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.

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

For a resolution to one skirmish between the sexes, argues the writer who goes by the name Cartoons Hate Her, we should consider reaching back to the 1990s.

via: https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/men-dont-like-bitches-but-they-do

On todays episode our hero attempts to explain the “puppy girl” while trying to sound sane. This subculture has become quite prominent in online trans feminine spaces, so she hopes to figure out why that is. Using an excellent paper published last year, anecdotal evidence, and the occasional first-hand account, she gets to the root of what it means to fully embrace becoming a puppy. Trans voices are needed more now than ever, and some of them just so happen to bark.

Drawing a one-to-one correspondence between media consumption and behavior is always dicey—and never more so than when a high percentage of the audience is consuming a very different text than the one that is there. And it’s important to take a step back and check for alternate interpretations of the media we’re criticizing. All too often, feminist critiques of heterosexual porn wind up saying more about our views of women and sex than they do about the porn itself.

Apparently a classic in certain circles.

Maybe the problem truly is with capitalism in that the nature of consensual sex relies on a supply-demand dynamic.

It’s easier to “de-center” men if you don’t want to have sex with them

More notes on heterofatalism, a la Garnett, “The Trouble With Wanting Men.”

Great comment from @polytropos365182:

Being in love, or even just being “down bad” for somebody, is a really vulnerable— and in many cases, humiliating— emotional experience. I think that often, resenting the gender that you’re attracted to, with or without an ideological rationalization, is a defense mechanism driven by fear of that vulnerability, or a way to palliate the psychic wound of humiliation. The really tough thing is that (as any gay person could tell you), things like rejection, getting dumped, infidelity, etc are personal, not structural. You won’t escape them by abolishing the patriarchy or leveling the longhouse.

Speaking of men: the whole “women are constantly afraid of men” idea is also bad for men. We recognize this on the axis of race. We know it’s painful for a black man to be always viewed as a potential perpetrator of a crime: to have women clutch their purses more closely as he walks by, to see women cross the street to avoid walking close to him, to have people question why he’s in a store if not to steal. Of course, in America, white and Asian men are much less strongly parsed as potential criminals than black and Hispanic men are. But it still happens, and it’s still painful to many men.

I mean, would you like reading about how half of humanity views you walking down Redwood Trail as a violent threat?

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

I would like you to think, for a minute, about what it would be like to be that kind of feminist: To give your life to a cause, to put absolutely everything you have into it, and to be told that your work is worthless because you didn’t die.

Cooties Simulator 2009™

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.

As said by a colleague in response to this tweet.

all boys ritually emasculate/are emasculated by other boys as part of showing you are a real man. Trans women do not respond to this phenomenon the way that boys do and, as a result, are treated differently long before anyone realizes they are trans.

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

maybe intersectionality isn’t a game of who can be oppressed in the most ways but rather a framework for understanding our relationship to power.

Every single piece of popular media out there has some variation of “no fats no fems no Asians” as an unspoken default policy. If you’re not white and skinny and cis and male and perisex and straight…