Hallucinating about sex with Dilbert

I've always been sort of in awe of Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams's disguised-as-humor insights. For instance, while I'm sure he didn't intend it, believe -- really and truly -- that you can't consider yourself a civilized modern human being until you've read a) Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and The Grand Inquisitor interlude from Brothers Karamazov and b) the introduction to Adam's The Dilbert Principle.

And while he's just clowning around with the idea in his blog, he included a killer example of confirmation bias in a post last week, and when I have a chance I'm going to do a post based on that idea and how it relates to certain seemingly intractable problems in the so-called "feminism wars." (Short answer: No, it's not time to give the word a rest. Long answer? You'll have to wait.)

Anyway, this morning he crystallized a concept that just runs through and through my posts about the culture and politics of sex, stereotyping, Mars/Venus differencing, "posturing," prudery and sluttery, chastity, and, and, and...

"You can't fix a problem that's based on a hallucination until you're able to acknowledge the hallucination."

You can read the rest of his post here, but when you're done laughing, frowning, or shaking your head, take a moment to memorize that quote.

Yes, Adams was posting about the utter futility of waging war when both sides know they can't win (and making fun of, um, uncreative types on both sides who, knowing "no one can win or lose, they settle for killing as many random civilians as possible because that's one thing they can do. The thinking, I gather, is that killing random people and never winning is still better than doing nothing and looking weak.") Still, the idea generalizes extremely well to other futilities such as which gender might be the more virtuous, which consensual sex acts might be right or wrong, and why, exactly, it makes more sense to debate contraception failure as an intractable moral question instead of as a social policy or R&D opportunity.