Autoandrophilia + Donna Tartt

The Secret History is Donna Tartt’s 1992 debut novel. It’s about classics students at a small, eccentric, private college in Vermont in the 80s. It’s heavily based on Donna’s own experience attending a small, eccentric, private college in Vermont in the 80s.

In 2019, an article by Lili Anolik came out interviewing classmates from around that time, and it turns out it was even more based on real life than most people knew. The big takeaway I had from that article, though, is that Donna Tartt seems more than a little autoandrophilic, and her college boyfriend Paul McGloin seems to have been kinda into it too.

TODD O’NEAL: Paul and Donna weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend. They were boyfriend and boy. She had a uniform. Black loafers, khaki pants—boys’ pants, not girls’—J. Press–type button-down, necktie, blue blazer with brass buttons, and hair in this funky little asexual bob. She looked like she came straight out of an English university. She and Paul were like Oxonian homosexuals or something. I once asked him, “What kind of relationship do you have?” And he said, “Well, that’s very funny, because she wants me to call her ‘my lad.’ ”

DONNA TARTT, LETTER TO JONATHAN LETHEM, DATED JANUARY 24, 1983 (DURING WINTER BREAK): I am now in Washington with The Man [Paul McGloin]. We have a nice little apartment in an old townhouse near Capitol Hill and all is well. . . . The raciest thing that’s happened to us was when we overheard a museum guard in the National Gallery mutter, “More faggots” as we walked into the room. (I was wearing a baggy sweater and trousers, no makeup, and my customary shapeless gray tweed coat. Perhaps I did look like a boy. . . .) It pleased Paul no end.

Esquire, “The Secret Oral History of Bennington: The 1980s’ Most Decadent College” (2019)

One thing to note is that Paul is the student of Claude (the eccentric classics professor who’s the model for Julian in the book). Paul is learning, in his classes, about male homosexuality from a romanticized Greco-Roman angle.

MAURA SPIEGEL: My understanding was that his classes were about being homosexual, and how to do it with grandeur and history and beauty.

Esquire, “The Secret Oral History of Bennington: The 1980s’ Most Decadent College” (2019)

This isn’t the same as the romanticized male/male ship in fanfic, but it’s not completely unlike it either. In both cases, people are drawing upon a trope male/male relationships as grand

Lili Anolik continued the investigation in the podcast Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College, looking more extensively into everything. The anonymous Student X (class of 82′ and friend of Paul) says:

Student X, interviewed now: And then this other thing—I don’t know why this filtered down, why anyone knew this—but just that she somehow, like, liked to have sex like a young boy? Like, I don’t even know what that means.

Except from Student X’s diary after she questioned Paul about the relationship: … [Paul] is in love with a “delightful creature,” a girl who looks like a little boy, whose sexuality seems to be that she wants to be treated like a homosexual man.

Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College, episode “Mississippi Chippy”

This streak appears, in a much more watered down form, in her book too. The Secret History has this background current of male homoerotic tension that’s so familiar to me from fanfic that I didn’t bat an eye at it upon reading the book, but which, upon reflection, is not actually ubiquitous to all female writers—just many. A brief romantic rundown of The Secret History: the friend group has 5 boys and 1 girl. At least half of the boys have a thing for that one girl, but they also have a lot of erotic tension with each other, namely between Richard, Charles, and Francis. Henry doesn’t, but it’s suggested that he may have an erastes/eromenos thing going on with their professor.

Ok, so Donna Tartt has an autoandrophilic streak. What of it?

Well… nothing. That’s sort of the point. This was the 80s. There was no one to tell Donna she could actually be gay if she wanted, no one to sell her medical treatments. The worst you can say of it is that it’s maybe disrespectful to fetishize male/male relationships this way, but compared to what’s going on today, that seems pretty mild. Donna’s not overstepping boundaries or imposing on actual gay men here. She’s got a straight boyfriend who’s happy to do this with her.

This is an example of how this same urge can play out in a different setting. It can play out fine. It doesn’t have to be like it is today.

The Biomedical Industry

The more I learn about the abortion industry, the more it reminds me of the gender medicine industry.

1. It’s presented as a human rights question, and we’re just supposed to pretend that it’s not also a lucrative industry.
2. The industry would have you believe that this is a product that a certain population intrinsically wants, and that they’re merely providing this service to a pre-existing market. But evidence suggests this really isn’t true, and they’re actually trying to grow their market, from media saying that their product is a good idea, to typecasting people who walk in and suggesting it to people who fit the profile.
   1. There’s also the kinda predatory fact that their core demographic is people who feel trapped and desperate, and the industry encourage this mentality by saying, “Yes, you need this.”
3. It’s an elective medical procedure being framed as a human right. It has thus become politicized and the medical details get swept under the rug.
   1. You need to have clean stats to support this narrative, so those stats are created, from abortionists not reporting complications to trans studies ignoring huge dropout rates.
   2. Mailing medical supplies to people for them to do these things themselves, all without any doctor oversight. If it’s a human right first and a medical procedure second, then accessibility matters more than safety.
4. Patients get little to no counseling. We know for certain that at least a small portion of patients regret their decision. They are considered acceptable collateral damage. No help is provided for them afterward. These people are told, “I’m sorry that happened to you, but you need to shut up and not talk about it because you’re decreasing accessibly for people who need it. And statistically most people who underwent this are happy they did, so you and people like you don’t matter.” Those who have been hurt often turn to the movement’s political enemy because those people are the only ones willing to listen to them or help them.
5. Both point to social problems—a lack of support for moms, poor treatment of gender non-conforming people. Both pay lip service to the idea that these are serious problems that should be addressed. Yet I’ve never seen either actually make any effort to address or solve these problems. Instead of demanding that society rise to the challenge and be better, both invisiblize the problems and thereby let society off the hook.
6. You can intellectualize both, but only so far. At some point people will look at the pictures, viscerally understand what this is, and be horrified. All that proponents can really do with that is to try to keep the pictures on the down low—which isn’t so hard given that most people shy away from gory images anyways and don’t want to see them.

Violinist Argument

The only good argument that I’ve ever heard for abortion is something that I thought up myself. I was unconvinced by any argument I’d ever heard, which always, “It’s convenient, so moral concerns go out the window,” (which I think is a horrific thing to say) or, “they’re not actually babies” (which I don’t believe). But I had also been told to so many times—from family, from friends, from school, from everyone—that I have to be pro-choice, so that, in my attempts to talk myself into it, I came up with this argument.

I’ve recently learned other people have also independently come up with variations on the same argument, and that it’s called “the Violinist Argument”.

Basically: “What if it were a different situation where one person’s ability to live is contingent upon someone else making a bodily sacrifice?” What if someone needed a kidney transplant, and would die without it, and you were the only match? Or what about blood donation?

The name “Violinist Argument” comes from a weird hypothetical about a violinist. The more specifically one-to-one argument goes like this, though: What a seven-year-old girl needs a kidney transplant, will die without it, and the only possible match is her mother?

It’s very easy for me to say that that making the sacrifice to save the person is the right thing to do. I myself do donate blood routinely. I’m signed up to be an organ donor to strangers if I die, and I think I’d do it while I’m still alive if the person who needed it was my daughter. And I think I would carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.

But should people be legally compelled to do these things against their will?

I’ve only even seen the Violin Argument made with the presupposition that of course no one thinks these other examples should be mandated. But honestly, it leaves me thinking, “Well, maybe that should be required too!”

I get that there’s a viscerally creepy reaction to that. It seems kinda dystopian in an aesthetic sense. Even for me—who’s ok with most of these things—am still brought up short at the idea of donating a kidney to a stranger, rather than my daughter. But I’m just saying I don’t want to, not that morally I think it would be fine not to. I still think you could make a very strong argument that I morally should.

However, I am perfectly aware that such legislation would be virtually impossible to pass. Point-blank, people are selfish. They don’t want to do these things. There’s a perpetual blood shortage, even though blood donation is the most mild sacrifice on the list—people don’t want to do even that much. And if it was ever to be passed, I would expect to see it in a collectivist country, not an individualist country.

It’s certainly conspicuous that the only thing on that list that has ever been legislated is the one that’s not a random chance circumstance that could equally happen to anyone. While I know other people interpret this as misogyny, that’s not what I see. What I see is that people see there’s a moral conflict here—but most people are reluctant to act on it. People know what’s right, but they’re reluctant to actually put their money (or bodily sacrifice) where their mouth is.

If such legislation was proposed that prioritized life above bodily autonomy across the board, I would seriously consider supporting it. But until then, I do think there’s an obligation to be consistent across different laws.

Going back to the mother and her seven-year-old daughter dying because of kidney failure, what else can you extract from that example?

