Southampton Antifascists warns of an impending outrage:

Portsmouth Guildhall will be hosting an event for the Transphobic group Filia on the 16th – 17th October.

Filia have openly called for conversion therapy for those in the Trans community and openly act as gate keepers of womanhood.

Can you imagine?? Women are actually having the brass neck to act as gate keepers of womanhood. Who the hell do they think they are?

Filia are a hate group masquerading as a feminist charity and should not be able to hold events unchallenged.

In fact they shouldn’t be able to hold events at all, or go outside without supervision, or have jobs, or vote, or go to school.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote an essay.

In a lengthy essay published on her website on Tuesday, Adichie accused a former student of publicly attacking her after a 2017 interview in which Adichie said, among other things, “I don’t think it’s a good thing to talk about women’s issues being exactly the same as the issues of trans women.” Adichie held up the personal feud as a cautionary tale about how social media has been used by “certain young people” as an ideological battering ram rather than a place to communicate and seek understanding.

Let’s read some of what she said:

After the workshop, I welcomed her into my life. I very rarely do this, because my past experiences with young Nigerians left me wary of people who are calculating and insincere and want to use me only as an opportunity. But she was a Bright Young Nigerian Feminist and I thought that was worth making an exception.

She spent time in my Lagos home. We had long conversations. I was support-giver, counsellor, comforter.

Then I gave an interview in March 2017 in which I said that a trans woman is a trans woman, (the larger point of which was to say that we should be able to acknowledge difference while being fully inclusive, that in fact the whole premise of inclusiveness is difference.)

And you know what happened next: the former student trashed Adichie on social media.

Of course she could very well have had concerns with the interview. That is fair enough. But I had a personal relationship with her. She could have emailed or called or texted me. Instead she went on social media to put on a public performance.

It’s so much more fun that way.

Back to the Times:

The conflict escalated last year, after Adichie defended an essay by the Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling about sex and gender — a piece that her critics seized on as transphobic — as “perfectly reasonable.” Emezi posted a lengthy Twitter thread, saying that when their* former teacher “said those things and then doubled down and then mocked those of us who called her out (she called the response ‘trans-noise’), I was gutted.”

Adichie’s essay appears to be the first time she has publicly addressed the feud, tying the personal attacks to what she describes as a larger social and cultural problem of moral self-righteousness and reflexive attacks on those with differing views, and the corrosive effect those stances can have on unfettered debate and discussion. “We have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow,” she wrote.

But at least they’re infinitely intersectional.

*Emezi uses customized pronouns

Ah yes both sides. Thank god there is someone to wade in at this late date to bemoan the “cruelty” on “both sides.”

She’s a columnist for the Evening Standard and a board member of the Fawcett Society.

Right on cue what? Disagreement? Is that so intolerable? Is it “cruelty”?

So let’s read her “thoughts on the need for more moderate voices.”

I’m on the board of the Fawcett Society which campaigns for women’s equality. Last week, a ruling was made which found in favour of a woman, Maya Forster, who had been dismissed from her job for expressing her views on the trans debate and established that gender critical views are a protected belief. She and others then attacked me and the Fawcett Society for not saying anything about the judgement. Millicent Fawcett, who the charity is named after, coined the motto “courage calls to courage everywhere”.

Oh, I see where we are. Hazarika is so special that she sees criticism of her actions as “attacking” her, and so confident in thinking that way that she doesn’t realize how petulant and vain it looks for a putative feminist to write a newspaper column bashing feminist women for expecting support from a feminist organization.

“Where is your courage?” furious gender critical women raged at me.

Yes, “where is your courage” is the most furious ragey four word question I’ve ever seen. My eyeballs are stinging.

It’s a fair question and I’ll answer it today in an entirely personal capacity. Hands up. Guilty as charged. Squeak squeak. I’m absolutely terrified about this debate. Even as I type, my anxiety levels are through the roof. I’m braced for the inevitable, merciless online abuse. I even booked in an emergency session with my therapist to work out a coping strategy for my mental health. Does this sound right to you? No. Because it’s not. This debate has become utterly toxic.

We know. We also know that it’s not “both sides” – and that feminists understand that.

But it’s time to stop this cowardice and to speak up. I’m sorry to disappoint but I’m not picking a side. The stakes are incredibly high on both sides, and I get that. But what I cannot and will not accept is the level of mindless cruelty and polarisation which is ripping apart progressive politics and making enemies of people who should stand shoulder to shoulder.

Actually she did pick a side, she picked it by starting the piece with a complaint about Maya Forstater and then by saying the two sides are equivalent.

You know all those endless collections of memes and tweets and images threatening graphic violence against “terfs”? And the curious absence of any such collections of memes and tweets and images doing the same to trans people? That are absent because they don’t exist? It’s too bad Hazarika hasn’t noticed the discrepancy.

As with so much right now, extremist, unforgiving, rigid voices on both sides dominate the online war in a fight to the death of who can scream and shame the loudest.

That’s just not true. It’s lazy and it’s a public stab in the back.

Sorry to get all supply teacher, but everyone needs to stop and reflect on their behaviour. If you get off on misgendering trans women, calling them men in dresses or making other pathetic, vile comments, you are part of the problem. If you enjoy slagging off older women who express a view about single sex spaces as ugly old cows who no one would want to f*** anyway, then guess what, you are part of the problem. There has got to be a way through this because newsflash — the only group benefiting from this vile punch up are the forces of social conservatism who are no true friend of either side.

Notice which one she put first. Notice also the difference between “pathetic, vile” and “you are part of the problem.” In short she is, ironically, a little abusive toward feminist women herself, apparently without even noticing it.

It’s funny that she positions herself as trying to tamp down the anger, because this craven and dishonest piece makes me more pissed off than I was before I read it.

Updating to add because I missed a couple of paragraphs hidden under an advert:

There’s a lot of talk of courage. Organising a Twitter pile-on is not brave by the way.

Neither is using a newspaper column to paint yet another target on Maya and then whining when Maya politely replies.

What about kindness and empathy? Most people are accepting of anyone providing they’re not a total arsehole. I’m part of a wonderful Facebook group of older women celebrating confidence in our “hot girl years”, AKA the menopause. Trans women are not only welcome, they are cherished — we have all learned from their stories and world class ability to accessorise.

Oh for fuck’s sake. That is at once so cutesy and patronizing and so insulting and belittling I don’t know where to begin. Yes that’s where women and men who identify as women can meet and embrace: on the ability to accessorize. Silly women, all we care about is fashion and hot girlism. Bully for her, she wants men who say they are women in her women’s groups, but not all of us do, and that doesn’t make us evil or bullies or deserving of a good scolding in a major newspaper…by a board member of the Fawcett Society of all people.

No you’re the ones who are weak on Russia.

President Joe Biden sat down in Geneva this morning with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as part of an important summit that’s expected to last several hours. As the meeting got underway, the Republican National Committee issued a press statement, letting reporters know the party’s takeaway from the international gathering.

“Giving Putin a meeting is just the latest win that Joe Biden has handed Russia,” the RNC said.

It is? So what was it when Trump gave Putin a meeting? And when he left his own table and went to hang with Putin with no US officials present that one time? And when he met with Putin in Helsinki alone except for translators, and ordered the US translator to destroy the record? Weren’t those wins for Russia?

One of the first hints of this line of attack came a month ago, when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) insisted, “Objectively speaking, the Biden administration is shaping up to be the most pro-Russia administration of the modern era.”

Huh. “Objectively” in what sense? Does that word now mean “opposite of truthly”?

And it’s not just Cruz.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, for example, wrote a piece for Fox News’ website, arguing that Biden was going into today’s summit “with a self-dealt weak hand.” Sean Hannity added this week that the Russian leader “will see firsthand how weak Joe is,” adding that “Putin loves a weak America and a weak American president.”

And he loved Trump a whole lot more than he loves Biden.

Biden and Putin have been having their chat.

Biden gave Putin a list of Don’t You Dares.

A reporter asked Joe Biden if he outlined for Vladimir Putin how his administration would respond if there were a Russian cyberattack on critical US infrastructure.

“I pointed out to him that we have significant cyber capability, and he knows it,” Biden said. “I pointed out, if they violate basic norms, we will respond.”

Biden noted he gave the Russian president a list of 16 critical infrastructure entities that should be off limits for attacks, whether cyber or otherwise.

So he’s saying everything else is fair game. Okaaaaaaay…

Putin went the “you’re just as bad” route.

Joe Biden was asked to respond to Vladimir Putin comparing his jailing of political opponents, like Alexei Navalny, to the charges filed against those who carried out the January 6 insurrection.

“I think that’s a ridiculous comparison,” Biden told reporters in Geneva.

The US president emphasized there was a great difference between storming the Capitol with weapons and threatening law enforcement officers versus marching for the right to hold free and fair elections.

During his own press conference earlier today, Putin used that unfair comparison to deflect a question about why so many of his critics are either imprisoned or dead.

Not because he expected anyone to believe it, but as theater. Mind you, it would have been considerably more dramatic to say “Because I’m a dictator, that’s why.”

Come on now. Don’t be silly.

Silly. Just plain silly. “Trans” means “not” in this context, which “tall” and similar descriptive adjectives of course don’t. A trans man is a woman who identifies as a man, so the word “trans” in this context is not comparable to “tall.” Obviously. It’s just silly to attempt such a feeble ploy. I know it’s an old favorite, but it’s still silly.

He says, a man telling women what to think.

You couldn’t make it up.

It’s interesting when legislators make laws to ban things without knowing what the things are.

There’s been a lot of talk about critical race theory lately, and I’ve felt at a loss. I’ve heard so many conflicting things about critical race theory, I’ve gotten more and more confused.

So I did what middle-aged white men are prone to do — I asked another middle-aged white man. But not just any. I called an Alabama lawmaker, state Rep. Chris Pringle, R-Mobile, who wants to make it illegal to teach critical race theory in Alabama.

Pringle recently pre-filed a bill for the next legislative session (eight months away…) and he’s been bragging about it on talk radio. Please tell us what critical race theory is, sir.

“It’s pretty simple,” Pringle said. “All it says is you can’t teach critical race theory in K-12 or higher education in the state of Alabama.”

That is a short bill, if not a simple one. But it didn’t answer my question: What is this critical race theory educators would be forbidden to teach? Pringle has seen enough legislation to understand the law requires specificity. Many bills begin by laying out their legal definitions. How would his bill define critical race theory?

“It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin, period,” Pringle said.

Ohhhh, is that what it is. That’s terrible! Show us the teachings! Which theorists?

“Yeah, uh, well — I can assure you — I’ll have to read a lot more,” he said.

Wait what? You will have to read more? I think you were supposed to do that before introducing the bill.

I began to get the feeling that Pringle didn’t know as much about critical race theory as I had hoped. Were there other examples he could give me where critical race theory was being put into practice?

Other besides the zero he’s given so far.

“These people, when they were doing the training programs — and the government — if you didn’t buy into what they taught you a hundred percent, they sent you away to a reeducation camp,” Pringle said.

And, is that true, or do you have to do more reading?

The reporter asked, Pringle fumbled around for a bit but didn’t come up with anything except another assertion.

“The white male executives are sent to a three-day re-education camp, where they were told that their white male culture wasn’t their —” he trailed off again.

Show us. Show us on the doll. Show us on the doll where the critical race theory touched you.

I was worried that we’d lost our connection. These sorts of conversations sometimes end abruptly, but Pringle was still on the line and after a little more hemming and hawing he retreated to a common safe-space of politicians who’ve crawled too far out on a limb: He just wanted to start a conversation, he said.

And the way to do that is to ban something you know literally nothing about.

Trump is pretending he’s being besieged with offers from top-class publishers longing to publish his “memoir” but publishers aren’t doing any besieging.

Their reluctance is driven by several factors, though the underlying fear is that whatever Trump would write wouldn’t be truthful.

“[I]t would be too hard to get a book that was factually accurate, actually,” said one major figure in the book publishing industry, explaining their reluctance to publish Trump. “That would be the problem. If he can’t even admit that he lost the election, then how do you publish that?”

By labeling it a novel?

Trump has insisted that he has suitors for a book too. In a statement last Friday, he said he had received two offers “from the most unlikely of publishers” but turned them down because he did “not want to do such a deal right now.”

Yes indeed and he didn’t want to go to that party he wasn’t invited to, he didn’t want to talk to that famous person who refused to talk to him, he didn’t want to win the election, he didn’t want to be taken seriously.

Trump didn’t reveal who the two publishers were. But in a statement on Monday afternoon to POLITICO, he insisted that “two of the biggest and most prestigious publishing houses have made very substantial offers which I have rejected.”

Why not just name them instead of being coy?

Because they didn’t.

“That doesn’t mean I won’t accept them sometime in the future, as I have started writing the book,” the statement read. “If my book will be the biggest of them all, and with 39 books written or being written about me, does anybody really believe that they are above making a lot of money? Some of the biggest sleezebags [sic] on earth run these companies.”

Says the non-sleazebag who is not at all motivated by making a lot of money.

