Why do men find it so hard to connect with other people, and their own emotions?

A modern review of a misunderstood and kinda strange book. Man, once you’ve consumed one or two good pieces of “masculinity crisis” media, you kinda realize the rest of them don’t have much of anything novel to say.

see: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29434.Self_Made_Man

To me there’s nothing powerful or subversive about this lexicon: it smacks more of a (literally) infantile fixation. Which makes it difficult to see why women would want to reclaim it.

In this sharp manifesto, veteran author and activist, Jude Doyle, reunites feminist and trans politics through a common belief: that all people deserve to have the final say about who they are…

An excellent book on transfeminism from the transmasc POV. A terrifyingly easy read: I zoomed through its 200 pages in about a day.

Never so quickly has an article made me transition from confusion to laughter to rage so quickly. Conservatives are weird. Everything’s here: pseudoscience, denial of the existence of racism and sexism, bio— and gender essentialism, and so many false dichotomies. The point of this article is to get a conservative white man’s dick wet. Furthermore, it’s one of those frustrating unfalsifiable “theories”: if I disagree with the author on the merits of what they’re written, then they can just claim I’ve been “feminized.” Utter bull crap.

via: https://smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/are-women-unsuited-for-the-pursuit

This month we learned that the linguist Robin Lakoff had died at the age of 82. If you’ve heard of Lakoff you will probably know her as the author of Language and Woman’s Place (LWP), an early and very influential contribution to the field of language and gender studies.

In my view, the effectiveness of what most people understand to be “linguistic engineering”—banning words, redefining them by fiat, trying to force people to use new words invented by engineers—is seriously overrated. If it were held to the same standard as actual engineering (does this work? Can we rely on it to keep working?), it would fail almost every time. Which is not to say we shouldn’t criticize it (though I’d prefer it if we didn’t only criticize the other side’s version while giving our own side a free pass); but I think we should probably focus less on the idea that “they” are messing with our minds, and more on the other, more prosaic tools which are used to crush dissent and enforce compliance.

I think there is much to be done regarding making linguistic engineering a legitimate field.

Last week the bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk ended in a spectacular war of words on social media. As the world watched, the US president and his “First Buddy” traded accusations, threats and insults. But while some people just reached for the popcorn, others apparently saw a golden opportunity to expound their pet…

because: Montell, Amanda. Wordslut. Nero, 2019.

Prohibition failed, but it succeeded in empowering women to speak up about issues like domestic violence.

Prohibition is strongly linked to the rise of women in American politics. A fascinating brief history of the 18th Amendment.

The discourse around Harry Styles, former One Direction member and one of the stars of “Don’t Worry Darling”, has taken an interesting turn. Perhaps it’s time someone… said something. Watch to find out whether Billie Eilish, Charlie Puth, Nick Jonas, and Shawn Mendes need to be… CANCELLED!?? In light of the recent heartbreaking tweet from Kit Connor, it’s seems like something should be said. Along the way, we’ll make friends with Judith Butler and weird gay sociologists and philosophers. Don’t you just love Twitter?

This video is such a great deconstruction of queerbaiting, from both the perspective of cinema and celebrity. It does well to ask both if common conceptions of queerbaiting are internally consistent and actually useful for working towards liberation.

I have many guy friends. Why don’t we hang out more?

Beautiful essay. Makes me very scared for my own future.