Heather Mac Donald on the world’s real unsafe spaces: 

Because Albinos’ body parts are believed to carry magical powers, their limbs are highly marketable — once obtained, of course, through mutilation or murder. Attending school for sisters Bibiana and Tindi Mashamba was a nightmare; not only did other children throw rocks and spit on them and teachers beat them, but the threat of murder was ever-present. So, like many Third World girls, they simply stayed home. But even such a retreat from the public realm couldn’t protect them. The day after their father’s funeral, Bibiana’s leg and two fingers were hacked off in the hope of a lucrative sale.

Good Samaritans brought the girls to the Orthopaedic Institute for Children in Los Angeles so as to provide Bibiana with a new prosthetic leg. And then students from USC’s law school started an asylum appeal for them. Did those law students seek to get them asylum in Nigeria, say, or Haiti, so that they wouldn’t be oppressed by white privilege? No, oddly, they targeted their asylum petition at the U.S. government, the place where victims of the brutality, superstition, and hatred that characterise so many Third World countries flee to (along with equally reviled Western Europe). The petition was successful, and now Bibiana and Tindi are students in Ojai, California, where they are eager to catch up on their lost schooling and go on to college. There are no reports as of yet of the girls being stoned in Ojai.

Seth Barron on the unmentionable costs of illegal immigration: 

New York’s Health + Hospitals Corporation, which runs the city’s massive public health infrastructure, takes it as its mission to provide care to anyone who needs it, without regard for immigration status. This policy is a major reason why HHC is on constant verge of financial collapse. During the last fiscal year, HHC needed an emergency allocation of $337 million from the city [i.e., taxpayers] just to keep its doors open, and the prognosis for the future is even worse. At an April press conference, Dr Ram Raju, president of HHC, said that caring for illegals consumes about one-third of his $7.6 billion annual budget. Rounding down, that means that $2.5 billion — of which the city is picking up an increasingly large chunk every year, as state and federal aid dries up — goes toward providing health care to illegal aliens in New York.

And Cathy Young on the alleged gender politics of headphone use:  

Back in 2013, Dan Bacon posted a piece titled “How to Talk to a Woman Who Is Wearing Headphones.” This three-year-old blogpost was dug up and pilloried by a Twitter activist named Brandon Evers, whose Twitter bio states, “I support intersectional feminism, but only women can decide if I’m a feminist” and helpfully clarifies that his personal pronouns are “he/him,” and whose Twitter feed is mostly one long exercise in ‘look how progressive and pro-feminist I am’ moral posturing. Brandon’s tweet quickly went viral with 18,000 retweets, and the outrage machine kicked in, with Bustle, Slate, and numerous other sites denouncing [Bacon’s] post as a creepy and misogynistic call to sexual harassment and boundary violation. Revelist, a publication for millennial women, compared Dan Bacon to mass murderer Elliott Rodger, who killed six people (four of them men) in 2014 because he was mad about being rejected by women.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

For newcomers, more items from the archives. A ladies-of-the-left edition:

Do Not Date Bedlamites.

Melissa Fabello, managing editor of Everyday Feminism, shares her interracial dating advice with those less enlightened: 

If you’re creasing the sheets with someone and you’re continually fretting about pseudo-sociology and imagined racial power dynamics, and about who’s being “marginalised” by virtue of their melanin levels, and thinking about sex “in relation to social power,” then it doesn’t sound like a relationship so much as an elaborate fetish. Seemingly oblivious, Ms Fabello goes on to stress the wickedness of “racial fetishization” and of “exotifying” sex with “people of colour.” “It’s never appropriate to stereotype people,” says she. And yet her own article is premised on “othering” and “exotifying” people with browner skin than hers. Chiefly by viewing them as eternal victims of some all-pervasive “white supremacy,” which apparently renders them “marginalised” and powerless, and in need of endless, neurotic accommodation by immensely sensitive white people, even in the bedroom. 

The Mouthing of Bollocks. 

“Racial justice educator” Rachel Kuo tells us how to order takeaway in a suitably agonised and intersectional manner: 

For Ms Kuo, neurotic fretting is, and should be, a staple of eating out: “Food can be used as a tool of marginalisation and oppression… It’s critical for us to reflect on how we perceive the cultures that we’re consuming and think about the relationships between food, people, and power.” And yet the family running my local Chinese takeaway actively encourages heathen white folk to sample their wares, regardless of whether those paying customers are intimately familiar with All Of Chinese History. And I very much doubt that they expect their patrons to acquaint themselves with “the complex relationships and power dynamics between Asian countries” and issues of “labour equity and immigration policy” as a precondition of buying hot tossed chicken. No. What they want is custom. Pretentiously agonised pseudo-sensitivity is, alas, not billable.

In case you missed it in the comments yesterday… 

…where it was followed, quite promptly, by this.

Via Tom J and Muldoon. 

If you are only attracted to able, ‘mentally well’, cis, normatively beautiful people, from class privileged backgrounds, then you are upholding violent norms.

Attention, husbands, wives, lovers, seekers of amour, and the partnered of the world. Student activist and avowed “feminist killjoy” Josefin Hedlund wishes to correct your desires in a totally non-dogmatic, non-presumptuous way:

This myth [of love, marriage and monogamy] still has a powerful hold in today’s Western neoliberal societies. Its most important message is that love is magical and apolitical. However, at a closer look, it is obvious that love actually works to uphold hetero- and cis-normative, patriarchal, capitalist, and hierarchical structures in society. 

Better stow your luggage and strap yourselves in. The ride may be bumpy.

Test yourself: write down the gender, race, class, social, political, educational, and geographical background of everyone you have been attracted to. Do you see a pattern?

Maleness aside, can’t say I do. In fact, I doubt I could recall everyone who’s ever caught my eye. And it occurs to me that if even momentary attraction requires a thorough preemptive vetting of each person’s geographic and educational background, and knowledge of their bank balance and socio-political views, then something’s gone horribly wrong. I should think few of us have time to maintain what sounds like a hugely impractical academic sorting fetish.

If you are only attracted to able, ‘mentally well’, successful (by society’s standards), cisgender, normatively beautiful, slim people, from class privileged backgrounds… you cannot just declare that who you are attracted to is a personal preference.

I feel there ought to have been some kind of explanation here, to pad out the assertion. I’m still waiting for some elaboration on that “upholding violent norms” thing. And it’s not entirely clear to me how my own lifelong coupling, with a chap, is “upholding hetero- and cis-normative, patriarchal, capitalist, and hierarchical structures in society.” Perhaps we’re supposed to enjoy the air of mystery. Still, there’s lots of boilerplate and rote regurgitation:

I am a truth-teller, if nothing else.

So says Meghan Murphy, whose frankness and modesty entertained us quite recently. Not least with her belief that the world needs “a feminist revolution… an end to masculinity,” and that “it’s time to consider a curfew for men.” Our self-effacing Amazon and speaker of truths, and editor of “Canada’s leading feminist website,” is once again sharing her wisdom with the world’s downtrodden womenfolk, with “Ten things every woman should know by the time she’s 36.” The nuggets on offer cover a spectrum of womanly woes, from the prosaic – buying shoes that fit as opposed to ones that don’t – to matters more profound:  

(3) Love, marriage, and heterosexual couplings will not complete you or make you happy.

Specifically,

I’m not saying that having positive, loving relationships with men is impossible. But it’s very hard.

Because,

First of all, most men are men… They are men who have been socialised as men in a world that teaches them male entitlement… As much as a man might be good and kind and loving, he’s still going to exhibit certain behaviours that will remind you that, oh right, I’m a woman living with a person who has spent their whole life in a position of power over me and my sisters and he will never fully understand what that’s like. 

You see,

Patriarchy makes heterosexual love next to impossible. Do your best to live the life you want regardless of whether or not there is a man in it and remember that having a man in it won’t necessarily make your life any better… Often, in fact, it makes it worse.

At which point readers may wonder if this severely jaundiced view of men – in which masculinity is something to “end” as a matter of urgency, and in which a male presence in one’s life is deemed likely to make it worse – is an obvious aid to success in the world of heterosexual romance. With heterosexual love being “next to impossible,” despite it occurring frequently across much of the planet’s surface. And some of you may be wondering whether the wholesale regurgitation of radfem boilerplate, including demands for male curfews, may give potential suitors the impression of being seated with a woman in need of medication. A perception unlikely to enhance any hopes of contented lifelong coupling.

However, if attempts to attract a male life partner fail – possibly as a result of explaining to him, at length, why he and other men are so ignorant, oppressive and dysfunctional – there is a consolation prize:

(10) You should get a dog.

So. Not a total loss.