“No morals, no nothing, just the bottom line,” he added. “And they sure wouldn’t admit it before the fact. But after the fact, they will stand by and say, ‘Let’s go.’”

What fact?

POLITICO reached out to top publishers and editors at the “Big Five” publishing houses — Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, and Simon & Schuster — to see if they had heard anything about any such deals Trump had been offered. None of the sources said they had heard about such potential book offers, and most said they wouldn’t touch a Trump project when he does start shopping a book around.

“It doesn’t matter what the upside on a Trump book deal is, the headaches the project would bring would far outweigh the potential in the eyes of a major publisher,” said Keith Urbahn, president and founding partner of Javelin, a literary and creative agency. “Any editor bold enough to acquire the Trump memoir is looking at a fact-checking nightmare, an exodus of other authors, and a staff uprising in the unlikely event they strike a deal with the former president.”

Plus the whole feeling of living inside a septic tank.

Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Tough times for Scarlett.

In connexion with Iknklast’s remark at #1 about ‘systemic racism’, I wrote the following e-mail to Andrew Sullivan, who in one of his blog-posts had, while invoking Orwell, presented a case for plain writing, quoted a horrid example of bad writing (which was genuinely horrid) and listed a number of terms that he considered pretentious, ambiguous & obfuscating, amongst which was ‘systemic racism’:

Dear Mr Sullivan,

It did not, alas, altogether surprise me when you listed ‘systemic racism’ in your collection of ‘horrid examples’ of obfuscating terms. I honestly feel it is disingenuous of you to do so. The term really is not difficult to understand. It derives from the term ‘institutional racism’ used in the Macpherson Report on the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Here is the definition the Report provided:

“The collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour that amount to discrimination through prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.”

That seems very clear to me, and, I should have thought, to anyone of any intelligence and good-will. You need only change one word of this definition so that the opening phrase reads ‘The collective failure of a society….’ to have a clear and cogent definition of ‘systemic racism’, that would apply as much to, say, the Chinese treatment of minorities as to American treatment of minorities. (ADDED: one might say ‘social and political institutions’ instead of ‘society’ to make things even clearer.)

I note also that you immediately plump for ‘socio-economic factors’ as explaining things where ‘poor outcomes’ for non-whites’ are concerned. I am not going to wade into the question of whether an apology, abject, or otherwise, was warranted, or whether the ‘defenestration’ was justified (probably not, I suspect, just as the ‘defenestration’ of Liz Cheney and other anti-Trump Republicans was not warranted – and where ‘defenestrations’ are concerned, I think you should pay rather more attention to those on the right if you wish to be, and to be seen as, fair-minded).

I have not read the original article, and do not intend to, but I note that it is not merely economic factors that are spoken of, but ‘socio-economic’ factors. I wonder what factors that ‘socio-‘ referred to? The kind of factors that the Macpherson Report draws attention to should surely be among them. Were they included? Or did the podcast confine itself to tired complaints about black family life and simply pretend that ‘systemic racism’ as defined above does not really exist? If the latter, then the podcaster was at fault (which is not to say that he therefore deserved ‘defenestration’).

Examples of ‘systemic racism’ – can you not simply look about you? Here are a few to be going on with: Gerrymandering so as to decrease the importance of the black vote; the various ‘election laws’ that are being passed in Republican states in order to discourage black voters; the incarceration over the years, often for long terms, of huge numbers of African-Americans for often trivial offences; the unwarranted violence too often visited by the police on African-Americans, of which a recent example was the murder of George Floyd.

I find curious the insistence by people on the right that systemic racism does not exist, and the pretence that the term ‘systemic racism’ is vacuous, while dishonestly rendering it suspect by supplying for it a false provenance. Sir William Macpherson was hardly a radical lefty, imbued with Foucauldian ideas and post-modernist ‘theory’.

I might add that I am just as sick of the proliferation of vacuous terms on the left as you are, as well as of the mealy-mouthed rubbish that you quote. But I dislike just as much an appearance of bluff straight-talking that in fact serves the purpose of not honestly addressing genuine issues. Shakespeare certainly disliked it, as the examples of Edmund & Iago show. I wonder if Orwell had anything to say about this tactic – for tactic it is.

Yours Faithfully,

Tim Harris

***

I might add that I find rather curious the nature of the interest Sullivan takes in racial matters, and why it exercises him so much.

I don’t even know this guy.

I don’t even know him. Have never talked to him before – but he marches right up and calls me a bigot. For saying that women get pregnant.

Then he calls me idiotic…while he pretends that “only women get pregnant” is “all women get pregnant” and then says it’s “simple observational fact” that men get pregnant.

Loudly? Wishes? Bigoted?

I don’t even know this guy.

Updating to add: I guess it’s all over between us. I still have no idea who he is or why he’s so specifically furious at me though.

Stonewall is doing what now?

It turns out NHS Rainbow Badge is not NHS but…Stonewall.

Why does Stonewall have this kind of power and authority in the NHS?

Never mind, I’m sure people trapped in NHS hospitals are thrilled to have Rainbow Badge people asking what their pronouns are and chastising them for not wearing Rainbow pins on their johnnies.

From George Eliot’s “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” courtesy of Project Gutenberg:

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists are a genus with many species, determined by the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them—the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic.  But it is a mixture of all these—a composite order of feminine fatuity—that produces the largest class of such novels, which we shall distinguish as the mind-and-millinery species.  The heroine is usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle distance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond.  Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues.

Do admit – “her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity.” Five stars.

We had imagined that destitute women turned novelists, as they turned governesses, because they had no other “ladylike” means of getting their bread.  On this supposition, vacillating syntax and improbable incident had a certain pathos for us, like the extremely supererogatory pincushions and ill-devised nightcaps that are offered for sale by a blind man.

Oh zing – she could do malice too.

Women’s silly novels, we are now convinced, are written under totally different circumstances.  The fair writers have evidently never talked to a tradesman except from a carriage window; they have no notion of the working-classes except as “dependents;” they think five hundred a year a miserable pittance; Belgravia and “baronial halls” are their primary truths; and they have no idea of feeling interest in any man who is not at least a great landed proprietor, if not a prime minister.  It is clear that they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-colored ink and a ruby pen; that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers’ accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains. It is true that we are constantly struck with the want of verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which they seem to live; but then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other form of life.  If their peers and peeresses are improbable, their literary men, tradespeople, and cottagers are impossible; and their intellect seems to have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing both what they have seen and heard, and what they have not seen and heard, with equal unfaithfulness.

“The peculiar impartiality” – she’s funny. She’s a great deal slower about it than Jane Austen, but she is funny. Mr. Brooke in Middlemarch is very funny indeed.

The most pitiable of all silly novels by lady novelists are what we may call the oracular species—novels intended to expound the writer’s religious, philosophical, or moral theories.  There seems to be a notion abroad among women, rather akin to the superstition that the speech and actions of idiots are inspired, and that the human being most entirely exhausted of common-sense is the fittest vehicle of revelation.  To judge from their writings, there are certain ladies who think that an amazing ignorance, both of science and of life, is the best possible qualification for forming an opinion on the knottiest moral and speculative questions. 

You see why she used a male pseudonym…

Berkeley News headline:

Truly changing sex is possible, says Berkeley trans scholar Grace Lavery

No it isn’t. Next?

An associate professor of Victorian literature, Lavery first became interested in trans studies after reading the work of George Eliot, a 19th-century writer — born Mary Ann Evans, who went by a masculine pseudonym.

“There was this thread that I couldn’t stop pulling on,” said Lavery. “We know that Eliot was read as a male writer by many, many people and wanted to be read as a male writer. Those things are interesting and important. It was something that I thought very deeply about.”

She didn’t “want to be read as a male writer” as such, she wanted not to be dismissed as a female writer. She wanted to be taken seriously. She wanted to be understood as an intellectual as well as a novelist. None of that was available to her as a woman at that time. That does not mean that she wanted to be a man, much less that she was a man or thought she was a man.

Trust a man who thinks he’s a woman to fail to understand that.

After reading several unsatisfactory explanations about why Eliot used a masculine pseudonym, Lavery began to do her own scholarly research on the subject and is now one of Berkeley’s experts on trans studies.

That must have been some shit “scholarly research” then, because Eliot’s reasons for using a male pseudonym are pretty god damn obvious.

Grace Lavery: … There is a kind of conservative feminist position that argues that sex is set in stone, is assigned at birth. And I don’t agree with that. Most scientists I’ve spoken to seem pretty comfortable with the idea that sex, like any other biological category, is not a cast-iron law, but rather a sort of set of contingencies that can be played with and culturally reinforced or not culturally reinforced.

Nice manipulative choice of metaphors – set in stone, cast-iron law. Also nice unmarked shift from the reality of female and male sex to play and cultural reinforcement. Of course we don’t disagree that sex can be “played with” and culturally deinforced. We disagree that it can be literally swapped.

