The Money Pipe From Transhumanism To The "Gender Industry"

timesofisrael  |  Last week, Tablet magazine published a bombshell of an article by Jennifer Bilek, “The Billionaire Family Pushing Synthetic Sex Identities (SSI): The wealthy, powerful, and sometimes very weird Pritzker cousins have set their sights on a new God-like goal: using gender ideology to remake human biology.” Bilek argued that several philanthropic foundations, most notably the Pritzker Family Foundation, are funding “Synthetic Sex Identities,” referring to trans and non-binary identities, as part of a larger “transhumanist” agenda to alter the human body through technology. Bikel names several foundations, some Jewish and some not, who support such an alleged agenda.

Progressive Jewish Twitter jumped into action, as progressive Jewish Twitter does, and condemned the article for both antisemitism and transphobia. Yehuda Kurtzer, the head of the Hartman Institute of North America, tweeted, “I think the piece (which I won’t link to) was horrible, dangerous, and antisemitic. And I’m sure there’s a way to talk about the transformation of sex and gender in our society that’s not that.”

That Bilek names a prominent foundation run by a Jewish family comes no where near the standard of evidence needed for labeling someone an antisemite. Jewish groups on both sides of the ideological spectrum name other Jewish philanthropies they don’t like all the time, and they’re not being antisemitic. Of course, sometimes when people name Jews and Jewish philanthropists like George Soros or the Koch Family they are indeed dog whistling that Jews dominate the media, government, progressive causes, rightwing causes, etc. Dog whistling is a real thing. But that doesn’t mean every time someone cites a Jewish philanthropy in a critical manner that they are tapping into this antisemitic trope or that we have the needed proof to say so publicly.

Accusing someone of a dog whistle without evidence that the person is trying to spread hatred toward Jews circumvents the usual high standard of evidence required before attempting to destroy someone’s reputation for being an antisemite. It’s one thing to speak of trends in antisemitism like dog whistles—we should–it’s another to accuse someone of a specific offense, which ought to require significant evidence.

Those who accuse Bilek of antisemitism might say that Bilek cavorts with extreme rightwing forces. It appears she has and does. Bilek did once question why Jews are so active in “transgenderism.” Her full comments were:

“I just report on who the men are (supporters of trans ideology), I don’t single them out for being Jewish and I have never really speculated about why so many are.  Quite some time ago I came across Keith Woods’ video on his theory of why this might be.  I revisited this today because somebody wrote and asked about the Jewish aspect of the men involved in this agenda and I found it equally as fascinating as I did the first time.  I wonder how others might feel about this.”

The Keith Woods video she mentions does offer up some fanciful speculation about why so many Jews are in the “transgenderism” movement. I’d have to go through his other videos to know if he’s a dyed in the wool antisemite but watching one was quite enough for one day. Bilek does seem to have low standards for citing truly shadowy figures in her writing and in some cases all out antisemites, but never spreads the tropes herself. In reading through much of her writing and social media, I didn’t come away with the impression that this is a woman who hates Jews and is trying to spread Jew-hatred.

The question of Bilek being a transphobe is another matter. The term transphobe has been so overused in condemning people who question any aspect of gender ideology that I’m not inclined to use it. It’s been weaponized to shut down legitimate discourse (which is why we should be so careful in haphazardly accusing people of “antisemitism”—it dilutes the power of the term).

The Benjamins Make Baron HarkonnenJennifer Pritzker's Fetish Into "Synthetic Sexual Identities"

Tablet  | One of the most powerful yet unremarked-upon drivers of our current wars over definitions of gender is a concerted push by members of one of the richest families in the United States to transition Americans from a dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of synthetic sex identities (SSI). Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of Illinois, who helped put Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a family philanthropic apparatus to drive an ideology and practice of disembodiment into our medical, legal, cultural, and educational institutions.

I first wrote about the Pritzkers, whose fortune originated in the Hyatt hotel chain, and their philanthropy directed toward normalizing what people call “transgenderism” in 2018. I have since stopped using the word “transgenderism” as it has no clear boundaries, which makes it useless for communication, and have instead opted for the term SSI, which more clearly defines what some of the Pritzkers and their allies are funding—even as it ignores the biological reality of “male” and “female” and “gay” and “straight.”

The creation and normalization of SSI speaks much more directly to what is happening in American culture, and elsewhere, under an umbrella of human rights. With the introduction of SSI, the current incarnation of the LGBTQ+ network—as distinct from the prior movement that fought for equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, and which ended in 2020 with Bostock v. Clayton County, finding that LGBTQ+ is a protected class for discrimination purposes—is working closely with the techno-medical complex, big banks, international law firms, pharma giants, and corporate power to solidify the idea that humans are not a sexually dimorphic species—which contradicts reality and the fundamental premises not only of “traditional” religions but of the gay and lesbian civil rights movements and much of the feminist movement, for which sexual dimorphism and resulting gender differences are foundational premises.

Through investments in the techno-medical complex, where new highly medicalized sex identities are being conjured, Pritzkers and other elite donors are attempting to normalize the idea that human reproductive sex exists on a spectrum. These investments go toward creating new SSI using surgeries and drugs, and by instituting rapid language reforms to prop up these new identities and induce institutions and individuals to normalize them. In 2018, for example, at the Ronald Reagan Medical Center at the University of California Los Angeles (where the Pritzkers are major donors and hold various titles), the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology advertised several options for young females who think they can be men to have their reproductive organs removed, a procedure termed “gender-affirming care.”

The Pritzkers became the first American family to have a medical school bear its name in recognition of a private donation when it gave $12 million to the University of Chicago School of Medicine in 1968. In June 2002, the family announced an additional gift of $30 million to be invested in the University of Chicago’s Biological Sciences Division and School of Medicine. These investments provided the family with a bridgehead into the world of academic medicine, which it has since expanded in pursuit of a well-defined agenda centered around SSI. Also in 2002, Jennifer Pritzker founded the Tawani Foundation, which has since provided funding to Howard Brown Health and Rush Memorial Medical Center in Chicago, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Foundation Fund, and the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Health, all of which provide some version of “gender care.” In the case of the latter, “clients” include “gender creative children as well as transgender and gender non-conforming adolescents ...”

In 2012, J.B. Pritzker and his wife, M.K. Pritzker, worked with The Bridgespan Group—a management consultant to nonprofits and philanthropists—to develop a long-term strategy for the J.B and M.K. Pritzker Family Foundation. Their work together included conducting research on developments in the field of early childhood education, to which the foundation committed $25 million.

Ever since, a motivating and driving force behind the Pritzkers’ familywide commitment to SSI has been J.B.’s cousin Jennifer (born James) Pritzker—a retired lieutenant colonel in the Illinois Army National Guard and the father of three children. In 2013, around the time gender ideology reached the level of mainstream American culture, Jennifer Pritzker announced a transition to womanhood. Since then, Pritzker has used the Tawani Foundation to help fund various institutions that support the concept of a spectrum of human sexes, including the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the Williams Institute UCLA School of Law, the National Center for Transgender Equality, the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Palm Military Center, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), and many others. Tawani Enterprises, the private investment counterpart to the philanthropic foundation, invests in and partners with Squadron Capital LLC, a Chicago-based private investment vehicle that acquires a number of medical device companies that manufacture instruments, implants, cutting tools, and injection molded plastic products for use in surgeries. As in the case of Jon Stryker, founder of the LGBT mega-NGO Arcus Foundation, it is hard to avoid the impression of complementarity between Jennifer Pritzker’s for-profit medical investments and philanthropic support for SSI.

Pritzker also helps fund the University of Minnesota National Center for Gender Spectrum Health, which claims “the gender spectrum is inclusive of the wide array of gender identities beyond binary definitions of gender—inclusive of cisgender and transgender identities, gender queer, and nonbinary identities as a normal part of the natural expression of gender. Gender spectrum health is the healthy, affirmed, positive development of a gender identity and expression that is congruent with the individual’s sense of self.” The university, where Pritzker has served on the Leadership Council for the Program in Human Sexuality, provides “young adult gender services” in the medical school’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Health.

Teenvogue Marketing The Lifestyles Of Useless White Women To Black Boys....,

teenvogue  | The fast food joint where Zuriel Hooks worked was just up the street from where she lived in Alabama, but the commute was harrowing. When she started the job in April 2021, she had to walk to work on the shoulder of the road in the Alabama sun. She would pause at the intersection, waiting for the right opportunity to run across multiple lanes of traffic. 

It was hot, it was dangerous, it was exhausting – but if she wanted to keep her job, she didn’t have much of a choice. “I felt so bad about myself at that time. Because I'm just like, ‘I’m too pretty to be doing all this,’” Hooks said, laughing while looking back. “Literally, I deserve to be driven to work.” 

Hooks, 19, now works for the Knights and Orchids Society, an organization serving Alabama’s Black LGBT community. But the experience of walking to that job stuck with her. Though she’s been working towards it for two years, Hooks doesn’t have a driver’s license. 

For trans youth like Hooks, this crucial rite of passage can be a complicated, lengthy and often frustrating journey. Trans young people face unique challenges to driving at every turn, from complicated ID laws to practicing with a parent. Without adequate support, trans youth may give up on driving entirely, resulting in a crisis of safety and independence.

The most obvious obstacle involves the license itself. Teenagers who choose to change their names or gender markers face a complicated and costly legal battle. The processes vary: some states require background checks, some court appearances, some medical documentation. At times, the rules can border on ridiculous. Alabama’s SB 184 forbade people under the age of 19 from pursuing medical transition. Yet the state also passed a law requiring drivers to undergo medical transition in order to change their gender markers. Though that law has since been ruled unconstitutional by a federal court, the state of Alabama is appealing that decision, leaving trans drivers with no official resolution. 

“It creates this – I don't want to use the cliche, but – patchwork,” said Olivia Hunt, director of policy at the National Center for Transgender Equality. “Not just state-to-state, but even person-to-person, where every person's name change and gender marker change situation is different.”

The cost can vary widely, too. Documentation, court fees and other requirements can quickly tally up to hundreds of dollars. “If you've got somebody who's already in a situation where, due to financial problems, [who] doesn't have access to a car, that might make it just that more inaccessible for them,” Hunt told Teen Vogue.

This lack of access to name and gender marker revisions puts first time drivers in a dangerous limbo. If your name or gender marker doesn’t match your appearance, there’s potential for harassment. The fear of getting outed by an ID (and subsequent abuse) is what some researchers call “ID anxiety.”

“For trans drivers, this is a unique, personal embodiment of stress,” said Arjee Restar, a social epidemiologist and an assistant professor at the University of Washington, “given that the same ID anxiety does not occur to cisgender drivers.”

With that being said, ID law is not the only thing troubling young trans drivers. Public driver education programs have dwindled significantly since the 1970s, leaving much of the burden of teaching driver’s ed on parents. In most states, teenagers must practice for their driving exams under adult supervision, typically a parent or guardian. 

But trans youth often have fraught relationships with the adults in their lives . Hooks, who started practicing driving with someone close to her at 17, often felt like a captive audience while trying to drive. “As [they were] trying to somehow teach me how to drive, I feel like it was [their] way to try to… I would say somehow try to brainwash me back from being who I am,” said Hooks. “They’d turn [the conversation] from driving to, ‘why are you even transitioning?’”

In Alabama, teenagers must complete a minimum of 50 hours of driving with adult supervision in order to get their licenses in lieu of a state-approved drivers’ education course. Hooks tried to muscle through it. But navigating the roads while navigating the emotions in the passenger side got to be too much. One day, Hooks just gave up. “If I'm gonna have this much agony trying to get this done,” Hooks recalled thinking, “then I don't want to do it.”

