Or, The Orange Man Wrecked My Marriage:

By now it’s a truism to point out that the election of Donald Trump… [has] prompted a wholesale realignment of American politics. But it’s also sent shock waves through heterosexual romance.

In the piously left-leaning New York magazine, Molly Langmuir invites us to sympathise with the inner turmoil of activist ladies who are blaming their unhappy marriages, their divorces and estrangements, and pretty much everything, on the continued existence of Donald Trump. There’s quite a bit of mental jungle to hack through, so bring a packed lunch:

29 percent of respondents to a May 2017 survey said their romantic relationship had been negatively affected by Trump’s presidency. And even people ostensibly on the same side of the issues as their partner have run into challenges, with the climate exacerbating or revealing new fault lines. 

Ms Langmuir introduces us to several pseudonymous couples and singletons – people for whom the merest deviation in thought has proved too much to bear. First up, we meet Kirsten:

Growing up, my parents were very liberal. My dad’s gay, he’s been with his husband now for over 40 years. That was my normal. My mom remarried a guy who’s very liberal.

Okay, then.

In high school, I also had a major drinking problem,

No. Don’t. We mustn’t rush to judge.

I was an art major at this big university…

Though, admittedly, she’s not making it easy.

Or, The Mao-lings’ Unhappy Id Spills Out In Portland.

“You’re inherently violent,” screams an unhinged blue-and-purple-haired woman named Hannah McClintock, while repeatedly spitting on people and trying to punch them in the face:

Heather Mac Donald on the obvious-but-seemingly-unthinkable:

Since the World Scrabble Championship began in 1991, all winners have been male. The North American Scrabble Championship has had one female winner (in 1987) since its founding in 1978. All eight finalists in this year’s French World Scrabble Championships were men. Competitive Scrabble constitutes a natural experiment for testing the feminist worldview. According to feminist dogma, males and females are identical in their aptitudes and interests. If men dominate certain data-based, abstract fields like engineering, physics and math, that imbalance must, by definition, be the result of sexism—whether a patriarchal culture that discourages girls from math or implicit bias in the hiring process.

But there are no cultural expectations that discourage females from memorising dictionaries—a typical strategy of competitive Scrabble players, often in a foreign language that the player doesn’t speak. Girls are as free as boys to lap up vocabulary. Nor are there misogynist gatekeepers to keep females out of Scrabble play; the game, usually first learned at home, is open to all. According to Hasbro, 83% of recreational Scrabble players 25 to 54 are female.

Championship Scrabble, however, rewards typically male obsessions: strategy, math, a passion for competition, and a drive to memorise facts. [World Scrabble Champion, Nigel] Richards’s mother told the Guardian in 2015 that he “related everything to numbers” when he was growing up. Feminists will need to employ circular logic to conjure forth a discriminatory barrier in Scrabble: Males’ excellence at a certain activity itself keeps females out. But that leaves unanswered the question of how males came to excel at Scrabble—or any other abstract, competitive activity—in the first place.

Also this:

With space exploration, we have to consider how we are using language, and what it carries from the history of exploration on Earth. Even if words like “colonisation” have a different context off-world, on somewhere like Mars, it’s still not OK to use those narratives.

In the pages of National Geographic, Nadia Drake and Lucianne Walkowicz competitively fret about how terribly problematic the language of space exploration is:

I think the other [word not to be used] is “settlement.”

I’ll give you a moment to process that one.

That comes up a lot and obviously has a lot of connotations for folks about conflict in the Middle East. I think that’s one that people often turn to when they mean “inhabitation” or “humans living off-world.”

Apparently, notions of our species expanding into space are “born from racist, sexist ideologies that historically led to the subjugation and erasure of women and indigenous cultures,” and must therefore be corrected by the lofty and woke. And so, “government agencies, journalists, and the space community at large” are “revising the problematic ways in which space exploration is framed.”

Numerous conversations are taking place about the importance of using inclusive language, with scholars focusing on decolonising humanity’s next journeys into space, as well as science in general.

You see, any attempts to colonise other worlds, or to explore and exploit astronomical objects, will have to be pre-emptively “decolonised” and purged of gender by the neurotically pretentious. Lest our astronauts and astronomers instantly start oppressing their black or female colleagues, rendering them tearful with the words unmanned probe, while spitting on the floor and shouting about the merits of Arcturian poontang.

Needless to say, the word frontier is also deemed “problematic,” due to “narratives… based around European settlement.”

I bring saucy celebrity news, which we don’t often cover. The catch is, it’s from the Guardian: 

The US magazine People has crowned Idris Elba the sexiest man alive,

A handsome chap, and popular, so not entirely surprising. Indeed, the author of the piece, Mr Caspar Salmon, refers to Mr Elba as “incontrovertibly loin-tugging.”

It’s heartening that Elba, long held to be a favourite to become the next James Bond, has cracked another predominantly white institution.

So far, so Guardian. But it could, I think, be a little more Guardian.

Elba fits squarely into an amusing pattern that People has been building up over the years, which sees them plump for decidedly masculine, established, patriarchal figures. The award, in other words, is relentlessly straight.

There we go.

The prize tells us a good deal about the cult of masculinity still prevalent in the world, which equates male looks with “sexiness” rather than beauty. This emphasis on sexual attraction brings power and dominance into consideration alongside mere aesthetic qualities.

“The cult of masculinity.” Now we’re cooking. And a trashy magazine that once a year ranks famous men by sex appeal tends to favour men who strike its readers as sexy, statusful, and manly. Shocking stuff. They even – brace yourselves – put “emphasis on sexual attraction.” Despite the aforementioned loin-tugging, I suspect this may prove problematic: 

[The magazine’s] museum-like display of strong, mostly white, straight-acting men does tell us something about the dominant culture, and is, let’s face it, funny.

What’s funny, apparently, is that the largely straight and female readers of People magazine – readers whose average age is 38 – often rate as sexy men of roughly similar age:

Elba is the fourth man in his 40s in a row to win the award… The average age of winners is 38.7 years old.

And which, it turns out, is also problematic: