Our unhappy poet appears to be annoyed both by “underwhelming responses” to her own writing and by insufficiently convincing displays of approval. All that “endless patronising praise.” At which point, the words high maintenance spring to mind.
In the pages of the Guardian, a “queer, feminist poet” airs her sorrows.
To be shocked by differences in how boys and girls often behave, as Ms van der Zee admitted in an earlier Guardian article – such that “even the suggestion” of innate gender differences, now clearly visible, “felt like sedition,” indeed “revolutionary” – again suggests a practised, almost farcical, denial of reality. One that in turn prompts a suspicion that perhaps one shouldn’t be quite so credulous regarding feminist claims of How Things Really Are.
In the Guardian, a feminist shares her experience of raising three boys. And much bewilderment.
“Socialist men don’t date socialist women and it really bothers me.”
A doctor of “embodied medicine” airs her woke credentials and confesses her whiteness. Which, obviously, is the root of all wrongness.
Her name is Angeliki Chiado Tsoli and she’s “challenging the existence of social, economic, cultural, and class-based inequalities.”
“Trump’s campaign and presidency has created a type of PTSD — what I call Post-Trump Sex Disorder. People just don’t want to have sex.”
Apparently, Salon readers are having difficulties with erections.
Mary Hudson on working in the progressive utopia of public education:
There was an ethos of hostile resistance. Those who wanted to learn were prevented from doing so. Anyone who “cooperated with the system” was bullied. No homework was done. Students said they couldn’t do it because if textbooks were found in their backpacks, the offending students would be beaten up… I tried everything imaginable to overcome student resistance. Nothing worked. At one point I rearranged the seating to enable the students who wanted to engage to come to the front of the classroom. The principal was informed, and I was reprimanded. This was “discriminatory.”
It’s fundraising week over at my place.
If you’d like to help a blog remain afloat, and remain ad-free, by all means do.
An old photo of coal miners drinking beer is seen, and promptly denounced as blackface.
I bring you art. No, don’t thank me.
James Kirkup on modern policing and the case of Harry Miller:
The cop said he was in possession of 30 Tweets by me. I asked if any contained criminal material. He said…. No. I asked if any came close to being criminal… and he read me a limerick. Honestly. A limerick. A cop read me a limerick over the phone. I said, I didn’t write that. He said, “Ah. But you liked it and promoted it.” I asked why he was wasting his time on a non-crime. He said, “It’s not a crime, but it will be recorded as a hate incident”… The cop repeatedly called the complainant “the victim.” I asked how there could be a victim if, as he’d established, there was no crime. He said, that’s just how it works.
Feminist romance, it’s not for everyone.
Christopher Snowdon attempts to feed himself for a day while abiding by the Lancet’s latest nutritional guidelines.
A lone woman defending herself from an armed male mugger is, it turns out, terribly problematic.
It seems unwise to redefine masculinity in order to flatter the resentments and insecurities of the fringe and maladjusted – say, “social justice” enthusiasts who consider themselves “marginalised” by expectations of competence, competitiveness and emotional self-possession. Or those who describe themselves as transsexual, non-binary or “gender non-conforming.”
Not correcting errors of grammar and spelling, at a university, is the path to “a socially just future,” apparently. And not, as one might suppose, somewhat narrowed hopes of employment.
Exempting favoured identity groups from the normal consequences of predatory and antisocial behaviour is the Hot New Fairness, apparently, at least among the enlightened. And if someone steals your phone or laptop, it would be wrong of you to protest, especially if the thief happens to be “of colour” and therefore, obviously, entitled to your stuff. Mugging, it turns out, is a form of “social justice.” We’ve been here before, of course. As when the Harvard-educated sociology professor Crystal Fleming championed the recreational looting of trainers, in bulk, and other fashion items, on grounds that the law-abiding are “hoarding resources.”
The year began on a highbrow note as the University of Denver’s Professor Ryan Evely Gildersleeve informed the world that laziness is a “a political stance,” a way to “combat the neoliberal condition,” and a “tool for contributing to social justice.” Half-arsed incompetence is, we were assured, both radical and empowering. The professor also shared his belief that plastic is sentient.
Inanimate objects also troubled Dr Jane Bone, a senior lecturer at Monash University, Melbourne, who specialises in “feminist post-structural perspectives” and the political implications of problematic furniture. Dr Bone’s research involves quite a lot of “embodied knowing,” i.e., visiting IKEA and sitting on chairs. Her work, she revealed, is “not necessarily logical.”
Further feminist insights came via Phoebe Patey-Ferguson, whose feminist fight club is “a mode of resistance,” because the spectacle of unhappy ladies body-slamming each other and breaking each other’s ribs is an obvious way to “destroy the Conservative government” and “bring down the patriarchy.”
That’s January. There’s another eleven months to get through.
Mr Roy G Guzmán describes himself as “a marginalised writer,” and an “artist and influencer,” thereby signalling both his suffering and his modesty to lower beings. He’s also, it seems, a tad sensitive.
Georgia Tech’s Young Socialists demand easier lessons, more time for sleep, and free psychiatrists.