In honor of my birthday month… let’s start with some color 🌈
“oh to be a little jelly gouache cup and being cared for and loved like this”
be an asker by Ava — This is sort of like the Maybe Baby piece I shared last month (linked in the article to) but I also loved Ava’s framing: “Directness is a gateway drug to emotional honesty.” I want to practice this, ask more questions, get more rejections yes but also get more acceptances.
The reality of prostitution is not complex. It is simple by Rachel Moran — Sex work is not work. Here is why.
WHAT SEX REALLY IS by Audrey Pollnow — A review of The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan. Both this review and Moran’s article above show you why the book was extremely lacking.
Roe v Wade has been overturned. Here’s what this will mean by Moira Donegan — Nothing I can say will add anything to the discourse.
What To Tell Our Daughters by Jessica Valenti — Things look bleak right now but we must not lose hope. Although it feels like things get shittier every day and all we do is remind ourselves not to lose hope.
Oh, Mercy by Moira Donegan — Forgiveness for sex pests… do we need it?
Bones, Bones: How to Articulate a Whale by Peter Wayne Moe — An unconventional project undertaken by a writing teacher. Apart from its literary beauty, made me think about how many weird and wonderful things we can do if we just ask.
Seventeen Theses on Disability by Freddie deBoer — A continued theme with FdB, but important. Look at number 17… we are headed towards some bleak times.
Social Justice Advocates Don't Get to Just Exempt Themselves From Politics by Freddie deBoer — He has said this before, but it’s worth noting again. Left politics can’t put people on a scale that assigns more value to the socially marginal. People are right to be wary of loudly self-proclaimed leftists who run to excommunicate their own community members at the first sign of thoughtcrime.
Mass Shootings and the World Liberalism Made by Katherine Dee — We have a meaning problem, and the only institutions in America (and the world at large) who have been harping on this rather unsuccessfully are the religious ones. Dee highlights the problem well: the maximization of individual autonomy. But what is the solution? Our mosques, churches, synagogues, and temples have the power to address this fatal issue (at least they claim they do) but of course they are wasting their energy on representation politics or completely inane non-issues.
Transcending the Transactional by Luke Burgis — The best crossover of the century. Burgis interviews Thomas Bevan (who is another also on Substack and one of the first people I followed). Both Burgis and Baven emphasize intentional consumption and creation.
Reading Ourselves to Death by Kit Wilson — “Most people were illiterate four hundred years ago; today Americans spend up to a third of their waking hours encoding and decoding text.”
I think these things have made me aware that I too have a “too much reading” problem. Or too much text-dependency. Even this substack — is, most of the time — a collection of things I read. Wilson is right that reading and writing give me a sense of control over how I understand and experience the world but at what cost… And Sarris is reminding us, reading for the sake of reading can be uninspired. Just a transfer of facts, no insight. I think he’s right, I need to be more selective about what I am reading.
Digital dysmorphia by Tom Farr — “the internet would simultaneously operate not only as an unconstrained free market, but as a technological State of Nature”
Anorexia, breast binding and the legitimisation of body hatred by Glosswitch— “I still reject the idea that one might somehow, by sheer force of will, learn to accept a body in which one does not feel at home […] The truth is that very few female people can accept their bodies as long as ownership of a female body – failure to starve it away, or crush it, or have it surgically corrected – is taken as implicit consent to be treated as a member of the inferior class.”