They’re bringing us together with their intersectional piety:

Gettysburg College has postponed a painting and writing event hosted by its Gender Sexuality and Resource Centre for people who are “Tired of white cis men.” The private Pennsylvania college offered the event as part of a peace and justice, or “P&J,” senior project, but has since postponed it after it was shared online. The event, originally scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 12, told people to “come paint and write about” how they are tired of straight, white men. The pieces from the event would then be displayed in the school’s dining hall for the campus to view.

For a mere $76,000 a year, you too can receive such lofty moral instruction.

Update, via the comments:

Connor adds, “It’s like everything they say has to be reversed.”

Well, yes, frequently. It’s not obvious, for instance, how “peace” would be achieved by cultivating a pretentious and competitive disdain for one’s classmates, and for random passers-by, based on their sex and skin colour. It’s also somewhat doubtful that the supposedly oppressive and fatigue-inducing properties of any other racial demographic would be a basis for an art event at an upscale college.

But as Lionel Shriver once put it, “Progressives seem especially prone to disguising one feeling as another.” And so, a contrived, self-flattering resentment – and outright bigotry – become acts of woke piety. And students are encouraged to believe that badmouthing people based on their skin colour is a thing one does in order to bond and make friends, and to impress others and thereby become statusful.

More items from the archives:

She’s Seething With Empowerment.

A Guardian contributor encounters a small act of courtesy, screaming ensues.

Ms Huckeba continues, “No, you cannot open this door for me! You wouldn’t have opened it two years ago, so you damn sure can’t open it now!” “I scowled and stormed away,” says she, “completely enraged.” You see, he’s not allowed to do that – holding open the door for her – or for any woman, presumably. Because although Ms Huckeba didn’t know this polite gentleman and had never seen him before, she’s nevertheless sure of what his views on holding doors open for people must have been two years previously, back when she was fat. It’s intersectional science. And this being the Guardian, what matters is that Ms Huckeba can invoke victimhood to rationalise having behaved like a complete and utter cow.

Don’t Oppress My People With Your Big Hooped Earrings.

The pretentiously agonised, part 436.

When not struggling with oppressive punctuation, Ms Martinez spends her time fretting about the fact that she and her peers are “not taken seriously” as the radical titans they so obviously are. According to fellow umbrage-taker Jacquelyn Aguilera, who also emailed the entire campus, “winged eyeliner, lined lips, and big hoop earrings” are “an everyday act of resistance” by the brown and virtuous.

You Mustn’t Stop The Hysteria.

A Professor of Education denounces consequences for… well, pretty much anything.

Meanwhile, in academia – specifically, the University of Southern California – it’s “Sex Week,” and so:

“Exploring Sensuality and Herbalism,” slated for Tuesday, will be a “virtual evening of plant-play and exploring pleasure, sensuality, and herbalism.”

If you feel an urge to make your own body oil, or herbal tea, or erotic pottery, or should you be in urgent need of a “sexuality doula” and a workshop on “pleasure and identities,” hosted by Ev’yan Whitney, an apparently famed “facilitator and sensualist”… well, your diaries should be updated.

But if anyone here starts fumbling in their pockets longer than is strictly necessary, I’m fetching the hose.

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Some items from the archives:

How Dare You Not Pretend.

On pronouns, politeness, and the strange mental rumblings of Ms Laurie Penny.  

Regarding rudeness, I’m generally polite by default, at least in person, and don’t go out of my way to needlessly put a kink in someone else’s day. I’ve had perfectly civil chats with people who regard themselves as transgender or gender-non-conforming or whatever. Nobody got upset. But what is often being asked – or demanded – is not a small thing, not in its implications.

Taken broadly, we are being asked to affirm, wholesale, a bundle of phenomena that includes not only actual gender dysphoria, whether the result of developmental anomalies or childhood molestation, but also autogynephilia, serious personality disorders, adolescent pretension, and assorted exhibitionist and unsavoury compulsions. The expectation seems to be that we should take these different phenomena, with very different moral connotations, as being one and the same thing, and then defer to them, habitually and uncritically. Which is asking rather more than can readily be agreed to.

Turf War.

At Middlebury College, woke piety erupts. A 74-year-old scholar is quite literally chased off campus.

Jonathan Kay on woke mysticism and the latest must-have identity niche:  

[O]ne of the main themes of the 32-page document is that the task of defining the Two-Spirit concept is (quite literally) beyond the powers of Western language and epistemology. And in any case, the category is almost completely open-ended: The act of proclaiming oneself Two-Spirited could be a statement about one’s gender, or sexual orientation, or both, or neither. Or 2S can be a statement about one’s politics, spirituality, or simply one’s desire to present as “anti-colonial.” […]

While the authors of the report were careful to source their work to Indigenous writers and interviewees, it’s interesting to note that all of the listed societal roles attributed to ancient Two-Spirited people align uncannily with the avant-garde outlook of a white 2022-era environmentalist who’s embraced intersectional conceptions of gender… We are told no fewer than nine times, for instance, that the authors are following an “anti-oppressive” approach. Colonialism is denounced more than a dozen times, including in its “heteronormative” (three times) variant.

Needless to say, the whole thing is a bit of a two-legged stool and, shall we say, not entirely consonant with anthropological evidence.

Libby Emmons on cheated female athletes and transgender overreach: