This essay argues that feminism is impossible. After examining a recent #MeToo episode—a bad sexual encounter between actor Aziz Ansari and a woman named Grace—as a case study in feminist disappointment, the essay turns to several key seventies feminist texts to reconstruct their theories of bad sex. By taking bad sex as the model for women’s oppression, seventies feminists crafted a culturalist theory of patriarchy logically culminating in lesbian separatism. This theory, while containing the essence of all feminisms, proved unactionable: feminism could not outlaw women’s stubborn desires for men. Hence, by the eighties, some feminists had reframed bad sex as rape, calling upon the state to police sex in lieu of changing women’s minds.

Friggin’ awesome piece.

via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmutjUfrpQQ

Are the straights okay? In episode 44 of Overthink, Ellie and David dive into “heteropessimism,” the sense of disillusionment or even shame associated with heterosexuality. From viral TikTok videos to studies showing that women are less dissatisfied than men in heterosexual relationships, post #metoo society is reckoning with the everyday sexism of many relationships. Ellie and David explore the reasons for heteropessimism, consider alternatives such as political lesbianism and boys’ education, and ask: how can we be attracted to things that are bad for us, and how can we break out of a heteropessimistic approach to love?

One that actually brings men and women together.

Featuring Louise Perry.

I was surprised to find myself nodding along with pretty much everything the host and guest said. They were both cooking. So many good quotes to chew on in here.

One criticism I have of the more individualistic feminist position is that if you think that rape is a product of propaganda, shall we say, consent workshops are no match for pornography. Just think of the hundreds of hours that a typical teenage boy might be exposed to pornography, compared with 30 minutes of a consent workshop. I mean, there’s no match. / Just on that basis, we’re at a disadvantage, and Dworkin and MacKinnon’s position on banning pornography makes a lot more sense.

It’s perfectly normal and natural for people to have mostly homosocial kinds of friendships and to say vulgar or unkind things in private. But now, of course, the internet blasts this out into the public domain. I think that is part of the problem.

Conservative SCOTUS block has taken a huge L.

Should religion be able to answer the problem at the heart of the second wave?

What feminists have to ask is, are we responding to this threat in the direction of greater meaning and deeper human flourishing for everyone? Or are we shutting down the articulation of meaning out of fear that we might be excluded from it? The right way to respond to this situation is to rediscover our ability to advocate positively for our own complex human nature, our own search for meaning, our own need for purpose in life.

via: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/linkpost-for-may-3ac

Academic and writer Amia Srinivasan’s revolutionary debut text, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, questions the ways in which we discuss or avoid the problems and politics of sex. Examining the complexities and interconnections between sex, consent, gender, class, race and power, the stunning narrative unravels the nuances of discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, to name a few. In conversation with Bee Rowlatt, Srinivasan discusses these urgent political debates and what it means to be free.

This woman is cracked.

Why does this have to exist…

What cancel culture reveals and conceals about redemption

Man, the Internet social justice movement really fucked up my life and many others. And for what? Sigh…

via: https://lydialaurenson.substack.com/p/social-contracts-moral-order-weaving

As [per] usual with gender issues, this can be best explained through a story from ancient Chinese military history.

What I propose is not for feminism to stop advocating against sexism towards women. I propose for feminists to look for ways to do so that don’t needlessly cause lasting sexual repression or guilt in a subset of men most sympathetic to feminist concerns. However, this would require considering men’s interests, perspectives, and experiences, not just women’s.

see: https://web.archive.org/web/20200217134031/http://home.earthlink.net/~ahunter/Same_Closet_Diff_Door/hpsissy.html

via: https://nottoby.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-training-boys-and/comment/149005099

Something fundamentally needs to change WRT how we talk about gender in this country. Damn, man…

This is of course the thing everyone swears they don’t mean when they use the word privilege, which is of course how the motte-and-bailey fallacy works. But as soon as they are not being explicitly challenged about the definition, this is the way they revert back to using the word.

see: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2091#comment-326664

via: https://nottoby.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-training-boys-and/comment/149005099

Seems like one of the smartest computer scientists on the planet and I have a lot in common.

My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, (completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did).

At one point, I actually begged a psychiatrist to prescribe drugs that would chemically castrate me (I had researched which ones), because a life of mathematical asceticism was the only future that I could imagine for myself.

see: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2119

via: https://nottoby.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-training-boys-and/comment/149005099

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.