I think the person deciding not to save that child should have to look. The mother who’d child dying of kidney failure does not get to look away. She doesn’t get to pretend this isn’t happening, or that it’s something less than what it is. So look at an ultrasound. Look at the bloody mess that comes out. If there at limbs, look at those. Don’t try to whitewash it or pretty it up. Face it for what it is.

Secondly: Even when the girl is dying of kidney failure, the doctors will still try. They aren’t deliberately trying to destroy her, even though without a kidney she’s a lost cause. And specifically with late-term abortions, that’s where you get the most ghoulish stories of babies that could have survived but were deliberately killed—the ones I really see how you can argue are anything but infanticide. That has to stop. The doctors have to try to save them, rather than try to kill them. They have to be given the same care as other premature babies.

Nonbinary: Divergent

Divergent by Veronica Roth is a goofy series of teen novels about a dystopia where all people are basically sorted into personality-based groups, in the same vein as the Hogwarts houses. Some people exhibit traits of more than one group, but this is quite rare. They are termed “divergent.”

Part of this issue is the way the factions are done, and the idea of being “divergent” in general. The world of Divergent is a world where it’s apparently rare to be both brave and smart, or honest and caring, or nice and a farmer. It’s based so much on basic human emotions rather than anything actually telling that it becomes hard to take seriously.

Sarah Z, “The Rise and Fall of Teen Dystopias” (2021)

This is, in effect, the same idea that the term “nonbinary” posits. And its dumb and goofy for the very same reasons.

The kind of society that Divergent posits would never actually exist. Likewise, “nonbinary” seems to believe in far more rigid gender roles than I have ever witnessed.

It’s like… so you have more than one personality trait? Maybe even seemingly contradictory personality traits?!

Congratulations! So does everyone else! It just means you’re a real, complex human being.

My issues with the pro-choice lobby

Ok, so it’s time: Actually voicing my actual thoughts, and not keeping silent for the sake of being polite or PC, or (and this is the big one) socially acceptable and easily palatable to the people around me. It’s a not just limited to trans shit.

Abortion is really convenient. It’s personally convenient for a women who doesn’t want to be pregnant to made herself not pregnant. It’s convenient for a deadbeat man who knocked a woman up and wants out. But it’s also convenient on an administrative or governmental level: abortion is much cheaper than maternity leave, or childcare, or welfare, or any of the other social programs that would be necessary in a society without abortion. And with so much convenience at stake, people are clearly incentivized to look the other way when it comes to the moral questions surrounding it.

But to simply to pretend that there are no moral questions there just because that’s more convenient? I think that’s really fucked up.

I don’t even really think abortion should be illegal, but I have a huge lack of respect for the pro-choice movement. And I think there’s a fair amount of hypocrisy in radical feminism’s die-hard pro-choice stance.

One of the most basic ideas of radical feminism is that “it’s my choice” isn’t enough. As in, sure, wearing makeup is a choice, but what context is that choice made in? And yet when it comes to abortion—the issue that literally has it being a choice as their tagline!—they’re suddenly silent.

As if the USA being the only first-world country without national paid maternity leave isn’t relevant context? As if parents who throw their pregnant teenage daughters out of the house isn’t relevant context? As if all the times time I’ve heard someone say of a young single mom, “Having a baby is going to ruin her life?” isn’t relevant context? Are you pretending you’ve never heard of parents trying to pressure their daughters into abortions they don’t want? Never heard of deadbeat boyfriends trying to pressure their girlfriends into abortions they don’t want?

But I’ve never heard any pro-choice people talk about any of that.

To be a choice, there needs to be other choices that someone could choose from. For abortion to actually be a choice, you better also be advocating for programs to provide support and resources to women who want to keep their babies.

Maybe some pro-choice group somewhere is doing that, but I’ve certainly never seen it.

There’s a strain of anti-natalism that runs deep in radical feminism, and for all that they talk about “destigmatizing women’s bodies”, there’s certainly a subset for whom pregnancy somehow doesn’t count as a natural female bodily function.

And what about sex-selective abortions? They’re included in “the right to have any abortion you want.”

Next, there’s a level of biological denial that’s oddly reminiscent of trans shit. “Fetal tissue” rather than a fetus. It’s not a heartbeat, it’s “cardiac cells pulsating.” Women framing pregnancy as analogous to cancer, a growing tumor that must be cut out before it overtakes them. To me, these really highlight that even people who claim they’re entirely ok with abortion aren’t, exactly. They aren’t willing to look it head-on. And I think that’s awfully telling. You have to do some mental gymnastics to de-moralize, de-humanize abortion.

There’s also an odd likeness is the way both the TRA and pro-choice lobby are so convinced that there’s only one stakeholder in these issues.

Person A	“There is only one demographic who’s a stakeholder in this issue.”
Person B	“Um, no, that’s factually inaccurate. There’s a second demographic who’s also a stakeholder in this.”
Person A	“No there isn’t! Why do you hate demographic #1 so much?!”
Person B	“I don’t hate demographic #1. I’m just saying that there is a second demographic who this issue heavily effects, and that maybe you should at least think about them.”
Person A	“No, demographic #2 isn’t impacted by this. Not at all.”

The absolute unwillingness to even consider that is just infuriating. But with that in mind, you can start to see why—when other people bring up that there are, in fact, other stakeholders in this issue—they seem oddly unwilling to take these people at their word. “No, you don’t actually care about babies; you just want to control women.” “You don’t actually care about women in prison; you just hate trans people.” That almost makes sense as a thought process when you remember that there is, in fact, collateral damage associated with all of these things, and in taking a extreme stance on these issues, they’ve had to decide that the collateral damage just doesn’t matter.

There’s more TRA likeness in the way that they argue, “Either you do exactly what we tell you, or you’re complete monsters.” Addressing the same issues in any other way is worthless. Therapy to manage dysphoria is worthless. Separate spaces for trans people, that aren’t women’s spaces, are worthless. Birth control is worthless. Recourses for single mothers are worthless. Capitulating to their demands word-for-word is the only way.

And when it comes to the very worst, most heinous examples—trans identified males raping women in prison; babies born during late-term abortions that can survive outside the womb, but are killed instead—I would really expect to see people saying, “No, of course not those examples. Yes it’s rare, but you’re right to be enraged about that because that’s deplorable. We should do something to put a stop to that.” And some people—many people, probably—do say that. And yet from both groups, I rarely actually hear that voiced. What I more often hear instead is the vocal minority who doubles-down to defend even those most horrific examples.

There’s also this thing where a majority arguments I see being made rest entirely on strawmen. For example: the pro-life, anti-contraception man who thinks women should avoid getting pregnant by just not having sex. On-the-ground, I have never seen such a person. What I have seen, however, is lots of men who are fans of both contraception and abortion because they want women to be sexually available to them with minimal accountability. The idea that men at large care about babies more than their own sexual expediency is absolutely comical. And all the people I can think of who are pro-life are women, and also very pro-contraception. I’m not saying that people like the strawmen don’t exist, but the idea that this is the average pro-life person? It’s the result of an aggressively polarized two-party system, I guess, where every opinion comes pre-packaged with other opinions—you end up with combos like this that don’t actually make sense, or reflect the views of real people.

And lastly, the way the pro-choice lobby make their arguments is just infuriating. Imagine you watched the musical Les Misérables:

Person A	“Wow, I really feel for Jean Valjean. He shouldn’t have been punished for years for stealing a loaf of bread; Javert was really out of line.”
Person B	“Ah, so you agree: Theft should be legalized!”
Person A	“…No, that’s not what I said.”
Person B	“Then what do you think Jean Valjean should have done?”
Person A	“I’m not sure. When it’s the middle of the French Revolution and you’re staving, there aren’t many option available to you, and maybe stealing is really the only viable route. Regardless, he shouldn’t have been treated like that and punished so.”
Person B	“So you agree: Theft should be legalized across the board.”
Person A	“No, that’s not what I’m saying! I’m saying I understand why someone would make that choice in that position. There were mitigating circumstances, and—even if there weren’t—I still have empathy for other people. But this doesn’t mean theft is unilaterality fine, with no consequences on others.”

Ultimately, I don’t even think abortion should be illegal. Realistically, I think the best option is to have safe and legal abortion for very early pregnancies, and then have a clear cutoff date that’s really enforced. Pro-life has “life begins at conception,” but pro-choice has no counter-slogan. It’s a fair question: If life doesn’t began at conception then when does it began? In a technical sense, life absolutely does begin at conception. But what we’re actually talking about here is not life in the cellular sense, but rather humanity’s moral obligations to our fellow human beings. I would say that begins when a person has brain activity. Unplugging someone who’s braindead is a tragedy, to be sure, but not what I consider killing.