One of the things that I encountered in some of the literature when I was beginning to transition was that people would say, “If you want to be treated as a woman, speak less and ask more questions and direct comments more specifically to other individuals.” And I was like, “Well, to me, that feels fairly misogynist, actually” — that I was supposed to make myself smaller, and I’m not really prepared to do that. I do understand how these things work, but that’s not a deal I’m willing to make.

Good. Great. Now take that thought and apply it to women in general, and turn your energy to demolishing those stereotypes instead of trying to make them apply to you.

The Times defends Nikole Hannah-Jones’s work again.

I don’t actually agree with the principle as they state it. I don’t think schools should be free to teach, say, that Emmett Till deserved what he got. Is the 1619 Project the obverse of that? I don’t think so.

More on that:

A legal red light district is set to be scrapped after a “significant” reduction of sex workers in the area.

Why is it called a “red light district”? That’s a euphemism. Who is shielded by that euphemism? The men who pay to rape women. “Red light district” conveys zero information. It’s a district where men pay women to be sexual toilets for them.

The Managed Approach (MA) area in Holbeck, Leeds, allowed sex workers to operate without fear of prosecution, but was paused in March 2020.

Ah yes it was all about compassion for the “sex workers,” wasn’t it, nothing to do with compassion for the johns. There’s another way to spare “sex workers” the fear of prosecution, and that’s the Nordic model. Prosecute the punters, not the women.

One piece of good news, which is actually just a piece of bad news undone.

Once more for those in the back: access to women’s bodies is not a right.

That guy who calls himself Wisey the Pretty isn’t happy that Maya won her appeal.

You might have heard about Maya Forstater, who made being “gender critical” a protected belief in the UK last weekend. I made this comic to summarize the situation in case you weren’t following. We can’t let that embolden and radicalize TERFs all around the world.

Not your call, bro. You don’t get to decide what we’re allowed to think and say.

Sure, because before the ruling, we weren’t allowed to think these thoughts in private. Our thoughts were public property.

Peggy Orenstein has an op-ed in the NY Times on why porn literacy is needed.

Parents often say that if they try to have the sex talk with their teens, the kids plug their ears and hum or run screaming from the room. But late last month, those roles were reversed: After a workshop for high school juniors at the Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School promoting critical thinking about online pornography, it was parents who flipped out. Some took to the media — The New York Post, Fox News, The Federalist and other like-minded outlets jumped on the story — accusing the school of indoctrinating children.

That may be because it was unclear, at least in the source I read, that the workshop was promoting critical thinking about porn. The title was Porn Literacy, which is not quite the same thing and in fact suggests a different approach.

The free content most readily available to minors tends to show sex as something men do to rather than with women. It often portrays female pleasure as a performance for male satisfaction, shows wildly unrealistic bodies, is indifferent to consent (sometimes in its actual production) and flirts with incest.

The clips can also skew toward the hostile. In a 2020 analysis of more than 4,000 heterosexual scenes on Pornhub and Xvideos, 45 percent and 35 percent, respectively, contained aggression, almost exclusively directed at women.

Well, you see, in male people the brain drawer for aggression is right next to the brain box for sex, so they just can’t help mashing the two together. Plus the culture teaches them that women are stupid and worthless and Karens, so what does anyone expect?

Boys I interview typically assure me that they know the difference between fantasy and reality. Maybe. But that’s the response people give to any suggestion of media influence. You don’t need a Ph.D. in psych to know that what we consume shapes our thoughts and behavior even — maybe especially — when we believe it doesn’t.

And even if they do know the difference, that doesn’t mean they won’t enjoy playing out the fantasy. “Hey I know this isn’t real but I’m going to do it to her anyway. Hot.”

Among college men, pornography use has been associated with seeing women as disposable and, for both sexes, a stronger belief in rape myths — such as that a woman “asked for it” because of what she wore or how much she drank. The combination of exposure and perception of porn’s accuracy has also been associated with an increased risk of sexual aggression, which was defined as pressuring someone into intercourse who has already refused.

Because porn isn’t erotica. Sex without violence (by the man, on the woman) is seen as vanilla. Bring on the ghost peppers, bitch!

Critical Race Theory may be a mixed bag that includes some very silly or sinister ideas, but on the other hand there’s this kind of thing.

In other words “history” as presented by Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind.

The acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs:

Pregnant women. The word for those people is women. Stop erasing us.