to talk. There are five-and-a-half times more complaints about an unmarried partner not wanting sex than an unmarried partner refusing to text back.

And Google searches suggest a surprising culprit for many of these sexless relationships. There are twice as many complaints that a boyfriend wont have sex than that a girlfriend wont have sex. By far, the number one search complaint about a boyfriend is My boyfriend wont have sex with me. (Google searches are not broken down by gender, but since the previous analysis said that 95% of men are straight, we can guess that not many boyfriend searches are coming from men.)

How should we interpret this? Does this really imply that boyfriends withhold sex more than girlfriends? Not necessarily. As mentioned earlier, Google searches can be biased in favour of stuff people are uptight talking about. Men may feel more comfortable telling their friends about their girlfriends lack of sexual interest than women are telling their friends about their boyfriends. Still, even if the Google data does not imply that boyfriends are really twice as likely to avoid sex as girlfriends, it does suggest that boyfriends avoiding sex is more common than people let on.

Google data also suggests a reason people may be avoiding sex so frequently: enormous anxiety, with much of it misplaced. Start with mens anxieties. It isnt news that men worry about how well endowed they are, but the degree of this worry is rather profound. Men Google more questions about their sexual organ than any other body part: more than about their lungs, liver, feet, ears, nose, throat, and brain combined. Men conduct more searches for how to make their penises bigger than how to tune a guitar, make an omelette, or change a tyre. Mens top Googled concern about steroids isnt whether they may damage their health but whether taking them might diminish the size of their penis. Mens top Googled question related to how their body or mind would change as they aged was whether their penis would get smaller.

Do women care about penis size? Rarely, according to Google searches. For every search women make about a partners phallus, men make roughly 170 searches about their own. True, on the rare occasions women do express concerns about a partners penis, it is frequently about its size, but not necessarily that its small. More than 40% of complaints about a partners penis size say that its too big. Pain is the most Googled word used in searches with the phrase ___ during sex. Yet only 1% of mens searches looking to change their penis size are seeking information on how to make it smaller.

Mens second most common sex question is how to make their sexual encounters longer. Once again, the insecurities of men do not appear to match the concerns of women. There are roughly the same number of searches asking how to make a boyfriend climax more quickly as climax more slowly. In fact, the most common concern women have related to a boyfriends orgasm isnt about when it happened but why it isnt happening at all.

We dont often talk about body image issues when it comes to men. And while its true that overall interest in personal appearance skews female, its not as lopsided as stereotypes would suggest. According to my analysis of Google AdWords, which measures the websites people visit, interest in beauty and fitness is 42% male, weight loss is 33% male, and cosmetic surgery is 39% male. Among all searches with how to related to breasts, about 20% ask how to get rid of man breasts.

The Truth About Hate and Prejudice

Sex and romance are hardly the only topics cloaked in shame and, therefore, not the only topics about which people keep secrets. Many people are, for good reason, inclined to keep their prejudices to themselves. I suppose you could call it progress that many people today feel they will be judged if they admit they judge other people based on their ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion. But many Americans still do. You can see this on Google, where users sometimes ask questions such as Why are black people rude? or Why are Jews evil?

A few patterns among these stereotypes stand out. For example, African Americans are the only group that faces a rude stereotype. Nearly every group is a victim of a stupid stereotype; the only two that are not: Jews and Muslims. The evil stereotype is applied to Jews, Muslims, and gay people but not black people, Mexicans, Asians, and Christians. Muslims are the only group stereotyped as terrorists. When a Muslim American plays into this stereotype, the response can be instantaneous and vicious. Google search data can give us a minute-by-minute peek into such eruptions of hate-fuelled rage.

Consider what happened shortly after the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, on 2 December, 2015. That morning, Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik entered a meeting of Farooks co-workers armed with semi-automatic pistols and semi-automatic rifles and murdered 14 people. That evening, minutes after the media first reported one of the shooters Muslim-sounding names, a disturbing number of Californians decided what they wanted to do with Muslims: kill them. The top Google search in California with the word Muslims in it at the time was kill Muslims. And overall, Americans searched for the phrase kill Muslims with about the same frequency that they searched for martini recipe and migraine symptoms.

In the days following the San Bernardino attack, for every American concerned with Islamophobia, another was searching for kill Muslims. While hate searches were approximately 20% of all searches about Muslims before the attack, more than half of all search volume about Muslims became hateful in the hours that followed it. And this minute-by-minute search data can tell us how difficult it can be to calm this rage.