So then what constitutes a brain, and what is a sort of… forming-but-not-yet-a-brain? I don’t know. I’m sure it’s a slippery question, and one that different scientists would answer differently. But I think we should try to get the most objective, evidence-based answer to that question that we can, and then use that—not what’s convenient—as the cutoff.

And lastly, the “what about cases of rape?” question. I think that question should be circumvented entirely by having morning-after pills be part of post-rape medical care. Why is that not already a standard thing?

A Case for Universal “They”

TLDR: if it meant I never had to have another conversation about gendered pronouns, I would be totally willing to switch to using “they” for everyone. However, since switching over to that would requite a great deal of talking about that shit, I wouldn’t actually want to implement this in real life.

But there are a few things about it that appeal to the linguistics nerd in me.

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The Whole Concept of Gendered 3rd Person Pronouns

Plenty of languages don’t have gendered 3rd person pronouns. It’s not even this edgy, progressive thing. Plenty of languages in sexist cultures don’t have gendered pronouns. For example, Chinese (tā) and Turkish (o) each have just one 3rd person pronoun that encompasses English’s he/she/it. And Chinese and Turkish cultures aren’t particularly egalitarian or androgynous. As far as grammatical features go, gendered pronouns are expendable.

The Verb Congregation Scheme

Spanish is a pro-drop language (“pronoun-dropping”) meaning that you can in most cases omit the pronoun from a sentence. Their grammar allows for this. In most cases it doesn’t even change the meaning of the stance, because Spanish has different verb conjugations for nearly all of its pronouns. You can tell what the noun is from the verb.

• Yo corro.
• Tú corres.
• Él/ella/usted corre.
• Nosotros corremos.
• Ellos/ellas/ustedes corren.

In all of these, you can remove the pronoun and the sentence still checks out, because the verb does double duty.

English is not like that. English once had verb congregation, but it has withered away. Now the only vestige left of it is in the 3rd person pronouns (aka he/she/it)

• I run.
• You run.
• He/she/it runs.
• We run.
• They run.

In English, all pronouns conjugate the same except for 3rd person singular. Verb conjugation in English isn’t good for anything, unlike in Spanish. Its too vestigial to be useful. But it also still exists, and is a pointless pain in the ass for those who learn English as a second language.

Switching from “he/she” to “they” would also eliminate this last vestige of verb cognation. That sort of appeals to me in a “cleaning out the garage” kind of way: we don’t use that shit anymore, and really, we should probably just get rid of it.

Plural Pronouns

In linguistics, pronouns are usually written on a pronoun chart that looks something like this:

	singular	plural
1st person	I	we
2nd person	you
3rd person	he, she, it	they

As you can see, English has a hole in the pronoun chart. English has no designated 2nd person plural pronoun. Different dialects address this in different ways. In my dialect, California English, 2nd person plural is “you guys”. In Southern American English, it’s “y’all”. In Australia it’s “youse”.

If “they” became singular, English would need a new plural 3rd person to replace it. So in that mold, I propose this:

	singular	plural
1st person	I	we
2nd person	you	you all
3rd person	they, it	they all

If I write a cyberpunk novel someday, I’ll need to include a Southern American to say “all th’all.” I just find the idea funny.

This is all pointless

This is all a pointless thought experiment. I am sick to death of talking about pronouns. I would want to make this switch if any only if it would remove the whole “talking about pronouns” thing. But no one can snap their fingers and magically make it happen. Making this switch would require a great deal of talking about pronouns. And I don’t want that.

So this whole thing is just a thought experiment. But I think “th’all” is funny, so I wrote it out.

Bad Worldbuilding

I’ve talked before about how, as a teen, I sort of dabbled in MOGAI circles but never quite went full in. And most of the reason for that is that I am a worldbuilding junkie. I’m a writer and a avid consumer of fiction, and the worlds are always my favorite part. And the worldbuilding of MOGAI just sucks.

To explain what I mean, I want to contrast MOGAI worldbuilding with flat earth worldbuilding.

I think that the “flat earth model” — in air quotes — is worldbuilding. Like it’s a fictitious story that a bunch of people have made up, that have suspended the disbelief of a whole bunch of people. So it is worldbuilding. And it’s something that literally you could take it and be like, “That is my setting. What they believe is my setting.” So I do want to bring it up, because it’s really good worldbuilding. It’s bad science, but it’s really good worldbuilding. […] It’s really interesting to watch them explain their setting. It’s just great. […] And I’m actually a little bit sad that it’s on the decline. Cause I’m like, “Oh no, please keep going! Please keep inventing your worldbuilding!”

Edgar Grunewald, AP #55: Icosahedron Planet

Classic worldbuilding is usually about deciding, “In my world, X is different than it is in the real world.” And then you follow X through to the end. You need to think about all the logical consequences of this one change, and explore them.

Flat earth does that. It’s flawed, of course, but they do have a model of how the earth works. Since the day cycle is dependent on the roundness of the planet, the sun must work differently. The seasons must too. My favorite part is the Ice Wall. They think Antarctica is not a continent, but rather a ring of ice around the edge of the flat earth, holding the seas in.

Whereas MOGAI… doesn’t.

The time when I entertained MOGAI ideas was when I was about 14, circa 2013. The rendition that I was coming across was the tumblr, teenage version, which is more extreme than the versions you’re probably familiar with. In more mild versions, for example, nonbinary is the identity. In the extremists version, nonbinary is an umbrella term, and the identities themselves are things like agender, neutrois, stargender, etc. People used “they” but also a whole range of neo-pronouns (“xie”, “zhir”, “fae”, etc) that seem to have largely gone away in the past few years.

This hyper-teenage MOGAI version is, in many ways, sillier than the more mainstream version that’s popular in academia. But as worldbuilding, it’s actually (slightly) better. Both versions nominally ask people to take their gender at face-value, treat it as literally true. But the mainstream queer version does not, themselves, treat it as literally true. The MOGAI kids at least attempt to. Their execution is flawed, but they seemed to me to be on board with the basic idea of, “Change X, and follow that through to its logical conclusion.”

For example: The more mainstream version talks about “nonbinary lesbians”. The teenage extremists version talks about “androsexual” (into men) and “gynosexual” (into women) to describe patterns of attraction without framing it in relation to their own sex, since they’re admit their own sex is untrue.

They don’t take it all the way to the end. For example, if nonbinary genders are just as fully real as men and women (a claim that the extremists version would make, although the mild version might not) then where’s the orientation for people who are exclusively attracted to nonbinary people? I’m sure someone’s made that word somewhere, and that I could scrounge it up if I really tried. But my point is that such a word was not commonly used, not even in that circle. Even as someone who knew way too many micro-identities, I still was not familiar with such a word. It was not commonly used, because that’s not how sexuality works, and even these kids were at least somewhat aware of that.

But despite it’s gaps, these kids were trying at least. They were asking other people to take their genders at face-value, treat them as literal, and this was backed up by them themselves treating it as literally as they could. At 14, I was able to at least humor this idea. There were still holes in it, and those still bothered me. But then again, the worldbuilding in most stories has a few plot holes. But they seemed to be genuinely trying, and so I tried too.

The other side of worldbuilding is the concept of “willing suspension of disbelief”. In fictional storytelling, willing suspension of disbelief is the “just go with it” factor. It’s the unspoken contract between storyteller and audience. As the audience, your job is to suspend your disbelief, not poke holes in the story. And as the storyteller, your job is to tell a story good enough that it’s worthwhile for the audience.

And I think that’s what it comes down to, in the end. This is how you can have two different people, both with the same understanding of biology and neuroscience, one who believes in gender and one who does not. This isn’t about difference of information; I think many — if not most — of us are working from the same basic foundation of knowledge. But those who believe in gender are willing to suspend their disbelief, because something about the story of gender speaks to them.

Woke Corp

On Ovarit, I saw an angry list of menstrual cup companies that someone was suggesting women boycott, because these companies were using dehumanizing language (“menstruators”, etc) instead of calling women “women”.

Not that they’re wrong to feel that way, but I don’t particularly agree with them either. More than anything else, I see cooperate wokeness as simply superfluous and irrelevant.

First of all, corporations don’t actually have opinions. In order to have an opinion, you must a conscious, thinking entity, and corporations are not. Whatever woke statement a company is making, it’s not because they actually hold that belief. It’s because a marking team decided that since X belief is popular right now, espousing it would be good for business.

Companies don’t actually care what political beliefs their customers hold; they just want you to buy their product. And this doesn’t make them bad exactly; it’s just the fundamental nature of corporations. A cat will toy with a mouse before killing it, not because cats are cruel or sadistic, but simply because this is the nature of cats. A company’s #1 priority above all else is making money because this is the fundamental structure of companies. If you wanna rage against the evils of capitalism evil, go ahead, but I don’t think its fair to hold individual corporations uniquely at fault for just being companies and marketing.

Woke advertisements are a biproduct of the current political climate. They are not the real issue, but merely a reflection of it.

If a baby says “fuck”, it’s because they’re mimicking the adults in their life. There’s no use in scolding the child for it, because coming for them, it’s meaningless, just an echo. The way to get the baby to stop is to a) not give them attention for saying it, and b) stop adults from using that kind of language around the baby.

There is value is boycotting these companies. They do this because they think it will be lucrative, and so like with the baby, don’t reward them for bad behavior. But it’s futile to be angry with companies for it.

Privilege

I was starting to think “the word ‘privilege’ is basically meaningless at this point” when I started to learn about how gender ideology is harming women. At that really lit up the scoreboard for me. Gender ideology hurts all women, yes, but it hurts some a hell of a lot more than others.

The #1 privilege, the one wokism doesn’t like to talk about much, is money. Money is not evenly distributed across racial groups, and so classism and racism can be hard to tease apart. But often as not, money is the determinator in the end.

The word “privilege” comes from Latin, prīvus (“private”) + lēg- (“law”). And that’s basically what privilege is: the ability to privatize public shortcomings. As gender ideology is encoded into national law, is becomes a huge problem for those at the mercy of public services, and less of a problem for those who can afford to privatize these things.

Putting male inmates in women’s prisons means that incarcerated women will get raped. Incarcerated women are disproportionately poor, and disproportionately Black, Latina, and Native. As a middle class white girl, I am extremely unlikely to be incarcerated.

Women at shelters are de-facto uniquely vulnerable demographics: homeless women, battered women, rape victims, etc. Even if I did end up homeless, I have my middle class parents to fall back on, so I don’t have to worry about ended up at a homeless shelter that also serves predatory males.

When we talk about gender identity curriculum being introduced to schools, we’re actually talking about public schools. Parents with the money can protect their kids from this by sending them to private school. Parents with less money cannot. Generational wealth means that — no matter how broke I am — I could probably convince my parents to fund their grandchildren’s’ private school education.

This is all privilege. And I’m grateful for it. These are genuinely scary risks, and I’m glad to have some level of protection from them. My heart breaks the women who do not have these privilege, but I don’t feel guilty for having them myself. It’s not that I shouldn’t have these privilege; it’s that they should have them too.

The ability to feel weird about privilege is — arguably — a privilege in and of itself. It belongs more in the realm of the theoretical. When shit actually hits the fan — when women’s rights are on the line, or when there’s a pandemic — there’s no room for that kind of hand-wringing. When privilege protects you from actual dangers, that’s something to be grateful for. And if a supposed privilege doesn’t protect you from actual dangers, it’s probably not a privilege at all.

SSA or lack of CSA?

In asking how asexuality relates to other sexual minorities, one question is “Is it same-sex attraction, or lack of cross-sex attraction, that is stigmatized?”

Both are, to some degree. Which one is more stigmatized depends a lot on the context. However, I will say that — while this is by no means a hard and fast rule — it generally seems to me that in men, same-sex attraction is stigmatized more, and in women, lack of cross-sex attraction is stigmatized more.

This principle is probably most visible in social views on bisexuality, and the ways that male bisexuality and female bisexuality are treated differently. Male bisexuality is seen as closer to gay, because in males, same-sex attraction is more important. Female bisexuality is seen as closer to straight, because in females, cross-sex attraction is more important.

Historically there were sodomy laws, which had no female counterpart.

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir wrote:

What must be explained in the female homosexual is thus not the positive aspect of her choice but the negative side: she is not characterized by her preference for women but by the exclusiveness of this preference.

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, 1949

Today in the West, it’s not lesbians right to date females that is under fire, but the right to categorically reject males.

This goes back to old ideas that women are not really sexual beings themselves, and that they only take part in sex out of custom rather than desire. Or if women do have their own sexuality, that it is more passive, more reactionary, than men’s sexuality. And then there’s the phallocentric idea that eroticism between two women is not really sex in the same way that sex-with-a-dick is. It doesn’t count, and so it’s fairly innocuous. Female homoeroticism is seen as less real and thus less threatening than male homoeroticism. It becomes an issue only when it stands in the way of heterosexuality.