Meme - Coddled affluent professional @feelsdesperate: "We find out the Second Gentleman knocked up the nanny and slapped around a girlfriend and they’re still trotting him out for interviews. I’m enjoying the Post-MeToo Era."
Tim Miller @Timodc: "Talked to @SecondGentleman about how @VP has encouraged him to lead in the fight against the crisis of anti-semitism and how seriously they would take it in the White House."
🇺🇸Travis🇺🇸 on X - "I never knew just how much Justin Bieber went through in Hollywood. I hope he exposes them all, especially Diddy and his friend."
No one cares about men
I’m not surprised people are suing a dating app company – our addiction to swiping makes us miserable - "a lawsuit was brought by six people in the US against Match Group, the company behind dating apps such as Tinder, Hinge and Match. The suit blames dating apps for game-like tactics that, they say, contribute to addictive behaviour, making miserable swiping addicts of us all. Match Group denies this, calling the claims “ridiculous”. But anyone who, like me, has spent years on and off the apps knows that there are clear parallels between love algorithms and online gaming – only with dating apps, we are the commodities. Addiction may have been baked into these apps from creation. Tinder’s co-founder confessed to being inspired by psychology experiments on pigeons. Experts have highlighted how the gamification of dating apps releases neurochemicals such as dopamine and serotonin, which are responsible for boosting your mood, into the brain. It’s unsurprising, then, that dating apps can feel so addictive. As the lawsuit claims, we’re being programmed to constantly seek a dopamine hit from each swipe in what it calls a “pay-to-play” loop. That’s probably why the “most compatible” feature on Hinge always brings up someone you likely couldn’t see yourself with in a million years, and why when it’s time to delete the apps, you’re offered alternatives such as “freeze your account” or “reset”. Dating apps are profit-driven, not powered by love, community or kindness. Yet even though most of us know the pitfalls we still choose to participate, even at the cost of our mental health. Dating app addiction has wreaked havoc on my life, and on those of my friends in their late 20s and early 30s. Apps, in my view, are responsible for entrenching a very particular physical “type” I look for when I am dating, which I think is dangerous and reductive. They have also cost me time and money. In my mid-20s, when outsourcing love to the algorithm still felt thrilling and not at all nausea-inducing, I would pay for premium features on Hinge (“more likes”) or Tinder (“rewind” swipes), only for my investment to come to nothing (selling premium subscriptions is the cornerstone of most apps’ business models). Last year, I became concerned when one 30-year-old female friend bounced between a series of failed casual relationships on Hinge, but refused to stop using it. “Am I addicted? Yes,” she says bluntly when I ask her about her usage. “Has my mental health been affected by them? Yes. I plummeted into the depths of depression last year. I felt as if men were seeing me solely as a commodity.”... The very notion of romantic love (and gender roles) has undergone a radical transformation since my parent’s generation. Women have enjoyed a sexual revolution and there has been a total rethinking of the economic rationale behind partnership, but also, I would argue, a breakdown in basic respect and communication – thanks in part to dating app culture. Nobody knows what they want, how long they want it for, or how to ask for it. Having a digital smörgåsbord of global partners at our fingertips convinces us there’s always a better option if we just keep on looking."
When you frame picking up women offline as sexual harassment, this is what happens
Coddled affluent professional on X - "The same sort of libs who want to outlaw dating in the workplace assure me it’s normal to knock up the babysitter. Also, when dad knocks up the babysitter it may be an opportunity for everyone in the family to undergo therapeutic personal growth."
Meme - 2 women: "How is it we are in a stadium full of men and still not one man came up to hit on us or even talked to us"
New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art explains why it refuses to take down "Thérèse Dreaming" by Balthus - "American art lovers have their knickers in a twist with one painting hanging at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Thérèse Dreaming by the Polish-French painter Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola) depicts 11-year-old Thérèse Blanchard sitting carelessly, lost in deep thought. The oil painting has been exhibited in various museums around the world—from London to Tokyo—without causing a big stir. It was donated to the Met in 1998 and now hangs in its modern and contemporary art gallery. At a time when the US is besieged by an almost daily update of famous sexual aggressors and the people behind the #MeToo movement were named TIME Person of the Year, Balthus’s painting stirred one outraged viewer to petition the country’s largest public art institution to remove the painting. “I was shocked to see a painting that depicts a young girl in a sexually suggestive pose,” wrote Mia Merrill in her online petition. “It is disturbing that the Met would proudly display such an image…The Met is, perhaps unintentionally, supporting voyeurism and the objectification of children. Merrill, who heads the HR department at a finance start-up, suggested that Thérèse Dreaming be replaced by a work created by a female artists in the same genre. She later published an update saying that she would settle for an explicit warning written on the wall text... Weine’s statement is a timely reminder of the museum’s purpose in daily life. There’s something that’s gone awry with how many Americans “consume” museums. With more institutions catering to the multi-tasking, social media-savvy generation, going to a museum today has become a drive-by excursion. How often do we catch ourselves spending more time with the wall text than actually looking at the art? It’s heartening that Merrill was so bothered by Balthus’s painting to take action against it. Presenting difficult and provocative ideas is part of a museum’s purpose. In some eyes, Balthus’s canvas is simply a picture of freedom, of that precious age before crippling self-consciousness takes hold of a young woman. “She is at home in her youth. She has the countenance of someone who knows other things are coming, eventually,” Jen George writes in the Paris Review last year. “When asked about the provocative poses of preadolescent girls in his work, Balthus said, “It is how they (young girls) sit.” Asking museums to post disclaimers on the wall can drown viewers in information and contextual caveats. Too much information robs us of the opportunity to have strong ideas about a work of art, like Merrill did.”
From 2017. Too bad, with BLM, museums succumbed to the woke wave
Rona Wang on X - "went to a wedding & watched this guy ask the bride if the maid of honor was single"
Emma Camp on X - "I do not understand how this is remarkable Have we just fully entered the phase where any kind of IRL attempt to flirt with someone is taboo?"
Ben Dreyfuss on X - "The whole point of going to weddings as a single person is to hook up with another single person. The gen z prudes are now attacking one of this country’s most cherished traditions"
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Bit weird to say, but at some point people are going to have to start standing up for sex and violence. No, it is not "weird" to hit on the maids or men at a damn wedding. No, it is not "creepy" to expect your lover to fairly often want to sleep with you. No, it is not "traumatic abuse" to spank a kid. These therapy raised rabbits seem incapable of negotiating the most banal environments without "trauma.""
Geology Jill on X - "Yet they fetishize traditional non-Western societies, where sex and violence are a big part of existence."
Meme - Richard Hanania @RichardHanania: "Stormy Daniels originally treated her affair with Trump casually, but now describes it as a great trauma. NYT ensures us that “experts” say this is normal. You can see how mental illness has taken over the culture by the way women are encouraged to retcon their sexual pasts."
Meme - "That moment when you realize Oprah didn't bring you here for a new car"
"Oprah Winfrey introduces young actress to Harvey Weinstein"
Meme - ""I was petrified" - Gwyneth Paltrow *friendly with Harvey Weinstein*
"His behavior was outrageous" - Kate Beckinsale *friendly with Harvey Weinstein*
"I kept saying no" - Ashley Judd *friendly with Harvey Weinstein*
"It was a nightmare" - Asia Argento *friendly with Harvey Weinstein*
"Everyone knew" *3 actresses, Uma Thurman, Heidi Klum and one other, kissing Harvey Weinstein*
Why Have Women Become Much More Liberal Than Men? - Daniel Cox - YouTube - "'With the #metoo movement... one of the things we heard from these young women again and again was how formative that experience was you know growing up and sort of seeing this happen in real time. Uh uh there there I think was a source of like uh we're in this together. Um this idea of kind of shared or link fated. That um you know if this thing was happening to this person it could happen to me too... and then for for young men what was really interesting is a lot of them said like well this is not really about me. Uh this is about celebrity or this is like the kind of malevolent dudes out there who are kind of you know awful and I have nothing to do with them'...
'Two-thirds of young women believe that in most or every way what happens to women in the US will have a bearing on their own lives'...
'Gallup tracked the how um how women and men felt about the position of women in society, were they satisfied with the way women were treated. And over the last like 20 or so years roughly similar numbers of men and women said that yeah they were basically satisfied with how women were being treated. And then around 2016, 2017, uh women just plummeted. So they were like 61% uh 16, 17, and then today they're in the like the mid-40s'..
'Despite the fact that you've got rising socioeconomic success for women. Improvements in education, graduation from University, two women for every one man completing a four-year US college degree, women earn 1,111 pounds more between the ages of 21 and 29 on average than men do etc etc etc'...
'You can't look objectively at whether it's economic data or data about politics um or just understand the way the culture is evolved and how we treat issues like uh sexual harassment and discrimination and not think that things are better for women than they were, you know in the 1970s. But interestingly um some sociologists have actually looked at the way young women felt in the 70s versus today in terms of how much gender discrimination was a problem and how much they experienced it and actually women today feel like they have things worse'...
'I'm not in an office but what it feels like from at least friends that work there, um, their felt senses that trepidation, that they're they're in a lot of fear... it allowed her to use other people's experiences to form a sense of putting a guard up. I'm not convinced that putting a guard up based on other people's experiences, especially if it's a guy glancing over in the gym, or you know like some social media campaign, that kind of maybe makes mountains out of molehills. I'm not convinced that that forms uh robust psychologically healthy women. I think that that makes them hypervigilant, scared of lots of men, always on edge and that can't be good for them either... that's not the sort of uh environment I want for women to inhabit from other women'
'Yeah and I think one of the problems is and we could talk about this a lot is taking so many of our cues from social media right versus our own personal experience... the men in my life you know uh siblings uh cousins friends are all great. Um but I think overall men are kind of terrible. And well where are you getting that perspective from? Because your real world experience is actually telling you a very different story. But well I'm I'm seeing these terrible men online and well what what kind of, you know what do you think the algorithm is doing? Is it, is it putting you know the kind of boring polite respectful men, are you think they're overrepresented on social media? Of course not'...
'People identify as bisexual but still date heterosexually mostly'...
'Oh you know professors are turning people uh into marxists and atheists. And the professors that I know says that we can't even get these kids to read the damn syllabus... I think what's going on there is is probably that uh for on a lot of these campuses the the peer environment is exercising pretty significant influence. And so your your peers, politics and then also the the longer trajectory in terms of where you end up. So if you go to college you're more likely to end up in a city um possibly a coastal city that and then uh among you work in places with lots of other college educated folks'
Clearly women in the 70s were stupid and didn't know they were oppressed. We must accept unconditionally and unquestioningly all claims of oppression made by "minorities"
Elliot Page had sex with Juno costar Olivia Thirlby during filming - "The actor, 36, reveals in the book (out now) that he and his Juno costar Olivia Thirlby had "sex all the time" while filming their Oscar-winning 2007 movie. Page says that he shared a hotel room with his mother while shooting the film in Vancouver, which "made it complicated when I met someone, the first woman I had a suitably consensual sexual relationship with."... Page, who was assigned female at birth and came out publicly as a trans man in 2020, previously revealed while promoting Pageboy how he had a past relationship with Kate Mara, who had a boyfriend at the time. "The first person I fell for after my heart was broken was Kate Mara," Page says. "She had a boyfriend at the time, the lovely and talented Max Minghella [The Social Network, The Handmaid's Tale].""
So many layers one can use to problematise this. Her greater fame/her being the star, workplace sexual assault, her being "a man"...
Megan Thee Stallion Denies Allegations She Forced Cameraman Watch Her Have Sex - "A former cameraman for rap star Megan Thee Stallion is suing her for harassment and for creating a “hostile, abusive work environment,” according to documents obtained by NBC News. Emilio Garcia told NBC that he worked for the star, whose real name is Megan Pete, starting in 2018 through June 2023. Megan denied the allegations soon after, with her attorney, Alex Spiro, telling Page Six: “This is an employment claim for money — with no sexual harassment claim filed and with salacious accusations to attempt to embarrass her. We will deal with this in court.”... After that, Garcia said that she fat-shamed him and made comments about how he needed to “spit his food out” and called him a “fat bitch.” He expressed his surprise at hearing these things from “someone who advocates about loving your body,” and added that the “harassment was so severe or pervasive” that the working conditions became “intolerable.” To make matters worse, in addition to the treatment, according to Garcia’s filing, his pay was also affected. He alleged that he was downgraded from a monthly flat rate to being paid per task, and had an overall decrease in work requests from the rapper."
Don't believe victims when they are men!
Kate McCullough on X - "In this piece, I look at what we know and don’t know about a McMaster University department plunged into chaos in 2020 after slew of sexual violence allegations triggered several internal investigations and two criminal trials."
Jonathan Kay on X - "What “we know” is that @McMasterU’s psych dept was plunged into a 2-year witch hunt over fake sexual assault accusations, in large part bcuz your newspaper published a 6K word love letter to a woman whose claims were debunked in open court. now you want to do it all over again?"
Why Men Can't Write About Sex Anymore - "Back in the early 1990s, I was one of the thousands of young, idealist Gen X Americans who moved to freewheeling post-Communist Prague to relive their version of “Paris of the 20s.”... Though there were plenty of women among the wine-sozzled bohemians of our expat massive, Henry Miller’s assertion that “Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation, and the other eight are unimportant,” was embraced by us all, regardless of gender. Men read poems called “Women who moan” at raucous expat readings, while girls wrote about their experiences with Czech lovers twice their age. Sex was the social currency of our close-knit literary community, and writing with brutal honesty about sexuality was a badge of honor. We were in decadent Prague after all, where writer Milan Kundera had ripped back the Iron Curtain to reveal its playful, sensual underbelly in novels like The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Fast-forward a quarter of a century and it feels like we’ve all become characters in dystopian Samizdat novels, our actions proscribed by the progressive thought police who wield power over our lives and careers. Sexuality, which was once seen as liberating, and the purest expression of a free society, is now perceived through the lens of sexual harassment and the #metoo movement. Male desire has become entangled with the contentious issue of consent, so that its every expression has the potential to be exploitative. Having sex for a male in America now is like driving drunk: things might work out fine despite the risk, but you might just as easily crash and burn. When I was in New York last month, close male friends were reevaluating their entire sexual history, and wondering whether any of their past actions could be seen as rapey by today’s standards. This was during the contentious hearings on the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh who was accused of possible misdemeanors in high school! It’s no wonder then that it had men scanning their priapic pasts with urgent fear. A friend who had written an innocent and sweet essay about losing his virginity for a big name American magazine years ago was now fearful that it might be used against him in this new climate of sexual inquisition. It’s no wonder that bad boy male writing has almost completely disappeared from contemporary literature. There are no young Phillip Roths creating lecherous literary heroes like Professor David Kepesh from The Dying Animal who teaches his 24 year-old student how to be his “filthy little whore.” There is no Henry Miller glorying in his sexual adventures in hedonistic Paris of the 1920s. Junot Diaz was one of the few contemporary male writers who dared to write honestly about his sexuality in stories like “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie),” but his reputation has been tarnished recently by allegations of sexual harassment. Though he has retained his teaching position at MIT, his claws have been sheared for now. Instead, contemporary male literary icons like Jonathan Franzen, Paul Auster, and Don DeLillo write cynical, despairing novels that read as a lament on the alienation and anomie of modern America. Where is the joie de vivre, the laughter and mirth and raw sexuality of their predecessors? It now falls to female novelists like Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn to write openly and dangerously about sex and desire. It’s a comment on the West today that bad girl writers are more prevalent than their male counterparts... by tarnishing male desire as “exploitative,” the conversation today has become too one-sided, with the pendulum swinging to the other extreme. Today, men are fearful of writing about their darker desires and urges, and rightfully so. Ian Buruma, the former editor of the New York Review of Books, was ousted for publishing an article hostile to the #metoo movement. In this fearful and inquisitorial atmosphere, sex is dangerous, and writing about sex is doubly dangerous. The neutering of male desire in literature and the arts has, however, also spilled out into real life. There has been a rash of articles recently in publications like the Atlantic—and even the New York Times, which has been a tireless cheerleader for the #metoo movement—bemoaning the decrease in sexual activity among Millennials and other Americans. The Atlantic article was originally entitled “The Sex Recession,” while Ross Douthat’s New York Times column was headlined “The Huxley Trap” and talked about the taming of the sexual revolution. According to a November 2017 Economist/YouGov poll, 17 percent of Americans ages 18-29 now believe that inviting a woman out for a drink constitutes sexual harassment... At this rate, America will desperately need more immigrants to sustain its population... While the New York Times talks about various factors, including the alienation caused by technology and social media, the criminalization of male sexual desire is surely a powerful factor to explain the fall in marriages, and birth rate. In today’s climate of fear and incessant talk about sexual harassment, we desperately need more—not less—graphic, lewd, and dangerous writing about sexuality from confident men unafraid to bare their fantasies without fear of retribution. That writing could set an example for young millennial men unsure of how to express their burgeoning sexuality, and perhaps help foster healthier relationships among America’s alienated youth... It’s a sad comment on contemporary America that a young Henry Miller’s salacious writings would be just as “shocking”—and possibly “cathartic”—today as when they were first published in the 1930s, in the shadow of rising fascism and Freudian repression"
Never-before seen footage from Rebel Wilson and Sacha Baron Cohen's 2016 film shows she was on board with THAT butt scene and casts doubt on her claim he sexually harassed her - "Footage from the sex scene in the 2016 film where Rebel Wilson claims Sacha Baron Cohen told her to 'stick her finger up' his butt seems to show that the action was actually part of the script and the actress was on board with the scene. Several never-before-seen clips from the movie The Brothers Grimsby that failed to make the final cut have been obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com and they depict Wilson and Cohen's characters using a cellphone to film themselves getting intimate. But Wilson, 44, is sticking by the claims she made in her upcoming memoir, Rebel Rising, where she says that Cohen, 52, requested she 'stick your finger up my a**' while his 'male friends' stood around laughing and recording on an iPhone. Clips from the scripted scene, which was read and approved by Wilson before filming began, tell a different story, insiders from the movie say... Still on camera but out of her character, Wilson can be heard discussing the blocking, telling Cohen, 'I'll do a slap [of your butt] and I'll do a – going down the crack', to which Cohen replies, 'It's almost as if you're going to ram your fingers inside.' She answers, 'Yeah.' Indeed, producers tell DailyMail.com Wilson was well aware of the intimate scene at the time she accepted the role of Dawn and she was 'fully engaged...confidently kissing Nobby'... Wilson's version of events has changed several times over the years, from claiming the incident took place in a room with 'male friends' recording, to being 'summoned' by Cohen and told on the spot that they needed to film an additional scene... Several people who worked on the movie and who were present during the filming of the scene have come forward to tell about their experiences on set, supporting Cohen. They insist that Wilson approved scripts in advance, confirmed that the 'finger in butt' direction came from the script, and say everyone on set acted professionally... Insiders from the movie say only around five people were present for the shooting of the scene. They included both men and women. One film insider suggests that Wilson was so comfortable with the scene that she took 'ownership of the production' and 'dictated ''rolling'' to the production team even though she wasn't a director or producer on the film. She was fully engaged.' Another production source said Wilson 'had the power and agency to withdraw from the film, or to have refused to have participate in the sex scene. She did not.' The actress has also claimed that Cohen pressured her to go nude, writing, 'It felt like every time I'd speak to SBC, he'd mention that he wanted me to go naked in a future scene. I was like, ''Ha, I don't do nudity, Sacha.'... Months later, Wilson even flew to South Africa to reshoot a sex scene and never expressed she was uncomfortable, they said... Ironically, Wilson appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2019 when she told the host that she stuck her finger in actor Tom Hardy's rear without consent while filming the 2012 movie This Means War... Many familiar with the filming contend that Wilson only made the allegations when she realized most of the scenes she improvised ended up on the cutting room floor"