Four days after the shooting, President Obama gave a prime-time address to the country. He wanted to reassure Americans that the government could both stop terrorism and, perhaps more importantly, quiet this dangerous Islamophobia. Obama appealed to our better angels, speaking of the importance of inclusion and tolerance. The rhetoric was powerful and moving. The Los Angeles Times praised Obama for [warning] against allowing fear to cloud our judgment. The New York Times called the speech both tough and calming. The website ThinkProgress praised it as a necessary tool of good governance, geared towards saving the lives of Muslim Americans. Obamas speech, in other words, was judged a major success. But was it?

Google search data suggests otherwise. Together with Evan Soltas, then at Princeton, I examined the data. In his speech, the president said: It is the responsibility of all Americans of every faith to reject discrimination. But searches calling Muslims terrorists, bad, violent, and evil doubled during and shortly after the speech. President Obama also said: It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country. But negative searches about Syrian refugees, a mostly Muslim group then desperately looking for a safe haven, rose 60%, while searches asking how to help Syrian refugees dropped 35%. Obama asked Americans to not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear. Yet searches for kill Muslims tripled during his speech. In fact, just about every negative search we could think to test regarding Muslims shot up during and after Obamas speech, and just about every positive search we could think to test declined.

In other words, Obama seemed to say all the right things. But new data from the internet, offering digital truth serum, suggested that the speech actually backfired in its main goal. Instead of calming the angry mob, as everybody thought he was doing, the internet data tells us that Obama actually inflamed it. Sometimes we need internet data to correct our instinct to pat ourselves on the back.

So what should Obama have said to quell this particular form of hatred currently so virulent in America? Well circle back to that later. First were going to take a look at an age-old vein of prejudice in the United States, the form of hate that in fact stands out above the rest, the one that has been the most destructive and the topic of the research that began this book. In my work with Google search data, the single most telling fact I have found regarding hate on the internet is the popularity of the word nigger.

Either singular or in its plural form, the word is included in 7m American searches every year. (Again, the word used in rap songs is almost always nigga, not nigger, so theres no significant impact from hip-hop lyrics to account for.) Searches for nigger jokes are 17 times more common than searches for kike jokes, gook jokes, spic jokes, chink jokes, and fag jokes combined. When are these searches most common? Whenever African Americans are in the news. Among the periods when such searches were highest was the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when television and newspapers showed images of desperate black people in New Orleans struggling for their survival. They also shot up during Obamas first election. And searches rose on average about 30% on Martin Luther King Jr Day.

The frightening ubiquity of this racial slur throws into doubt some current understandings of racism. Any theory of racism has to explain a big puzzle in America. On the one hand, the overwhelming majority of black Americans think they suffer from prejudice and they have ample evidence of discrimination in police stops, job interviews, and jury decisions. On the other hand, very few white Americans will admit to being racist. The dominant explanation among political scientists recently has been that this is due, in large part, to widespread implicit prejudice. White Americans may mean well, this theory goes, but they have a subconscious bias, which influences their treatment of black Americans.

Academics invented an ingenious way to test for such a bias. It is called the implicit association test. The tests have consistently shown that it takes most people milliseconds longer to associate black faces with positive words, such as good, than with negative words, such as awful. For white faces, the pattern is reversed. The extra time it takes is evidence of someones implicit prejudice a prejudice the person may not even be aware of.

There is, though, an alternative explanation for the discrimination that African Americans feel and whites deny: hidden explicit racism. Suppose there is a reasonably widespread conscious racism of which people are very much aware but to which they wont confess certainly not in a survey. Thats what the search data seems to be saying. There is nothing implicit about searching for nigger jokes. And its hard to imagine that Americans are Googling the word nigger with the same frequency as migraine and economist without explicit racism having a major impact on African Americans. Prior to the Google data, we didnt have a convincing measure of this virulent animus. Now we do. We are, therefore, in a position to see what it explains. It explains why Obamas vote totals in 2008 and 2012 were depressed in many regions. It also correlates with the black-white wage gap, as a team of economists recently reported. The areas that I had found make the most racist searches underpay black people.

And then there is the phenomenon of Donald Trumps candidacy. When Nate Silver, the polling guru, looked for the geographic variable that correlated most strongly with support in the 2016 Republican primary for Trump, he found it in the map of racism I had developed. To be provocative and to encourage more research in this area, let me put forth the following conjecture, ready to be tested by scholars across a range of fields. The primary explanation for discrimination against African Americans today is not the fact that the people who agree to participate in lab experiments make subconscious associations between negative words and black people; it is the fact that millions of white Americans continue to do things like search for nigger jokes.

The Truth About Girls

The discrimination black people regularly experience in the United States appears to be fuelled more widely by explicit, if hidden, hostility. But, for other groups, subconscious prejudice may have a more fundamental impact. For example, I was able to use Google searches to find evidence of implicit prejudice against another segment of the population: young girls. And who, might you ask, would be harbouring bias against girls? Their parents.

Its hardly surprising that parents of young children are often excited by the thought that their kids might be gifted. In fact, of all Google searches starting Is my two-year-old, the most common next word is gifted. But this question is not asked equally about boys and girls. Parents are two-and-a-half times more likely to ask Is my son gifted? than Is my daughter gifted? Parents show a similar bias when using other phrases related to intelligence that they may shy away from saying aloud, like Is my son a genius?

Are parents picking up on legitimate differences between young girls and boys? Perhaps young boys are more likely than young girls to use big words or show objective signs of giftedness? Nope. If anything, its the opposite. At young ages, girls have consistently been shown to have larger vocabularies and use more complex sentences. In American schools, girls are 9% more likely than boys to be in gifted programmes. Despite all this, parents looking around the dinner table appear to see more gifted boys than girls. In fact, on every search term related to intelligence I tested, including those indicating its absence, parents were more likely to be inquiring about their sons rather than their daughters. There are also more searches for is my son behind or stupid than comparable searches for daughters. But searches with negative words like behind and stupid are less specifically skewed toward sons than searches with positive words, such as gifted or genius.

What then are parents overriding concerns regarding their daughters? Primarily, anything related to appearance. Consider questions about a childs weight. Parents Google Is my daughter overweight? roughly twice as frequently as they Google Is my son overweight? Parents are about twice as likely to ask how to get their daughters to lose weight as they are to ask how to get their sons to do the same. Just as with giftedness, this gender bias is not grounded in reality. About 28% of girls are overweight, while 35% of boys are. Even though scales measure more overweight boys than girls, parents see or worry about overweight girls much more frequently than overweight boys. Parents are also one-and-a-half times more likely to ask whether their daughter is beautiful than whether their son is handsome.

Liberal readers may imagine that these biases are more common in conservative parts of the country, but I didnt find any evidence of that. In fact, I did not find a significant relationship between any of these biases and the political or cultural makeup of a state. It would seem this bias against girls is more widespread and deeply ingrained than wed care to believe.

Can We Handle the Truth?

I cant pretend there isnt a darkness in some of this data. It has revealed the continued existence of millions of closeted gay men; widespread animus against African Americans; and an outbreak of violent Islamophobic rage that only got worse when the president appealed for tolerance. Not exactly cheery stuff. If people consistently tell us what they think we want to hear, we will generally be told things that are more comforting than the truth. Digital truth serum, on average, will show us that the world is worse than we have thought.

But there are at least three ways this knowledge can improve our lives. First, there can be comfort in knowing you are not alone in your insecurities and embarrassing behaviour. Google searches can help show you are not alone. When you were young, a teacher may have told you that if you have a question you should raise your hand and ask it, because if youre confused, others are too. If you were anything like me, you ignored your teacher and sat there silently, afraid to open your mouth. Your questions were too dumb, you thought; everyone elses were more profound. The anonymous, aggregate Google data can tell us once and for all how right our teachers were. Plenty of basic, sub-profound questions lurk in other minds, too.

The second benefit of digital truth serum is that it alerts us to people who are suffering. The Human Rights Campaign has asked me to work with them in helping educate men in certain states about the possibility of coming out of the closet. They are looking to use the anonymous and aggregate Google search data to help them decide where best to target their resources.

The final and, I think, most powerful value in this data is its ability to lead us from problems to solutions. With more understanding, we might find ways to reduce the worlds supply of nasty attitudes. Lets return to Obamas speech about Islamophobia. Recall that every time he argued that people should respect Muslims more, the people he was trying to reach became more enraged. Google searches, however, reveal that there was one line that did trigger the type of response Obama might have wanted. He said: Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbours, our co-workers, our sports heroes and, yes, they are our men and women in uniform, who are willing to die in defence of our country.

After this line, for the first time in more than a year, the top Googled noun after Muslim was not terrorists, extremists, or refugees. It was athletes, followed by soldiers. And, in fact, athletes kept the top spot for a full day afterwards. When we lecture angry people, the search data implies that their fury can grow. But subtly provoking peoples curiosity, giving new information, and offering new images of the group that is stoking their rage may turn their thoughts in different, more positive directions.

Two months after that speech, Obama gave another televised speech on Islamophobia, this time at a mosque. Perhaps someone in the presidents office had read Soltass and my Times column, which discussed what had worked and what hadnt, for the content of this speech was noticeably different.

Obama spent little time insisting on the value of tolerance. Instead, he focused overwhelmingly on provoking peoples curiosity and changing their perceptions of Muslim Americans. Many of the slaves from Africa were Muslim, Obama told us; Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had their own copies of the Koran; a Muslim American designed skyscrapers in Chicago. Obama again spoke of Muslim athletes and armed service members, but also talked of Muslim police officers and firefighters, teachers and doctors. And my analysis of the Google searches suggests this speech was more successful than the previous one. Many of the hateful, rageful searches against Muslims dropped in the hours afterwards.

There are other potential ways to use search data to learn what causes, or reduces, hate. For example, we might look at how racist searches change after a black quarterback is drafted in a city, or how sexist searches change after a woman is elected to office. Learning of our subconscious prejudices can also be useful. We might all make an extra effort to delight in little girls minds and show less concern with their appearance. Google search data and other wellsprings of truth on the internet give us an unprecedented look into the darkest corners of the human psyche. This is at times, I admit, difficult to face. But it can also be empowering. We can use the data to fight the darkness. Collecting rich data on the worlds problems is the first step toward fixing them.

Extracted from: Everybody Lies: What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, published by Bloomsbury, 20. To order for 17 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846 Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz will be speaking in London at the Royal Society of Arts on Tuesday and at Second Home on Wednesday

Q&A with Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

The degree to which people are self-absorbed is pretty shocking: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. Photograph: Christopher Lane for the Observer

Whats your background? Id describe myself as a data scientist, but my PhD is in economics. When I was doing my PhD, in 2012, I found this tool called Google Trends that tells you what people are searching, and where, and I became obsessed with it. I know that when people first see Google data, they say Oh this is weird, this isnt perfect data, but I knew that perfect data didnt exist. The traditional data sets left a lot to be desired.

What would your search records reveal about you? They could definitely tell Im a hypochondriac because Im waking up in the middle of the night doing Google searches about my health. There are definitely things about me that you could figure out. When making claims about a topic, its better to do it on aggregate, but I think you can figure out a lot, if not everything, about an individual by what theyre searching on Google.

You worked at Google? For about a year and a half. I was on the economics team and also the quantitative marketing team. Some was analysis of advertising, which I got bored of, which is one of the reasons I stopped working there.

Did working there give you an understanding that helped this book? Yeah, I think it did. All this data Im talking about is public. But from meeting the people who know more about this data than anyone in the world, Im much more confident that it means what I think it means.

Does it change your view of human nature? Are we darker and stranger creatures than you realised? Yeah. I think I had a dark view of human nature to begin with, and I think now its gotten even darker. I think the degree to which people are self-absorbed is pretty shocking.

When Trump became president, all my friends said how anxious they were, they couldnt sleep because theyre so concerned about immigrants and the Muslim ban. But from the data you can see that in liberal parts of the country there wasnt a rise in anxiety when Trump was elected. When people were waking up at 3am in a cold sweat, their searches were about their job, their health, their relationship theyre not concerned about the Muslim ban or global warming.

Was the Google search data telling you that Trump was going to win? I did see that Trump was going to win. You saw clearly that African American turnout was going to be way down, because in cities with 95% black people there was a collapse in searches for voting information. That was a big reason Hillary Clinton did so much worse than the polls suggested.

Whats next? I want to keep on exploring this, whether in academia, journalism or more books. Its such an exciting area: what people are really like, how the world really works. I may just research sex for the next few months. One thing Ive learned from this book, people are more interested in sex than I thought they were.

Interview by Killian Fox

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