The alternative wasn’t much better. She didn’t just feel miserable walking everywhere; she felt vulnerable. 

“I always got catcalled, I always got beeped at by a lot of men,” she said.

It Never Fails, Some Professional And Managerial Class Dickweed ALWAYS Goes Too Far!!!

...., high on power and feeling their full Cartman, "respeck my author-i-teh!!!" these SUNY assclowns forgot they're a public university and that by extension, their censorship and censure of this kid is an explicit violation of his 1st Amendment rights. 

jonathanturley |   There could be a significant First Amendment case brewing in New York after the School of Education at the State University of New York-Geneseo suspended student Owen Stevens for posting his view that gender is limited to biologically males and females.  As a state institution, SUNY is subject to the limitations of the First Amendment and Stevens could challenge the action based on his statements on Instagram.

I have not been able to find the letter sent to Stevens by the school but it is quoted on a conservative website, The Daily Wire. According to that report, Owen posted on Instagram that there are only two genders. This may be that posting:

 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Owen Stevens (@owen_stevens_)

The school reportedly maintains that such statements made on social media are grounds for suspension and other disciplinary action.  While she did not refer to him by name, SUNY-Geneseo President Denise Battles sent out a message stating that “[y]esterday, I was made aware of a current student’s Instagram posts pertaining to transgender people.” Battles acknowledges that “There are clear legal limitations to what a public university can do in response to objectionable speech. As a result, there are few tools at our disposal to reduce the pain that such speech may cause.” However, the school then suspended Stevens.

A spokesperson is quoted by the Daily Wire declaring students must follow the “professional standards” of their chosen field by acting and behaving in ways that “may differ from their personal predilections.”

That does not sound like an accommodation of the First Amendment, which protects your right to express your “personal predilections.” Many object to his view of transgender persons, but it is a view that often expresses a myriad of religious, political, social, and biological beliefs.

 

 

Dr. Sen. Rand Paul DESTROYED Serial FailTail "Rachel" Levine's Horrifying Ass Ideology....,

nationalreview |  Here’s the real story. What Senator Paul asked and what Levine refused to answer was this: “Do you believe that minors are capable of making such a life-changing decision as changing one’s sex?” And this, “Do you support the government’s intervening to override the parent’s consent to give a child puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and/or amputation surgery of breasts and genitalia?”

As Senator Paul referenced, these are the very same questions that appeared before the High Court in England and Wales last year. In his questioning of Levine, Senator Paul cited the plaintiff in that case, Keira Bell:

I would hope that you would have compassion for Keira Bell, who’s a 23-year-old girl who was confused with her identity. At 14, she read on the internet about something about transsexuals and she thought, “Well, maybe that’s what I am.” She ended up getting these puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, she had her breasts amputated.

But here’s what ultimately she says now, and this is a very insightful decision from someone who made a mistake, but was led to believe this was a good thing by the medical community.

“I made a brash decision as a teenager, as a lot of teenagers do, trying to find confidence and happiness, except now the rest of my life will be negatively affected,” she said, adding that the medicalized gender transitioning was a very temporary superficial fix for a very complex identity issue.

Having reviewed the evidence from all sides, the judges in Bell’s case concluded that it was “highly unlikely that a child aged 13 or under would be competent to give consent to the administration of puberty blockers,” adding that it was also “doubtful that a child aged 14 or 15 could understand and weigh the long-term risks and consequences of the administration of puberty blockers.”

Accordingly, the court ordered a National Health Service moratorium on the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for gender-dysphoric young people.

Got that New York Times, et al.? The Keira Bell decision happened in Enlightened, secular Britain — and at the behest of impartial and liberal-minded judges. Unfortunately, in the absence of a similar judicial intervention — or indeed of a centralized health-care system — the situation in the United States is far more out of control.

There are currently 40+ transgender-youth clinics (and counting) in the United States, according to the Human Rights Campaign. The largest transgender-youth clinic in Los Angeles saw more than 1,000 patients in 2019; the youngest patient was four years old. And the director of that clinic has admitted to personally recommending double mastectomies for “probably about 200” adolescent females, a decision she has justified by the argument that “they don’t identify as girls,” thus breast removal is actually “chest reconstruction.” Similarly, a study entitled “Age Is Just a Number,” published in 2017 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, reveals that eleven out of the 20 surgeons interviewed admitted to having performed vaginoplasty — that is, castration followed by the inversion of the penis to form a pseudo-vaginal canal — “1 to 20” times on males under the age of 18.

If the British judges think that minors can’t consent to taking drugs and hormones to halt puberty, how likely is it that a minor can consent to having his or her sexual organs removed or mutilated?

 

 

Biologically Female Athletes Should NEVER Have To Compete With M-to-F Transgenders

usatoday |  On his first day in office last month, President Joe Biden signed an executive order which threatened to pull federal funding from schools unless they allow transgender women to compete on girls’ sports teams. On Thursday, the House passed a bill that would write this policy permanently into law. 

Like many Americans with common sense, we strongly oppose these radical and unfair measures. And like many parents, our opposition is rooted in the care and concern we have for our daughters.

Participation in sports has had a positive impact on countless young women, helping them to develop leadership skills and learn to work together as a team. Striving to be the best is the goal, and valuable opportunities can stem from the competition. However, these lessons and opportunities would be seriously endangered if transgender women are allowed to compete in girls' sports. Indeed, the entirety of women's athletics would be deeply imperiled.

The reason is obvious. Biological male athletes have an insurmountable physical advantage over biological female athletes. They have greater muscle mass,bigger and stronger bones, and larger hearts and lungs  than women. Moreover, one new study shows that even after taking female hormones, transgender women athletes still enjoy at least a temporary physical advantage on the playing field.

This reality cannot be ignored. It could even be dangerous.

For example, consider the implications of a young woman competing in boxing or another physical sport being matched up with a biological male opponent. Besides likely being at a fundamental disadvantage, she might also be at increased risk of severe injury based on physical differences. Unfortunately, this hypothetical has already played out in a 2013 incident, and it could have major consequences on the whole of women’s sports should such situations become more normal.

 

Biologically Female Caster Semenya Gets The Side-Eye While M-to-F Transgenders Compete As Women?

CNN  |   Caster Semenya, the South African Olympic champion runner, has appealed to the European Court of Human Rights to end "discriminatory" testosterone limits imposed on female athletes.

Semenya is hyperandrogenous -- meaning she has naturally high levels of the male sex hormone -- and is fighting against new rules introduced in 2019 by track and field's governing body World Athletics (previously known as the IAAF) that regulate levels of the hormone in female athletes.

This fight is not just about me, it's about taking a stand and fighting for dignity, equality and the human rights of women in sport. All we ask is to be able to run free as the strong and fearless women we are!! Thank you to all of those who have stood behind me✊🏽 pic.twitter.com/0PdBiujH8b

— Caster Semenya (@caster800m) February 25, 2021

 

World Athletics said the rules were about "leveling the playing field" because, it said, testosterone "provides significant performance advantages in female athletes."

 

Semenya took the 800 meters gold at the 2012 and 2016 Olympics but the rules mean she will now need to take testosterone-reducing medication in order to compete internationally over distances between 400

She is now training to qualify for the 200 meters at the postponed Tokyo Olympics, which will take place later this year.

 

In April 2019, Semenya lost an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. In September 2020, she lost an appeal made to Switzerland's Federal Supreme Court but vowed to continue to "fight for the human rights of female athletes."

 

The latest appeal, to the European Court of Human Rights, was announced Thursday in a press release from Semenya's lawyers, Norton Rose Fulbright.

 

The press release calls on the court to find that, in its dismissal of Semenya's appeal, Switzerland's Federal Supreme Court "failed" in its obligations to uphold her human rights.

 

meters and one mile -- something she has declined to do.

Why Have Transgenders Been Glamorized?

coreysdigs |  How do you build an industry? How do you market it and provide support backing up your marketing? How do you exploit a community, while creating a glamorized trend throughout society, stemming from chaos and confusion? How do you grow your margins and take it all the way to the bank? How do you do all of this, and still sleep at night? The exploitation and manufacturing of the transgender “industry” kicked off in the 1950s with a mix of social and medical engineering, with a moving target on children. The manufacturing of this industry goes far beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, and if you dare question it, it is discrimination. The real discriminators are those exploiting a community who truly suffer from trauma, depression, and an attempted suicide rate of 40 percent. They are the ones who should be angrier than anyone about the atrocities these people have committed. They are now exploiting your children, and they have taken this to dangerous extremes.  

Why are transgender people being glamorized, the idea of switching genders pushed upon children, and it’s all prohibited from being discussed or debated? The remaking of a population by creating mass confusion and chaos while dishing out puberty blockers as though it’s the next best Botox treatment, has avalanched into dangerous territory. Faster than one could daringly speak the incorrect pronoun, gender clinics are popping up across this country, surgeons are sharpening their scalpels, and money is pouring into this agenda. With the suicide rate of transgenders being nineteen times greater than the general population and a large percent of transitioned transgenders wishing they hadn’t done so, one wonders how this destructive agenda got its kickstart and who’s really benefiting from it. Certainly not those dealing with gender dysphoria.

Part one will take you through the timeline and origins of the social engineering used to create this industry. Part two will cover the medical engineering behind this, and the danger to children. Part three will get into those funding this agenda and those profiting from it. Part four will show how they have manufactured a reality, who’s assisted, and how it must be stopped.

Queer Academic and Clerical Slug Trails DEMAND Cleansing Blue Fire

newyorker | This is academics doing their job: engaging with things in great complexity. Discussions of #MeToo cases in other areas haven’t been up to this task. We certainly can’t expect it from Hollywood, whose job is to make stories palatable and simple. Writers, who on the subject of #MeToo have often practiced either avoidance or positional warfare, have been able to advance the conversation only so far. But this rare moment, when a wider audience is briefly interested in what academics have to say for and about themselves, might give us a chance for complicating the conversation. They can bring us back to some under-deliberated questions. In the #MeToo revolution, does the focus on identifying bad actors distract us from breaking down the structures that enable them? What is justice in terms of #MeToo, if not merely public disgrace and professional exile for the perpetrators? And how can justice be achieved?

As it happens, many of the scholars apparently most invested in the Ronell case have spent their professional lives studying power. That may give us a chance to finally acknowledge that there are power imbalances in all relationships, and that both parties in two-person interactions exercise some sort of power. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who is firmly convinced of Ronell’s innocence, argues that it was Reitman who was using Ronell. This sort of assertion is perhaps easier to make because the accuser is, in this case, a man, but also because Žižek has made a career of making shocking arguments.

What Žižek’s take does not acknowledge, however, is that even when it seems that everyone has behaved badly, it doesn’t mean that everyone has behaved equally badly, or is equally responsible for the bad relationships that have been created. This is where Duggan’s question, about the boundaries in the relationships between graduate students and their advisers, becomes crucial. The same blog on which Žižek’s post appeared, Theory Illuminati, posted a video of Jeremy Fernando, now a fellow at the European Graduate School (where Ronell is a professor), delivering a talk called “On Walking With My Teacher.” In the video, from 2015, Fernando, seated in front of a large projected photograph of him and Ronell, says, among other things, “My dear teacher Avital always reminded me that movement of thought and our bodies are potentially entwined.” For nearly forty minutes, he talks about love as a precondition for teaching and learning and bodies as the location of both knowledge and love. The talk is, clearly, full of love.

Ronell employs the psychoanalytic term “transference” to describe intense relationships with her students. She is not the first feminist postructuralist scholar to have done so, nor is she the first to get in trouble for it—or to take it too far. Twenty-six years ago, two graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee filed sexual-harassment complaints against the scholar Jane Gallop, who was eventually found to have violated a rule against consensual amorous relationships, though the university found no evidence to support other claims . (A contemporary account of the case, by Margaret Talbot, is eerily relevant.)

