Conservatives don’t think at all, they just assume their prejudices are true, and demand that you accept them, too.

The new @Gillette ad features a transgender boy shaving for the first time.

It’s a little much to normalize and promote high-school-aged kids undergoing hormone therapy and gender reassignment. Don’t ya think?

— Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) May 28, 2019

The “boy” in this ad is not a teenager, he’s a young man, capable of thinking for himself.

It’s not a “little much”, it’s a “bit late”. We should normalize the decision to be a trans person. It does no one any harm, and it does help some individuals.

That said, it’s a little strange to see progressive social issues being used in an ad to sell razor blades. We should take it, though, since that’s what tools we have in a capitalist system.

I look forward to the day that Tomi Lahren realizes that social attitudes are being manipulated by capitalism, and tweets out her rejection of capitalist values.

In this fascinating article about incels getting plastic surgery to help them get girls, we learn yet more about the twisted minds of that cult-like subculture. I think it’s fine that people who want plastic surgery can get it, even if some of them are clearly getting a little too obsessive about it (multiple surgeries to tweak slight asymmetries? Get over it. Everyone is asymmetric to some degree). If they’re doing it to appeal more to women, they’re operating on the wrong organ. This one paragraph says it all.

Mike recently got a jaw procedure called BSSO, plus a hair transplant. After the surgeries, he met two girls at his other job, teaching comedy, whom he considered “cute,” and he took this as a sign of success. Now he’s investing in cryptocurrency in hopes of getting more procedures with Eppley [the incel’s favorite surgeon]. In a recent forum thread, he posted a selfie specced out with angles and degrees, measurements of his features; he then found a photo of Tom Cruise and gave it the same treatment. (Mike’s jaw angle was 69.02 degrees; Tom’s was 76.31.) “I want to solve this woman thing,” he told me.

Women aren’t a thing to be solved. A jaw angle isn’t an objective measure of your attractiveness. Cryptocurrency isn’t going to get you rich. Your problem isn’t your skull, but what’s inside it.

The article has photographs of various incels and their ideals. They all look fine, although I sympathize with people who find their looks unsatisfactory. It doesn’t matter how much money Eppley makes off repeated surgeries, or whether they end up looking like Tom Cruise — it’s not going to fix their problems. Maybe one step forward would be to get off those self-loathing incel forums?

I’m boycotting Georgia, too.

In an hour I have to go watch a terra-bad movie by the bozos who made God’s Not Dead, about how abortion is evil. I am not ready.

Men get molested, too, and university administrations seem to care about as much as they do for the welfare of men. A doctor in the athletics program at Ohio state used his position to abuse students for years.

The abuse at Ohio State went on from 1979 to 1997 and took place at various locations across campus, including examining rooms, locker rooms, showers and saunas, according to investigators. Strauss, among other things, contrived to get young men to strip naked and groped them sexually.

The report describes one patient who came in with strep throat. Strauss spent five minutes fondling his genitals and never examined another part of the body. Another victim had grown up in a rural area and had never had a proper medical exam; Strauss put a stethoscope on his penis.

I am not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure the genitals are a long way from the throat, and I wonder what he expected to hear through that stethoscope? It would be almost comical, except that this was another of those “open secrets” that nobody did anything about, it did stress the students, and it’s probably going to cost the university millions of dollars to settle.

Additionally, Strauss killed himself in 2005, after retiring with honors from the university. No one spoke up before then? I’m sure there were many who knew, shrugged their shoulders, and let the behavior continue.

This is why everyone needs to speak up, and the people in power need to fucking listen.

…Tony Robbins! Tell me you’re surprised. He’s another over-inflated ass with no real talent or expertise beyond self-promotion, he maintains a secretive self-help empire, he’s a creepy cult leader, and he practically oozes privilege and greed. Of course he’d be full of himself and his bad opinions, and he’d expect his underlings to serve him in every way possible.

One woman had told him through tears that she had been raped. Robbins recounted how he had “cut her off” in a “warm” and “elegant” way and informed her that she was “fucking using all this stuff to try and control men.”

Every man who silences a woman who has been raped believes that they did it elegantly, I’m sure. Especially when they go on to blame the victim.

Don’t worry, he doesn’t support rape, he just thinks it unimportant.

“I don’t support anybody fucking raping her or taking advantage of her,” he said, according to the transcript, “but I don’t support her fucking manipulating herself, men, and other people by trying to use that tool when it’s really not the primary experience of her life now.”

Of course, he has a theory. He has no academic training or expertise at all — he does have a high school diploma, at least, but nothing beyond that — but he paints himself as a psychological authority.

By now, Robbins had set himself up as an authority on relationships, dispensing a theory about “two opposing energies — masculine and feminine.”

“Women’s torment is that men fucking look, and men’s torment is that women are fucking insane,” he said at the same 2003 event.

He’s made billions of dollars off that kind of bullshit. It’s about time someone took him down a few thousand notches.

I am just shocked at the stories emerging about David Yesner, the University of Alaska anthropologist. He is being sued for sexual harassment by 20 women, for events spread over 26 years.

The women allege that Yesner subjected them to years of sexual discrimination, harassment, abuse, exploitation and retaliation that was crippling to both their academic careers and their emotional well-being and that the university failed to comply with federal Title IX requirements in response to their numerous complaints.

They describe Yesner as someone who would deliberately stare at their breasts, make inappropriate sexual comments and advances and find ways to touch them without consent. He was known to keep an extensive pornography collection on his computer that was discovered by multiple women on different occasions during his time at UAA. He also kept photos he had taken of students participating in field digs, cropped to highlight body parts rather than archeological artifacts. One woman reported walking into his office to find him masturbating.

In one of the most serious claims against Yesner, a woman who spoke to Title IX investigators reported that Yesner sexually assaulted her in a public shower during a field project.

There’s something rotten at the University of Alaska. They’re suing Yesner, the whole dang university, and the regents of the university — they reported the problems many times, and the Title IX office dragged its heels, the chancellor did nothing and was in fact about to bestow emeritus status on Yesner. There seems to be a real problem among the faculty there.

Jane Doe I and Jane Doe II “constantly” reported Yesner’s behavior to professors and other faculty, according to the suit, but were met with excuses like “Oh, that’s just David being David.”

Jane Doe II was also told she “should cover up more” and that she should just “switch advisors” – a move that would have set her studies back by years since she was already writing her thesis under Yesner’s guidance.

The lawsuit alleges Yesner retaliated against Jane Doe I for rejecting his sexual advances by delaying grading her comprehensive exam, which prevented her from graduating. The task should have taken the professor five weeks at the most, according to the suit, but instead it took 2 1/2 years. She eventually withdrew from the university, but still must pay back student loans with interest.

“David being David.” Jesus. Try mentally reviewing your colleagues and coworkers, and you probably know their personalities and quirks well enough that you can say that’s “[Name] being [Name]” about something — it’s about the emptiest thing you can say — but it can also numb you to what harm they’re doing. “Oh, that’s just Joe, he likes holding up liquor stores on the weekend. That’s Joe being Joe!” Usually, when we’re told about criminal behavior, we don’t excuse it by dismissing at just a feature of their nature.

Unless, it seems, it’s sexual harassment. Boys will be boys, you know; if we kicked out all the men who fondled young women and made lewd jokes about them and held up their progress in the system, why, we wouldn’t have a department any more. As one of Yesner’s accusers put it, though:

“Because the university ignored a longstanding problem, my dream of becoming a professional archaeologist came to an end. All of the hard work I put into my chosen path leading up to graduate school was subverted by Yesner and UAA when I had to quit. Yesner made it clear to me I would never finish my degree. Every student should have the opportunity to work hard and succeed, not work hard and have their professional confidence debased. Every student should be able to trust the institution they attend.”

Exactly right. When Yesner started his petty tyranny over two decades ago, he should have been fired then. I understand precisely the pressures universities face, where dismissing a faculty member means the administration is going to take years to replace them, and meanwhile, everyone else has to work harder to fill the gap because he was also teaching essential courses and doing the administrative work, but the procedures should have been initiated long ago, not the year he is retiring. Sure, if you kick out the harassers you’re going to weaken your department for a while, but what will thoroughly destroy your department and blight the careers of your students is if you keep him there.

Would anyone recommend to an enthusiastic student who wanted to study anthropology that UAA would be a good place to go? I wouldn’t. I’d steer them to just about any other university. Yesner may be gone, but the faculty who said, “Oh, that’s just David being David” is presumably still there. The chancellor still has his job. The Title IX office is still understaffed and not doing its job.