Looking Forward, Looking Ahead
Here’s what’s going through my head on this fine Sunday in July. I was going to make this a political newsletter but I realized partway through it had very little to do with politics.
I sometimes think I'd get less disrespect and active rudeness on Twitter if I was actively mean to people because now, I'm polite and diplomatic and I still get derided and dismissed and called an idiot lol. I also sometimes wonder if if I was like, academic nerdy attractive with glasses or something and not my brand of conventionally hot and very feminine, my haters would be less hate bonery. The thing is, their behavior doesn’t make me reconsider my perspective or make me think I’m wrong, it just frustrates me. That said, I’m also positive that their misogyny is subconscious and it’s not like I’m calling them out for it so I doubt anybody else will either.
I'm currently reading And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham and the immediate and admittedly borderline self-aggrandizing thought I had was that Lincoln reminds me of my own father, which is the highest compliment I can give a public figure. They're two men from very humble beginnings who rose up far beyond what they were ever meant to through their intelligence and hard work, pragmatic yet deeply and consistently moral, driven by the strength of own convictions. They both married tiny and beautiful (and rather difficult™) poor little rich girls with profound intellect and backbones of steel, became good and devoted husbands and fathers despite not having example to emulate, and to paraphrase Meacham, imperfect men but men whose inconsistencies resonate with the world.
One of my favorite terms of late is the “narcissism of small differences” which explains why left-liberals get hopping mad at Matthew Yglesias (or me) for saying perfectly normal anodyne things like “freeing the nipple around children is weird.”
I’m a big romance novel fan, and I listened to a Fated Mates episode a while ago on “unusual historical romances,” ones set outside England during the Regency period which featured one of my favorite authors, Joanna Shupe. In the episode, the hosts talk about how so many American romance writers and readers for that matter shy away from reading books that are set in the United States because they feel like it’ll be “too close to home” so to speak. They went on to discuss how this is largely because of the history of slavery, the Civil War/Reconstruction and subsequently, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement weighing down over the US throughout its entire history in a way it doesn’t over Europe even though European countries also obviously were huge players in the slave trade. Besides, it’s not like those dukedoms in Regency romances aren’t built on colonialism and slavery and a whole other assortment of extremely sordid things. Joanna Shupe writes Gilded Age romances which are excellent, but I really wish more authors were willing to write American centered historical romance that aren’t like, westerns which glorify Manifest Destiny, if you know what I mean. But, in all seriousness, that’s just one major manifestation in the idea of why the United States can never be Europe politically, and left-of-center people just need to grasp that reality.
My lukewarm take on the "crisis of masculinity" thing is that women have never been okay and are continuing to not be okay and men were kept afloat for a long time by the patriarchy and are now cratering, but that doesn't erase the fact women are still suffering with no respite.
It’s extremely horrifying to me that people are editing fully clothed pictures of women, and not just public figures, to be naked and posting their renditions of those women in little or no clothing online, and the proliferation of deep-fakes will only make things worse. Due in part to how easily accessible pornography is due to the advent of smartphones, it’s become acceptable to regard all women as public property regardless of whether they consent to it, and the prospect of being violated in that way is absolutely terrifying to me. Like, this is a complete and total violation of another person and I’d call it sexual violence. I hate that it’s become so prevalent and acceptable, and idk how to remedy this phenomenon.
Something I’ve realized is that people on the left will argue until their faces are blue that “being uncomfortable” is not grounds to penalize someone without material harm to an individual, which is fair, but they conveniently ignore that this criteria means a lot of #MeToo cases are also rendered invalid. The magnitude of the impact of an action isn’t determined by the perpetrator’s identity! If your stance is women have to endure men jacking off to them in trains without calling the cops if the men are less privileged than they are, you’d better be ready to defend workplace sexual harassment. Kat Rosenfeld is right here.
It’s very interesting to me when academics who want to be activists will use their identity as academics to validate their activism but use their activism to exaggerate the truth of their research, and by interesting I mean ridiculous and makes me take academics extremely unseriously. I remember during the summer of 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones of 1619 Project fame insisted that fireworks during the week of the 4th of July were CIA psyops and kept on doubling down, claiming that her research on the CIA and anti-Black racism proved her point. She obviously was wrong, and the reason there were fireworks at that time is because people have been setting off fireworks for the 4th of July for decades, but my point stands.
Anyways, I love this painting, and my ex-boyfriend calling me a “performatively straight-shooting martyr” will always live rent-free in my head.