Would it be OK if I called this an example of toxic masculinity, or will it hurt young men’s feelings?

“They started beating me, I was bleeding all over – I was really bleeding”

Melania Geymonat tells @BBCMarkMardell on #BBCwato about how she and her girlfriend were attacked after a group of men demanded they kiss. pic.twitter.com/E3kRVLxQtA

— The World at One (@BBCWorldatOne) June 7, 2019

Arrests have been made, at least.

A 16-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion of robbery and aggravated burglary on Saturday morning, Scotland Yard said.

Four other men between the ages of 15 and 18 have already been arrested on suspicion of robbery and aggravated grievous bodily harm and are being questioned separately.

We also get an example of why it’s called pride.

“I was and still am angry. It was scary, but this is not a novel situation,” said Chris. “I’m not scared about being visibly queer. If anything, you should do it more.

“A lot of people’s rights and basic safety are at risk. I want people to feel emboldened to stand up to the same people who feel emboldened by the rightwing populism that is, I feel, responsible for the escalation in hate crimes. I want people to take away from this that they should stand up for themselves and each other.”

Geymonat added: “The violence is not only because we are women which are dating each other. It’s also because we are women.”

Maybe somebody should explain this to Peter Boghossian.

Quillette is a strange site. It tries to hide its unpleasant reactionary perspective beneath a pretense of academic objectivity, but it’s like trying to pour perfume on a garbage dump — it just makes the whole thing even ickier. Usually the reek oozes through most pungently in their numerous articles promoting pseudo-scientific racism, but the latest stinker that has bubbled to the surface is an article on sex.

Titled A Modest Defence of the Missionary Position, it immediately trumpets its pointlessness. Why? Is there some political faction or avant-garde wing of the culture wars that has denounced certain sexual positions? Does anyone care, outside of religious fanaticism (one thing I don’t think Quillette favors), what postures you assume in your intimate heterosexual moments?

No.

So the author has to manufacture an anti-missionary position position held by those annoying third-wave feminists.

In the post-#MeToo, third wave feminist climate, it often feels as though, in order to be an ethical progressive women, I need to search out and identify aspects of our society that are sexist, oppressive, unfair. Much of this takes the form of critiquing tradition, which we view as largely inhibitive and repressive. Pointing out oppression, raising consciousness, is women’s strategy for getting out from under the patriarchy. “The Future is Female” signals that it’s our turn to be on top.

So of course the author gets very literal with Simone de Beauvoir: “All sex is rape”, “It is he who has the aggressive role”, etc. None of this is about the missionary position, but about control and dominance and how sex can be used as a tool of oppression. We’re going a bit far afield here, you know, from the specifics of who is concerned about what position you favor.

Then it gets ever more airy and soft-focused. Sex is wonderful and beautiful and part of our nature and an essential aspect of the relationships between human beings. OK, even if I grant that kind of greeting card optimism, what does that have to do with the missionary position?

Our erotic nature is the very foundation of human civilization, which is grounded in the bonds of affection and mutual care that result from the promptings of our sexual instincts combined with deeper emotions of love, self-giving, esteem, and friendship. If we view sex as the fulfillment of our natural instincts, then we really have no grounds to take offence at sexual harassment, or even sexual violence, since it would simply and unashamedly be the expression of male animal sexual aggression. It is rightly unthinkable to define our sexual nature as wholly instinctive. To do so would puts us at the mercy of appetite and invites brutality.

I don’t even know what point she is trying to make here, that simultaneously sexual harassment is perfectly normal as a consequence of instinctive male aggression, and that maybe we should throttle it back just a little? Throughout there’s this implicit idea of what male and female (and only those two!) natures ought to be, and a weird vibe about the beauty of heterosexuality, as long as it fits her preconceived mold. “Normal” is best, and she has a very traditional view of normal. She’s willing to nod condescendingly at people who do things differently, but ultimately the best way to “encounter our deepest selves” is to conform to social expectations, even in your most private moments.

“The ancients,” writes Camus in The Rebel, “even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated in wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It is butting one’s head against a wall.” There is a kind of tragic heroism in rebellion. And a kind of deeply human beauty in it—rebellion, too, seems to be our nature. But there is also a uniquely human courage in participating in nature wholeheartedly, with abandon. The irony is that what we often consider the most boring, the most quotidian, the most comically old-fashioned, and unremarkably ordinary way to have sex with another is also the way we encounter our deepest selves because we transcend ourselves to find union with another.

Sheesh. Fine, lady, you have a preferred sexual position. Talk to your partner about it. You don’t have to convince everyone else that your favorite way of boning best reflects the transcendent nature of humanity or that it’s encoded instinctively in our psyches. There are a lot of people in the world who don’t fit your pattern, gay/lesbian/asexual people, or people with specific kinks, and they’re all part of glorious human diversity, too.

I still get this kind of message all the time — there are ugly hordes of men (and some women) who make this flat declaration that they don’t like feminism, and they’re usually the kind of cretinous clown who doesn’t see anything wrong with Donald Trump’s behavior. So it’s good to see Sadiq Khan rebuking our jerk of a president with a short simple message.

If you’re the kind of person who likes to announce that feminism is cancer, you get to fuck off and leave me alone now. I’ll have nothing to do with you.

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.