A different take on Ronell’s pedagogy came in an anonymous quote that circulated on Facebook. (I don’t know the name of the author, who declined to communicate with me, citing, through an intermediary, the fear of retaliation.)

We don’t need a conversation about sexual harassment by AR, we should instead talk about what AR and many of her generation call ‘pedagogy’ and what is still excused as ‘genius.’ When people talk about sexual harassment it’s within the logic of the symbolic order – penetration, body parts – I doubt you will find much of this here. But AR is all about manipulation and psychic violence. . . . AR pulls students and young faculty in by flattery, then breaks their self-esteem, goes on to humiliate them in front of others, until the only way to tell yourself and others that you have not been debased, that you have not been used by a pathological narcissist as a private slave, is that you are just so incredibly close, and that Avi is just so incredibly fragile and lonely and needs you 24/7 to do groceries, to fold her laundry, to bring her to acupuncture, to pick her up from acupuncture, to drive her to JFK, to talk to her at night, etc. . . . All I am saying is: the AR-case is not about a single case of sexual harassment, it’s about systematic manipulation, bullying, intimidation, pitting students against each other, creating rivalry between them. . . . I agree the concept of “Avital Ronell” is a great one: I too would love to be friends with a smart, hilarious, queer, Jewish, feminist, anarchist theorist!

Duggan calls for looking at harassment as an issue that is neither limited to sex nor rooted in “bad apple” individuals—rather, it is a function of power structures. Closed Title IX investigations are not a good way to address harassment, she suggests. “Perhaps we should begin to think about a restorative justice process that would center in departments, be transparent, hold faculty responsible, and assess the question of boundaries in local context?” she writes. “Perhaps impose confidentiality as the exception, not the rule—to be invoked when a need is demonstrated.”

Toxic Femininity

quillette |  Calling good men toxic does everyone a deep disservice. Everyone except those who seek empowerment through victim narratives.

For the record: I am not suggesting that actual victims do not exist, nor that they do not deserve full emotional, physical, legal, medical, and other support. I also do not want to minimize the fact that most women, perhaps even all, have experienced unpleasantness from a subset of men. But not all women are victims. And even among those women who have truly suffered at the hands of men, many—most, I would hazard to guess—do not want their status in the world to be ‘victim.’

All of which leads us directly to a topic not much discussed: toxic femininity.

Sex and gender roles have been formed over hundreds of thousands of years in human evolution, indeed, over hundreds of millions of years in our animal lineage. Aspects of those roles are in rapid flux, but ancient truths still exist. Historical appetites and desires persist. Straight men will look at beautiful women, especially if those women are a) young and hot and b) actively displaying. Display invites attention.

Hotness-amplifying femininity puts on a full display, advertising fertility and urgent sexuality. It invites male attention by, for instance, revealing flesh, or by painting on signals of sexual receptivity. This, I would argue, is inviting trouble. No, I did not just say that she was asking for it. I did, however, just say that she was displaying herself, and of course she was going to get looked at.

The amplification of hotness is not, in and of itself, toxic, although personally, I don’t respect it, and never have. Hotness fades, wisdom grows— wise young women will invest accordingly. Femininity becomes toxic when it cries foul, chastising men for responding to a provocative display.

Where we set our boundaries is a question about which reasonable people might disagree, but two bright-lines are widely agreed upon: Every woman has the right not to be touched if she does not wish to be; and coercive quid pro quo, in which sexual favors are demanded for the possibility of career advancement, is unacceptable. But when women doll themselves up in clothes that highlight sexually-selected anatomy, and put on make-up that hints at impending orgasm, it is toxic—yes, toxic—to demand that men do not look, do not approach, do not query.

Young women have vast sexual power. Everyone who is being honest with themselves knows this: Women in their sexual prime who are anywhere near the beauty-norms for their culture have a kind of power that nobody else has. They are also all but certain to lack the wisdom to manage it. Toxic femininity is an abuse of that power, in which hotness is maximized, and victim status is then claimed when straight men don’t treat them as peers.

Creating hunger in men by actively inviting the male gaze, then demanding that men have no such hunger—that is toxic femininity. Subjugating men, emasculating them when they display strength—physical, intellectual, or other—that is toxic femininity. Insisting that men, simply by virtue of being men, are toxic, and then acting surprised as relationships between men and women become more strained—that is toxic femininity. It is a game, the benefits of which go to a few while the costs are shared by all of us.

Food is a Substitute for the Female Body

QZ |  Original recipes in a cozy home kitchen, intimate details about family life and domestic bliss—and painstakingly arranged food that oozes sexual overtones. These are the features of a successful food blog.

Often referred to as “food porn,” the trendy phenomenon highlights the seeming contradiction between femininity and feminism while also allowing women to shape the possibilities for women’s identities in online spaces. In contemporary social culture, women are encouraged to be feminists and pursue professional ambitions while still maintaining their femininity and domesticity. Their chief value in society is to reproduce and feed their families while denying their own appetites. These blogs reflect the digital identities of women who have been required to embody multiple contradictions—and look delectable while doing so.

In the food blogosphere, some of these sexualized conventions include the overabundance of “oozing” food, including runny egg yolks that are captured dribbling over neat vegetable beds, chocolate lava cakes with molten centers that drizzle over porcelain plates, and frosted cakes depicted with glazes dripping down their tall sides. There is also something sexually tinged about many food blogs’ penchant for “cheeky peeks,” a photographic motif that peers inside the hidden layers of elaborately decorated cakes. Examples of this include cakes stuffed with candy, desserts whose batter is painstakingly dyed and assembled to reveal ombre and checkerboard patterns when sliced open, and an array of gravity-defying layer cakes.

