She Was a Famous Millennial Feminist. Her Polyamory Memoir Is Heartbreaking.
Politics can’t always save us from the self-annihilating need for love, on whatever terms it’s offered.
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My absolute best reads
The “Cornell Seven” Is Really About Liberalism
Between the opposing poles of a culture wedded to celebrating degeneracy while insisting we coddle women, and a conservative alternative equally totalitarian in its demands for “purity,” is a third way. We don’t have all the answers. What is clear to us, though, is that such liberalism as practiced in the opening decades of the 21st century—all the sexual freedom and none of the consequences—does not work; neither do punitive and reactionary laws or unsubstantiated media frenzies. A more dignified sexual ethic would recognize the agency of men and women alike, and have a greater share of adults, including college students, making adult decisions. It also probably wouldn’t celebrate depraved and extreme acts for their own sake as “empowering,” even if they’re consensual.
Cornell raises an uncomfortable question about consent
We want sex to be simple and sexual assault to be simply unthinkable. We want there to be bright lines that obviously shouldn’t be crossed so we can shout “J’accuse” at anyone who does. But we want to proclaim that men and women are fundamentally the same, aside from socialization. We want to declare that anything goes, as long as both parties have consented. And then we want to set 18-year-olds free to live out this liberation theology. The result is predictably disastrous.
Why No One Trusts Data Centers and Flock Cameras
When small business owners begged to reopen so they could make a mortgage payment, the press, the political class, and many of our medical experts called them selfish, and worse. Some reporters said those people should not get respirators if they got Covid during those protests. Then, in the summer, cities started burning in riots, and the press, the political class, and many of our medical experts decided that mass gatherings were now a moral necessity and the virus would understand. That was the moment several million Americans concluded that none of it had ever been about the science and the press. The political class, and many of our medical experts, wanted control, not solutions.
Why the Media is Honest and Good
My advice is to read the mainstream media, and trust the facts they present, while questioning the narratives. Understand where the biases are and correct for them. Read some of their critics too, but understand that those critics are almost more biased and less intelligent and honest than those that they attack. The few media critics who are better than the press are rare and deserve your support. The exception here is anything having to do with race, gender, or sexual orientation, where you should understand that establishment journalists are trying their best but can’t be trusted because they’ve lost their minds, or are scared of those that have, and you’d be better off listening to people with cancelable views. Continue to criticize the press for where it falls short, without devolving into nihilistic hate.
From Isaac Newton to Jason Arday
I wonder if over time the private sector may take on the intellectual role once played by the university. There are companies you can employ to answer almost any question you like— most commonly: “Where should I invest my money?”—as well as plenty of companies that employ scientists to carry out research that might once have been done by academics. “Objective, rational linear thinking” will reliably have market value, even if its social status is diminished. Isaac Newton might not have found a place at today’s Cambridge, which would be a great loss to the institution. But I have faith that someone, somewhere will always be willing to pay brilliant people to be weird.
A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution
Coleman Hughes defends the ideal of colorblindness, which he defines as “treat[ing] people without regard to race in our personal lives and in our public policy.” He calls for “policies aimed at reducing the gap between the haves and the have-nots [that] should be executed on the basis of class, not race.” First, class-based affirmative action, which punishes children for the success of their parents, is worse than the current system of explicitly anti-white, anti-Asian, and anti-male discrimination. A class-based affirmative action regime would not only discriminate against higher-performing racial groups. Within the white and Asian populations it would disproportionately target the most talented individuals, who are more likely to have high-SES parents. We need to end the war on nature, accept that talent is not distributed equally within or across groups, and allow people to succeed based on their merit. Second, the ideal of colorblindness is probably not tenable. Race provides important information about expected outcomes. That’s why AI ethicists find it so difficult to stop pattern-recognizing algorithms from becoming “racist.” People spontaneously organize themselves to some extent along racial lines, and groups can have conflicting interests. Racial realities will inform interpersonal behavior and public policy.
The tragedy of Jason Arday
We may not feel exactly guilt at participating in the row, but it would be strange if we didn’t feel sober, chastened, by his tragic end.
Why We Got It So Wrong
We need a social vision that is as morally compelling as identity politics but does a better job of describing reality.
Don’t Scapegoat Women
In fact, what we now call “wokism” has been the ideology of Western liberals for more than a century. Women were mass recruited into institutions largely because the white male elites were already woke… When you combine the equality thesis with Christian moral sensibilities (“ There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female” and “ inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me”) you get wokism… The empirical premise of wokism is that all groups—including the sexes—are innately the same, at least with respect to socially relevant psychological traits. Therefore, in a just world men and women would have equal outcomes.
Carl Jung and the spiritual problem of the modern individual
Casting aside these religions has had many effects, but the one which Jung saw as most pressing, was the fact that it forced countless people to face the existential dilemmas of human life without the helpful crutch of religious dogma.
The Slumflower is a small part of a much bigger problem
I mostly question how a brand of feminism that claims not to care about men, seems so intensely obsessed with them. Whilst Eggerue is ‘guilty’ of all of the above, she isn’t alone. Followers have said that she admits coming into her ideas on self-worth and feminism after spending over a year getting over a man she had dated for three months. I think deep, unresolved pain is most people’s route and anchor to Popular Feminism. Whilst the movement can be a powerfully cathartic force for its participants, it isn’t healthy or sustainable for that pain to remain unresolved, unstudied. All it truly is, is profitable.
Feminism without human warmth leaves me cold
Zoe Williams
Above all, my feminism doesn’t even exist without the presumption that all human beings are infinitely precious, infinitely vulnerable, that none of us could withstand the harshness of this worldview, in which we all use each other furiously until everybody’s spent.
The Wrong Kind of Black Poet
Ernest Jesuyemi
The tic and the taboo
I truly feel for Davidson. This latest chapter in the culture war is so frustratingly stupid it’s like a really bad episode of The Jerry Springer Show. And yet this is a painful but needed reminder for our nation that the absurd hypersensitivity Americans have around the word “nigger” is actually really unhealthy and will inevitably lead to situations in which innocent people are trampled over pretend harms, which is precisely what happened here. We should be ashamed of ourselves for becoming so profoundly unkind in the name of kindness. In the end, that’s the real takeaway.
Don’t Judge Me
He talks of Americans yearning to live not the great life and not only the good life, but something far humbler: “a normal life.” I asked him if this choice was deliberate. It was.
In Defense Of J.D. Vance
This is how it works. Southerners have an advanced capacity to put up with a lot for the sake of keeping social harmony. It can and does lead to all kinds of dysfunction — oh yes indeed it does! — but it also works magic in keeping messy people together. The bonds of family and community cannot be stretched infinitely, of course, but they can be stretched a lot farther than people think. In my own extended family, we don’t have any people who inhabit ideological and social extremes, but if we did, we would find a way to work through it. That’s just what we do. When I was in the latter years of high school and the first years of college, my father and I were very much at odds politically (actual dialogue: “Daddy, I’m a socialist.” “Got damn, how did I get a son like you?!”), but we held it together.
👂🏾🗣️ @ibquake collaborating with @one
Cc @drfoy
Why the Young Republicans Felt Comfortable Saying Such Vile Stuff
The internet changes our sense of who we’re speaking to and how our words land. Until we confront that shift directly, we will keep circling the same argument about whether people “really mean it.” The question misses the point. Meaning itself has become unstable because the medium blurs intention and consequence.
London Has Fallen
And I reminded him that the Thought Police of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four didn’t literally police thoughts. They policed politically incorrect opinions, whether written down or spoken. In fact, the first mention of thoughtcrime in the novel is when the protagonist Winston Smith writes “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” in his secret diary.
The First Step to Winning Back the Senate: Don’t Nominate Anyone Who Said ‘God Is Non-Binary’ On Video
It’s an important example of how Democrats sometimes hug The Science along their way to expressing ideas so bizarre and off-putting that only someone with a Ph.D. could have come up with them.
What is Blueskyism?
Still, a subculture like Blueskyism that sees depression as a rational and even virtuous response is going to select for a lot of miserable people. And misery likes company. So the Blueskyists gather in a corner, exchanging tales of woe, while the rest of us slink away.
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Latest Epiphanies
On social media, many of the most chaotic and emotionally lawless people you’ve ever known are posting on a regular basis about having at long last achieved inner peace. Many among us, after observing this cringe-inducing side effect of regular self-narration at mass scale, have given up altogether on sincere ideas of personal epiphany.
A Party of Prigs and Pontificators Suffers a Humiliating Defeat
The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe. Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive D.E.I. seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s double plus ungood
The Problem With Art by “Monsters”
Do we really want musicians to rein in the eros, filmmakers not to depict anything sexually untoward, allegations to equal guilt? Artists of decades and centuries past to be held to present-day comportment standards? The consensus appears to be yes. What a prissy and punitive world ours has become.
Israel Killed 31 of My Family Members in Gaza. The Pro-Palestine Movement Isn’t Helping.
I remain very pro-Palestine. I’m also in favor of peace and pragmatism. I’m vehemently opposed to everything Hamas represents and all of their vile acts against the Israeli people. I also think Prime Minister Netanyahu is a war criminal, responsible for killing my family members along with tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians in Gaza. He has blood on his hands and will not be easily forgiven. Balancing these multiple truths is not something many activists seem capable of doing. They’re genuinely unwilling to acknowledge that the goal should be coexistence. To achieve true peace and anything approaching a realistic solution, we need to talk to each other as equals.
The Great Awokening What happens to culture in an era of identity politics?
An artist can be so perfectly attuned to the moment that he or she makes machines precision engineered to flatter contemporary taste. An artist can also be so perfectly attuned to the moment that he or she sees what’s unsaid and so says something new. The first category is disposable; the second is not. The work of a critic — alert to ideals, alert to ambition — is to tell the difference.
Your Laughter Is My Trauma: Hannah Gadsby and the Comedic Art of Emotional Manipulation
But trauma is increasingly becoming the mark of honor in today’s vomitous culture of constant revelation. Hannah Gadsby and other high-profile confessors will be fine, with access to the kind of counselling and other services that exist to ease victims of trauma back into everyday life. But texts like Nanette create dramas of revelation and exposure that serve as templates for everyone else, and reinforce an already widespread cultural prerequisite that women in particular continually define themselves by their traumatized selves. Attend any social justice event on matters like prison abolition and you will find panels of mostly women, mostly women of color, often LGBTQ-identified, beginning their presentations with their tales of trauma. People who do this have spoken (usually privately, and only in trusted circles) that they are often explicitly told, by funders and “allies,” that they must present their tales of woe if they want to be taken seriously.
Camille Paglia Can’t Say That
Paglia possesses all sorts of knowledge that any student could benefit from understanding. (Understanding doesn’t imply agreeing.) The identitarian conceit is that trans people and survivors of sexual assault can’t learn from Paglia, because she renders them “unsafe.” Meanwhile, cis white males are acculturated to believe that they can always learn from anyone, even professors overtly hostile to their race, sexual orientation, or gender identity. In this way, left-identitarianism encourages historically marginalized groups to believe that they are less resilient and less capable than their white, male classmates. They suggest, falsely, that “harm” is the only possible result of listening to controversial (or even offensive) ideas.
Camille Paglia: It’s Time for a New Map of the Gender World
The New Criticism desperately needed supplementation, but that opaque hash (so divorced from genuine art appreciation) was certainly not it. I was disgusted at the rapid spread of deconstruction and post-structuralism throughout elite U.S. universities in the 1970s, when I was teaching at my first job at Bennington College. The reason it happened is really quite prosaic: a recession hit in the 1970s, and the job market in academe collapsed. Fancy-pants post-structuralism was the ticket to ride for ambitious, beady-eyed young careerists on the make. Its coy, showy gestures and clotted lingo were insiders’ badges of claimed intellectual superiority. But the whole lot of them were mediocrities from the start. It is doubtful that much if any of their work will have long-term traction.
What Is a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP)?
Social stress is perceived as more taxing to most people than other types of stress. This kind of stress can be particularly difficult for someone who can perceive many different ways that things could go wrong in a conflict, for example, or can perceive hostility or tension where others may not notice it.
14 Things Highly Sensitive People Absolutely Need to Be Happy
Because most people are not highly sensitive, they simply don’t understand what it’s like to get very stressed out by, say, a startling noise, a busy weekend, or a violent scene in a movie. Not everyone will understand, and that’s okay. But what an HSP needs is at least a few people — preferably the people closest to them — to “get” their sensitivity. Someone who not only gets it, but helps protect them from overstimulation (“Yes, it’s perfectly okay that we leave the party now. I can see all over your face that you’re overstimulated.”). And, someone who sees all the wonderful gifts that come with this rare trait.
Opinion | We want objective judges and doctors. Why not journalists too?
Nor was the principle of objectivity “meant to imply that journalists were free of bias,” as Tom Rosenstiel, a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland and former executive director of the American Press Institute, and Bill Kovach, a former top editor, wrote in their book, “The Elements of Journalism.” “Quite the contrary,” they noted. The term arose “out of a growing recognition that journalists were full of bias, often unconsciously. Objectivity called for journalists to develop a consistent method of testing information — a transparent approach to evidence — precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of their work.”
Kathleen Stock: The Oxford kids are alright
This is not the fatuous argument, made by opportunistic identitarians and anti-woke warriors alike, that we should “listen to young people” — usually made while smoothly guiding listeners to exactly those young people whose views happen to coincide with their own. Nor is it the pretence that we oldies should just shut up and listen to young people generally, no matter what they say — as if today’s youth had miraculously gained hitherto unknown oracular powers, what with all that gaming and watching of TikTok videos. Of course, we shouldn’t be shy of arguing robustly with younger generations, when they talk what appears to be nonsense. They can both dish it and take it. The question is: can we?
The Problem With Reparations
Contrary to Blackhawk (and his reviewer), no American who received a basic elementary (let alone high-school) education nowadays can be unaware of the injustice and cruelty meted out to North America’s prior inhabitants as European settlers, themselves often fleeing poverty, oppression, starvation, and serfdom abroad, settled the frontier. But as with the Benin bronzes, we might wonder: how did the tribes inhabiting this continent at the time of European settlement themselves acquire their land? In all likelihood they did so by the conquest and expulsion of prior occupants. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, North America was not a continent of Edenlike peace and innocence. The New World was already rife with the same human violence that plagued the old. Should this country then not rather be judged, nowadays, by the unprecedented set of free political and economic institutions it established – and into which its native inhabitants were welcomed in the end?
How to Make Your Relationships Authentically Harmonious | by Anna Mercury
That it takes a monastic level of spiritual retreat to exist in surroundings that don’t reinforce the illusion that we are nouns, and by extension, good or bad nouns, is a sign that everything about our world is very, very messed up. Reality should not be a spiritual pursuit or a radical proposal. It should be a given. Instead, we live in such an intensely illusory world that reality seems foreign and otherworldly. understood as the art of ‘sober calculation’ about ‘choice and avoidance’. Prudence helps us determine what produces pleasure over the long-term, encouraging us to choose pains that produce greater pleasure (eg, exercising to increase health), and avoiding pleasures if they result in more pain (eg, credit card debt; hangovers). Prudence, in other words, tells us that ‘drinking bouts and continuous partying’ are not a great life strategy. Prudence keeps us out of the proverbial gutter and helps us achieve or approximate tranquility.
Onomarie Uriri Honours Chude Jideonwo as He Turns 30! “A Birthday Tribute to the King of Misfits.
Those who have met Chude and interacted closely with him will attest to these three things: meeting Chude will confuse, challenge and eventually change you. Confuse you, because he’s thinking/doing a zillion and one things at the same time, and it’s hard to keep up. While you’re in 2015, I can assure you, that Chude has already scoped out 2045. Challenge you because, he never allows you to peacefully exist in a state of inertia or ordinariness. If you have a hidden skill or talent that you are leaving to waste, you can be sure that Chude will sniff it out and ensure you put it to good use. Change you because, though he is a prodigy, and by extension, naturally impatient,
Witch trials, TERF wars and the voice of conscience in a new podcast about J.K. Rowling.
The heroes in Rowling’s books are not flawless. They are not worthy of our blind adoration or tribal allegiance. They are at their best when they are listening, searching and doubting, acknowledging the complexity and diversity of the world around them. Perhaps Rowling could have remained silent, and remained beloved. But, for wrong or right, that is not what her heroes do.
The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido.
It’s a relief to see a film so frank about sex, and so open to sex’s complexities, especially when so much of current cinema is sexless to a disheartening degree. Sex isn’t just sex. It’s healing and cathartic and just plain old fun, fun with no object other than it’s fun to have fun. These are tough topics.
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande rewrites onscreen nudity.
How much more shameful could we get than saying that this thing that keeps us alive and gives us pleasure and does all these things for you, the most important thing is how it looks. We say that to everyone – we say it to our kids and we say it to everyone around us and to ourselves. What a bloody waste of time and energy. That shame then leads into sexual shame. We are soaked in it, in a culture that tells us that. So we have to really try and stand outside of it. Ema [Thompson] likes to say it doesn’t necessarily mean self-love. It’s not looking at your body and going, ‘I love the way it looks’. It’s saying the way it looks isn’t the most important thing about it
It’s Good To Be Difficult: Shonda Rhimes’s Leadership Lessons.
I never thought there was a problem with being called bossy, bitchy, or difficult. That might be the way I was raised. I was the youngest of six, with a lot of sisters. It just never occurred to me “bossy” was a negative thing. Speaking my mind, standing up for what I want…I was raised to believe I belong in every single room I’ve ever been in. To be concerned that somebody else thinks I’m bossy or difficult suggests their opinion of me is more important than my own belief in myself.
Netflix’s ‘Harry & Meghan’ Review: A Royal Rerun
There’s an air of duty about the entire enterprise of “Harry & Meghan,” as if they’re honor-bound to keep reciting their personal story until we eventually lose interest.
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s “Against Decolonisation”
One can critique Eurocentric narratives, broaden one’s intellectual and cultural palate beyond the Euro-American canon and believe that African societies and cultures deserve respect and should not be slandered—without the specialised and mostly incomprehensible terminology, shrill posturing and reactionary pseudo-radicalism that define decolonial politics.
The Limits of ‘Lived Experience’
It’s essentially a turf war. Only Latino authors can write novels about Latinos. Only Holocaust survivors can convey the truth of the Holocaust. Only disabled people can portray disabled people. Everyone else is out. This is one point of view, and as with most points of view, some of it is valid. Clearly those who have lived through something — whether it’s a tsunami or a lifetime of racial discrimination — have a story to tell. Their perspective is distinct and it’s valuable. But it is, crucially, only one perspective.
Assured Misery
The inability to deal with the hassle, delay, setback, and nonsense, caused by a desire to squeeze maximum efficiency out of everything we do
