So you think you’re a bad collaborator
This guy Dollard was holed up in a stockade trying not to get his ass kicked by the Iroquois Confederation when he had the brilliant idea to light up powder keg and toss it into the enemy.
Unfortunately, he missed and dropped the damn thing in the stockade, blowing allies and his own men and the wall to bits.
This did not go as planned.
Then the Iroquois popped right on in and set to trussing everyone up for some ritual torture.
Quiz: Worst collaborator ever was:
- Dollard
- Dollard
Like a man
Exhaustion and gloom pressed on him more and more heavily. Did he want someone to talk it over with? Or someone to complain to? Or just someone to have a heart-to-heart talk with, who might perhaps even show him a little pity?
Of course he had read and heard that pity is a humiliating feeling: whether you pity or are pitied.
Because throughout his life, no one had ever pitied Dyomka [him].
Here in the ward it was interesting listening and talking to people, but he couldn’t talk to them in the way he now wanted. When you’re with men you have to behave like a man.
from Alexander Solzenitsyn’s Cancer Ward
So you think your PhD is a waste of time
This guy Frobisher goes the Arctic to find the Northwest passage and totally fails, but he finds some rocks that he thinks may have coal or gold or something in them. So he brings them back to good old England and somebody tells him they do indeed have gold in them, so he goes back to the Arctic and fills his ships up with rocks. But when he gets back to England, he finds out actually somebody lied and they’re just fucking rocks. All they’re good for is fixing manor walls and shit.
Also he got shot in the ass with an arrow by the Inuit.
Excuse me sir you appear to be trespassing lost let me help you find your way home with my arrow.
When all your data is worthless, remember that your ventures could be considerably more painful and pointless than this journey of Sir Martin Frobisher.
While you’re waiting for the bus
Stuff worth reading
- periodic reminder on the origins of the phrase “the personal is political”
- Egg War: Why India’s Vegetarian Elite Are Accused Of Keeping Kids Hungry
- Ask Polly: How Do I Make Conversation? Red flag: dude says he doesn’t like small talk
More than this
Every August my mother took my siblings and me to the Goodwill for new school clothes. She chose a few pairs of pants for each of us and a new set of church clothes, but we got to pick our own t-shirts.
I loved this and could spend hours browsing the racks. It wasn’t the opportunity for input into my appearance that I was so excited and careful about, but the life the shirts represented. I chose shirts from things like summer camps, arts competitions and classes, travel to a big city. I thought maybe people would think I wasn’t so poor if my shirts showed things rich people did.
And I wanted to do those things so badly. The shirts fueled my daydreams every time I wore them – a summer learning to canoe and sleeping in bunk beds in cute cabins, years of ballet classes culminating in a beautiful performance with lots of flowers and clapping, flying in an airplane to New York and visiting all the famous places with calm, smiling, well-dressed people.
Homosexual sex in the service of heteronormativity
no one ever asks what’s going on in white culture or what it is about white masculinity that is making this kind of sex practice possible. But that’s really precisely the question we should be asking, because white men have engaged in — straight-identified white men have engaged in — intimate or sexual encounters with one another since the very invention of heterosexuality and homosexuality as medical terms in the late 19th-century
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we don’t have language that circulates in mainstream culture that would help straight men make sense of or explain their sexual encounters with other men, whereas straight women, when they have sexual encounters with other women, have an array of socially acceptable narratives that they can draw on.
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if straight people want in on queer life, that’s about something more than homosexual sex. That’s about queer subculture, which is anchored to a long tradition of anti-normative political practices and anti-normative sex practices and appreciation for a much broader array of bodies and kinds of relationships and so forth, and so I think most straight people don’t actually want to be part of it. I think straight people who engage in homosexual sex, what makes them straight is precisely that they have no interest whatsoever in being part of queer subculture, and so in the last chapter I’m making the point that they could if they wanted to, but they don’t, and that’s part of how we know that this is homosexual sex being enacted in the service of heteronormativity.
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the language of the hetero-eroticism is — and I’m not talking about making love, but just the language of hot, hard core hetero-eroticism — a language that reveals to us this dynamic relation between desire and repulsion, that women are bitches, that you’re going to “hit that,” that you’re going to “slam that,” that you’re going to “kill that.” I cite another great book by a sociologist named CJ Pascoe who did this study of boys in a California high school, and she talks about how their accounts of sex mostly focused on what they found abjectly repulsive about a girl’s body — you know, I fucked her until she bled, I fucked her until she was shitting, I ripped her walls, that kind of thing. So there’s something in the very formation of hetero-masculine desire that can allow for both attraction to and repulsion by the person, the woman, being penetrated.
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Well, why do some people want it more than others, or why do some people organize their life around it, and other people don’t want anyone to even know that they do it? To me that’s a more interesting question than Are you born gay or straight? and so I think that the solution, honestly, is to stop being so obsessed with sociobiological arguments about sexual orientation, which I think are a trap, frankly, and instead ask the question, Given that so many humans have homosexual encounters, what is it that makes some people understand their homosexual encounters as culturally significant, and other people understand it as meaningless or circumstantial?
From a very good interview with Jane Ward on straight men who have sex with men