Pornographic imagery is built upon women offering their bodies to the male gaze, but food porn recognizes and appreciates the creative and technical skills of the woman behind the camera. In this way, food is used as a substitute for the female body; food bloggers offer intimate domestic details from their kitchens, rather than their bedrooms. Food porn can therefore be seen as a way of recognizing the active and creative capacities of women’s bodies rather than the more passive and objectified positions of traditional erotica.

Food and Dieting Negotiate Hegemonic Masculinities in American Popular Culture

emilycontois |  The Dudification of Diet: Food Masculinities in Twenty-First-Century America examines how the food, advertising, and media industries have constructed masculinities through food in the twenty-first-century United States, particularly when attempting to create male consumers for products socially perceived as feminine. Employing the tools of critical discourse analysis to examine food, dieting, and cooking, I consider a diverse array of media texts—including advertising campaigns, marketing trade press, magazines, newspapers, industry reports, restaurants, menus, food criticism, blogs, and social media. Case studies include diet sodas (Coke Zero and Dr. Pepper Ten), yogurts (Oikos Triple Zero and Powerful Yogurt), weight loss programs (primarily Weight Watchers), and food television (namely Food Network star, Guy Fieri).

More than just companies jockeying for market share, these food phenomena “for men” marked a moment of heightened gender anxiety and the rise of a new gender discourse—dude masculinity. Partly created by the food marketing industry, dude masculinity sought to create socially acceptable routes into and through the feminized terrain of food and the body. As a gender discourse, it celebrates the “average guy,” while remaining complicit in hegemonic masculinity’s overall structure of social inequality.

Beyond gender performance, dude masculinity articulates apprehension for how consumption reconfigures notions of citizenship, bodily surveillance, and nationhood. Dude masculinity tells a larger story of the United States’ very recent past, one rooted in perceived social chaos, concerned with terrorism, border control, immigration, same-sex marriage, race relations, new media, and neoliberalism. Despite decades of resistance and progress toward gender equality, these recent social shifts have resulted in the reactionary shoring up of gendered categories, a complex and contradictory sociocultural process that I read through dude masculinity, food, and the body.

Previous scholarship has treated these areas of culture separately and considered food and gender largely in terms of femininity, domesticity, and care work. I synthesize feminist studies of media, food, and the body and apply them to masculinities, centering discussions of power. Bridging theory and practice, this dissertation also informs how entities like advertising campaigns, food packaging design, public health programs, and weight loss studies can rewrite gender scripts to promote equality and justice.

Jenny Frum Da Block Aint...,

Breitbart  |  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Party’s rising socialist star, describes herself as “a girl from the Bronx” to project a working-class image. However, this claim is only half true – to borrow a phrase from the left-wing website PolitiFact.

“Well, you know, the president is from Queens, and with all due respect — half of my district is from Queens — I don’t think he knows how to deal with a girl from the Bronx,” Ocasio-Cortez said this week on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

She similarly told the Washington Post: “I wasn’t born to a wealthy or powerful family — mother from Puerto Rico, dad from the South Bronx. I was born in a place where your Zip code determines your destiny.”

The congressional candidate, who pulled off an upset win against high-ranking establishment Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY), was indeed born in New York City’s Bronx borough. She currently lives there, too.

So what’s the issue? For most of her formative years, Ocasio-Cortez was actually raised in one of the United States’ wealthiest counties.

Around the age of five, Alexandria’s architect father Sergio Ocasio moved the family from the “planned community” of Parkchester in the Bronx to a home in Yorktown Heights, a wealthy suburb in Westchester County. The New York Times describes her childhood home as “a modest two-bedroom house on a quiet street.” In a 1999 profile of the area, when Ocasio-Cortez would have been ten years old, the Times lauded Yorktown Heights’ “diversity of housing in a scenic setting” – complete with two golf courses.

The paper quoted Linda Cooper, the town supervisor, describing Yorktown as ”a folksy area where people can come, kick off their shoes, wander around, sit in a cafe, listen to a concert in the park, or go to the theater.”

DNC Pretending To Feel The Heat From Below...,

consortiumnews |  Conventional wisdom said that powerful Congressman Joseph Crowley couldn’t be beat. But his 20-year career in the House of Representatives will end in January, with the socialist organizer who beat him in the Democratic primary in the deep-blue district of the Bronx and Queens poised to become Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. 

 

In a symbolic twist of fate, the stunning defeat of Crowley came a day before the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic Party voted on what to do about “superdelegates,” those unelected Democratic Party elite who’ve had an undemocratic and automatic vote in presidential nominations since 1984 to prevent leftwing candidates from being nominated.    

Crowley’s defeat shows how grass-roots movements can prevail against corporate power and its pile of cash. The Crowley campaign spent upward of $3 million in the Democratic Party primary. The Ocasio-Cortez campaign spent one-tenth of that. He wielded the money. She inspired the people. 

As the 28-year-old Ocasio-Cortez was quick to say after her Tuesday night victory, her triumph belongs to everyone who wants social, economic and racial justice. She ran on a platform in harmony with her activism as a member of Democratic Socialists of America and an organizer for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.

Conventional wisdom said superdelegates—who exerted undemocratic power over the selection of the party’s presidential nominee in 2016—couldn’t be stopped from once again putting the establishment’s thumbs on the scale.

But on Wednesday afternoon, the party committee approved a proposal to prevent superdelegates from voting on the presidential nominee during the first ballot at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. (The last time the party’s convention went to a second ballot was 1952.)

As NPR reported, the committee “voted to drastically curtail the role ‘superdelegates’ play in the party’s presidential nominating process. The DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee voted 27 to 1 to block officeholders, DNC members and other party dignitaries from casting decisive votes on the first ballot of presidential nominating conventions.”

Make no mistake: Those in the top echelons of the Democratic Party aren’t moving in this direction out of the goodness of their hearts. Grass-roots pressure to democratize the party—mounting since 2016—is starting to pay off.

Why Is Pinker Anti-PC Okay - But Peterson Anti-PC Not Okay?

WaPo |  Ontario has been hit hard by the ravages of global economic policy and should be a prime location for emerging, radical action. Instead, Canada’s most populous province has produced the English-speaking world’s most controversial, right-wing surrogate dad: Jordan Peterson.

Peterson cloaks his anti-progressive opinions in folksy, common-sense advice. He is a master at inventing an enemy and offering young men a solution to various straw men. Peterson has perfectly tailored his self-help style to the individual, no doubt a holdover from his days as a clinical psychologist, which he mentions a lot when he talks.

Self-help alone isn’t dangerous, but it becomes dangerous in the way that Peterson uses it as the solution to the myriad problems that young people face. He argues that the left is dangerous and destructive because of the emphasis it places on “group identity.” In a trailer for a video called “No Safe Space,” to be released in 2018, Peterson argues that “group identity” is really what killed tens of millions of people under Stalin’s Communism and Hitler’s Nazism and then, remarkably, concludes, “and I’m concerned because the universities are so overwhelmed by this, that I can’t see how they can extract themselves from it.”

Therefore, supremacy of the individual is the only way to stop global war and mass murder.

Peterson’s message fits perfectly with the prevailing ideology that has driven public-policy debates in North America since the 1980s: People should be able to succeed on their own, without help from the state. This message intentionally erases systemic barriers that perniciously remain and instead demonizes anyone who understands that collective advancement is the key to improvement.

"This is a Terrifying Time to be White an American"

NewYorker |  Several distinct cultural changes have created a situation in which many men who hate women do not have the access to women’s bodies that they would have had in an earlier era. The sexual revolution urged women to seek liberation. The self-esteem movement taught women that they were valuable beyond what convention might dictate. The rise of mainstream feminism gave women certainty and company in these convictions. And the Internet-enabled efficiency of today’s sexual marketplace allowed people to find potential sexual partners with a minimum of barriers and restraints. Most American women now grow up understanding that they can and should choose who they want to have sex with.

In the past few years, a subset of straight men calling themselves “incels” have constructed a violent political ideology around the injustice of young, beautiful women refusing to have sex with them. These men often subscribe to notions of white supremacy. They are, by their own judgment, mostly unattractive and socially inept. (They frequently call themselves “subhuman.”) They’re also diabolically misogynistic. “Society has become a place for worship of females and it’s so fucking wrong, they’re not Gods they are just a fucking cum-dumpster,” a typical rant on an incel message board reads. The idea that this misogyny is the real root of their failures with women does not appear to have occurred to them.

The incel ideology has already inspired the murders of at least sixteen people. Elliot Rodger, in 2014, in Isla Vista, California, killed six and injured fourteen in an attempt to instigate a “War on Women” for “depriving me of sex.” (He then killed himself.) Alek Minassian killed ten people and injured sixteen, in Toronto, last month; prior to doing so, he wrote, on Facebook, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” You might also include Christopher Harper-Mercer, who killed nine people, in 2015, and left behind a manifesto that praised Rodger and lamented his own virginity.

The label that Minassian and others have adopted has entered the mainstream, and it is now being widely misinterpreted. Incel stands for “involuntarily celibate,” but there are many people who would like to have sex and do not. (The term was coined by a queer Canadian woman, in the nineties.) Incels aren’t really looking for sex; they’re looking for absolute male supremacy. Sex, defined to them as dominion over female bodies, is just their preferred sort of proof.

If what incels wanted was sex, they might, for instance, value sex workers and wish to legalize sex work. But incels, being violent misogynists, often express extreme disgust at the idea of “whores.” Incels tend to direct hatred at things they think they desire; they are obsessed with female beauty but despise makeup as a form of fraud. Incel culture advises men to “looksmaxx” or “statusmaxx”—to improve their appearance, to make more money—in a way that presumes that women are not potential partners or worthy objects of possible affection but inconveniently sentient bodies that must be claimed through cold strategy. (They assume that men who treat women more respectfully are “white-knighting,” putting on a mockable façade of chivalry.) When these tactics fail, as they are bound to do, the rage intensifies. Incels dream of beheading the sluts who wear short shorts but don’t want to be groped by strangers; they draw up elaborate scenarios in which women are auctioned off at age eighteen to the highest bidder; they call Elliot Rodger their Lord and Savior and feminists the female K.K.K. “Women are the ultimate cause of our suffering,” one poster on incels.me wrote recently. “They are the ones who have UNJUSTLY made our lives a living hell… We need to focus more on our hatred of women. Hatred is power.”

Having Upgraded His Wardrobe and Paid in Full - Jordan Peterson's 15 Minutes Nearly Over...,

WaPo |  The world is wretched with weak men. Slouchers, slackers, chumps, low-status dudes who have amassed a crumpled pile of inferior habits and made the world a messier place. 

Or so Jordan Peterson will tell you. But fear not, the doctor is here to help, preaching his thoroughly footnoted gospel of order and discipline, one rule at a time — in a popular book, in lectures far from his ivory tower roost and, most potently, on YouTube.

The man of the moment, the self-proclaimed “professor against political correctness,” sits in his Manhattan hotel aerie before another sold-out talk based on his best-selling “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.” The University of Toronto clinical psychologist also sold out his date at Washington’s Warner Theatre on Friday, so he’ll return next month to lecture there again. Plenty of men are listening. Even Kanye West, who amid his still-unspooling existential crisis on Twitter, shared an image of his computer screen, on which a tab for a Peterson video was visible. 

Peterson elicits nearly every opinion except indifference. “The most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now,” wrote David Brooks in the New York Times, calling him “a young William F. Buckley.” Critics, and there are plenty, raise serious doubts.

“He takes a really simplistic approach toward gender inequality. It feels like a dressed-up version of misogyny,” says Gary Barker, a developmental psychologist who has studied ways to promote gender equality and violence prevention. “The scary part is it doesn’t provoke men to be better but to live with this inequality and get what you can out of it.”

Peterson rails against victimhood and “radical left-wing identity politics.” He’s an opponent of regulated equality and a skeptic of the notion of male or white “privilege.” Like many thought leaders who flirted with socialism in their youth, Peterson crusades against anything that he thinks smacks of Marxist tendencies and groupthink, which means a lot of inveighing against “postmodernist” scholars, who are probably a bigger nuisance at faculty confabs than in the lives of his fans.

MisoHorny Terrorists Rubbing, Rubbing, Rubbing UNTIL ITS TIME TO GO KILL SOMEBODY!!!

NYTimes |  Alek Minassian, who plowed a rental van through a busy Toronto sidewalk on Monday, left little doubt as to why he killed 10 people, most of them women. Minutes before his attack, he posted a message on Facebook lauding the mass murderer Elliot O. Rodger and warned of an “incel rebellion” — a reference to an online community of “involuntarily celibate” men who believe women unjustly deny them sex.

Mr. Rodger, who killed six people in Isla Vista, Calif., in 2014, recorded YouTube videos raging against “spoiled, stuck-up” women he called “sluts” who sexually rejected him. And before Mr. Rodger, there was George Sodini, who killed three women in a Pennsylvania gym in 2009. He left behind an online diary complaining that women ignored him and that he hadn’t had sex in years.

Despite a great deal of evidence that connects the dots between these mass killers and radical misogynist groups, we still largely refer to the attackers as “lone wolves” — a mistake that ignores the preventable way these men’s fear and anger are deliberately cultivated and fed online.

Here’s the term we should all use instead: misogynist terrorism. Until we grapple with the disdain for women that drives these mass murderers, and the way that the killers are increasingly radicalized on the internet, there will be no stopping future tragedies.

Over the past decade, anti-women communities on the internet — ranging from “men’s rights” forums and incels to “pickup artists” — have grown exponentially. While these movements differ in small ways, what they have in common is an organized hatred of women; the animus is so pronounced that the hate-watch group Southern Poverty Law Center tracks their actions.

The other dangerous idea that connects these men is their shared belief that women — good-looking women, in particular — owe them sexual attention. The incel community that Mr. Minassian paid homage to, for example, was banned from Reddit last year because, among other issues, some adherents advocated rape as a means to end their celibacy.

Jordan Peterson: Isn't This Just The Way Women Try To "Debate"?

theatlantic |  My first introduction to Jordan B. Peterson, a University of Toronto clinical psychologist, came by way of an interview that began trending on social media last week. Peterson was pressed by the British journalist Cathy Newman to explain several of his controversial views. 

But what struck me, far more than any position he took, was the method his interviewer employed. It was the most prominent, striking example I’ve seen yet of an unfortunate trend in modern communication.

First, a person says something. Then, another person restates what they purportedly said so as to make it seem as if their view is as offensive, hostile, or absurd.

Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and various Fox News hosts all feature and reward this rhetorical technique. And the Peterson interview has so many moments of this kind that each successive example calls attention to itself until the attentive viewer can’t help but wonder what drives the interviewer to keep inflating the nature of Peterson’s claims, instead of addressing what he actually said.

This isn’t meant as a global condemnation of this interviewer’s quality or past work. As with her subject, I haven’t seen enough of it to render any overall judgment—and it is sometimes useful to respond to an evasive subject with an unusually blunt restatement of their views to draw them out or to force them to clarify their ideas.

Perhaps she has used that tactic to good effect elsewhere. (And the online attacks to which she’s been subjected are abhorrent assaults on decency by people who are perpetrating misbehavior orders of magnitude worse than hers.)

But in the interview, Newman relies on this technique to a remarkable extent, making it a useful illustration of a much broader pernicious trend. Peterson was not evasive or unwilling to be clear about his meaning. And Newman’s exaggerated restatements of his views mostly led viewers astray, not closer to the truth.

Intersectionality Is A Farce

truthdig |  In the worlds of politics and nonprofits intersectionality has become a sneaky substitute for the traditional left notion of solidarity developed in the process of ongoing collective struggle against the class enemy. Intersectionality doesn’t deny the existence of class struggle, it just rhetorically demotes it to something co-equal with the fights against ableism and ageism and speciesism, against white supremacy, against gender oppression, and a long elastic list of others. What’s sneaky about the substitution of intersectionality for solidarity is that intersectionality allows the unexamined smuggling in of multiple notions which directly undermine the development and the operation of solidarity. Intersectionality means everybody is obligated to put their own special interest, their own oppression first – although they don’t always say that because the contradiction would be too obvious. The applicable terms of art are that everybody gets to “center” their own oppression, and cooperate as “allies” if and when their interests “intersect.” What this yields is silliness like honchos who run the pink pussy hat marches telling Cindy Sheehan earlier this month that their women’s movement can’t be bothered to oppose war and imperialism “…until all women are free,” and the advocates of this or that cause demanding constant, elaborate performative rituals of those who would qualify for “allyship.”

The nonprofit industrial complex, funded as it is by the one percent, loves, promotes and lavishly rewards intersectionality at every turn because it buries and negates class struggle. Intersectionality normalizes the notion that the left is and ought to be a bunch of impotent constituency groups squabbling about privilege and “allyship” as they compete for funding and careers, not the the force working to overthrow the established order and fight for the power to build a new world. Even Hillary Clinton uses the word now.

Afro-pessimism is a term coined by Dr. Frank Wilderson at UC Irvine, and a nappy headed stepchild of intersectionality. Afro-pessimism, to hear Wilderson tell it is the realization that black people have no natural allies anywhere, that we are born with ankle irons, whip marks on our backs, bulls eyes on our foreheads and nooses around our necks. Blackness, he says is “a condition of ontological death,” and the dead have no allies, at least among the living. Wilderson is at least honest. He freely admits that afro-pessimism leads nowhere and offers no answers to any strategic or even tactical questions. Wilderson’s shtick is that of an old man throwing word grenades and he seems not to care much where or how they explode, as long as they do. Whatever works for him, I guess.