I’m not Hispanic or Latino, so I don’t really have a stake in how they’re counted on the census, but I thought this story at NPR was interesting. “Other” is now the second-largest racial group, and most are Latino. Nationwide, some 45 million Latinos did not identify last year with any of what the federal…
In arguments with trans activists, sometimes they’ll object when I talk about “born in the wrong body” rhetoric or say that they treat misogynist stereotypes as aspirational. Those are outdated straw men, they’ll say. I don’t understand the diversity of the trans experience! Of course they don’t give examples, but I think I’ve found one.…
I’ve been reading Angela Chen’s Ace: What asexuality reveals about desire, society, and the meaning of sex. It suffers greatly from its lack of radical feminism. For example, a big chunk of chapter 3 is about a super-Christian with sex issues who was liberated when he saw jargon about gray-asexuals in an Instagram bio. We…
Here, I’ll be discussing chapter 2 of Angela Chen’s book Ace, on asexuality. The previous post was about the book’s prologue and first chapter, about Chen’s own story. Chapter 2 is about where the concept comes from and what it’s even for. After explaining that asexual people didn’t fit into the Kinsey scale (“Group X”),…
I thought demisexuality sounded stupid the first time I saw the word in someone’s OkCupid profile and looked it up. You’re supposed to have a strong emotional connection to someone before having sex with them. Not wanting casual sex is not a marginalized sexual identity analogous to being gay. The fact that people think it…
Andrea Dworkin being right about everything is one of my favorite topics, so I’ve been looking forward to reviewing Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex, which has an essay about teaching second wave feminism to kids who grew up on internet porn. The good news is that they agree with Andrea Dworkin. The interesting thing…
Happy 9/11! I remember everyone flipping out on Susan Sontag for saying these things: The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a…
I think Kathleen Stock’s take on the trans movement is funny: it’s about wanting to live a fiction. It’s all about pretending, taken too far. The trans movement also pretends to do gender studies, but that’s in bad faith, too. Of course, historical studies always have present-based motivations, but the problem with the trans movement…
In America, most white men are Republicans, and Republicans have stopped pretending not to be Nazis. Therefore, the social norms of any space catering to white men have to treat Nazism as reasonable. This is the real victory of Nazism. A few years ago, everyone seemed to acknowledge the danger of “normalizing Trump”, and then…