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.”

A student group at a California university is hosting a month-long “Body Love” celebration, which includes events about how “menstruation and environmentalism go hand in hand.”

Not, I think, an entirely happy image. But apparently, students will be “empowered” and “feel more comfort” by exploring the “intersection” – because you knew there was going to be an intersection somewhere – of “body love and Earth love.”

Students could also attend a “Self-Care for Body Hair” event that offered answers to questions such as: “What do you do with your body hair? Does your relationship with your body change when you’ve shaved recently? Do you shave at all?”

Because when you call yourselves The Student Assembly for Gender Empowerment at the University of Southern California, and proudly declare a mission to fight for those “oppressed by the patriarchy,” while “working towards intersectional, collective liberation,” then obviously you’re going to focus on the big, meaty issues of the day. And so,

At the group’s “signature event,” a “body love fair,” students were treated to “crafts, donuts, boba, music, and self-lovin’ vibes!” At that event, attendees were also invited to “release your anger at our Scale Smashing!”

Yes, students with weight issues – issues of such magnitude that they have anger to release – will be encouraged to gorge on doughnuts and thick sugary drinks containing various types of pudding and requiring an extra-wide straw, before hating themselves all over again, while pretending to be empowered and totally okay with it. You see, the way to help overweight people is to encourage the kind of high-sugar consumption that results in weight gain, and inviting them to smash objects that remind them of how unhappy they are about being fat. A situation that they’ve just made slightly worse.

It’s intersectional science, people.

Men, listen up… Join me, with due diligence and civic duty, and publicly claim: I am sexist!

In the pages of the New York Times, a philosophy professor named George Yancy is gushing his little heart out:

It is hard to admit we are sexist. I, for instance, would like to think that I possess genuine feminist bona fides, but who am I kidding? I am a failed and broken feminist. 

Upon which revelation, I suppose we could all just stop and go home. But no, let’s press on.

More pointedly, I am sexist. There are times when I fear for the loss of my own entitlement as a male. Toxic masculinity takes many forms. All forms continue to hurt and to violate women.

The word toxic, by the way, is deployed no fewer than nine times, excluding various synonyms, as if it were an incantation. Now brace yourselves for some full-on testosterone-jacked beastliness.

For example, before I got married, I insisted that my wife take my last name… While this was not sexual assault, my insistence was a violation of her independence.

To reiterate. Asking a fiancée if she’ll change her surname upon marriage, as is still the custom, perhaps to avoid confusing people as to whether you’re actually married or not, and possibly to avoid imposing on any children lengthy hyphenated surnames… this is not sexual assault. I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.

However,

I had inherited a subtle, yet still violent, form of toxic masculinity… These are deep and troubling expectations that are shaped by male privilege, male power and toxic masculinity.

What, then, are these dark and monstrous expectations, the ones that are “subtle, yet still violent”? Apparently, our professional thinker is troubled by the fact that he appreciates thanks after cleaning the house or cooking a meal. Yes, it’s deep and troubling.

Oh, we’re not done yet.

If you are a woman reading this, I have failed you. Through my silence and an uninterrogated collective misogyny, I have failed you. I have helped and continue to help perpetuate sexism. I know about how we hold onto forms of power that dehumanize you only to elevate our sense of masculinity. I recognize my silence as an act of violence. For this, I sincerely apologise.

And yet, frankly, I’m not sensing an excess of masculinity. If you spend hours preparing a meal, or cleaning the house, and then appreciate some acknowledgement, however small or routine, this doesn’t strike me as “toxic,” or “troubling,” or “dehumanizing,” or a “violation” of womanhood. Framing an appreciation of gratitude as “uninterrogated collective misogyny” sounds just a tad preposterous. And when my own Other Half takes charge of some particularly tricky meal preparation, some feat I daren’t attempt, I keep bunting and T-shirt cannons on hot stand-by.

Professor Yancy goes on to denounce, on behalf of all men, “our sexually objectifying gazes… our pornographic imaginations.” Our “dominant phallic economy.” Indeed, he continues, “we are collectively complicit with a sexist mind-set and a poisonous masculinity.” You see, being aroused by women, while not quite rape in itself, is nonetheless, as it were, rape-adjacent, and constitutes “a violent, pathetic and problematic masculinity.”

One wonders how a species of suitably corrected human beings, purged of such heterosexual inclinations, might propagate and flourish. Such that we can indulge the theatrical sorrows of lecturers in “critical whiteness studies.”

Or, as our educator puts it, tearfully, his face reddened with shame,

When I was about 15 years old, I said to a friend of mine, “Why must you always look at a girl’s butt?” He promptly responded: “Are you gay or something? What else should I look at, a guy’s butt?” He was already wearing the mask. He had already learned the lessons of patriarchal masculinity.

Yes, adolescent butt-watching. Oh calamitous woe. And which, apparently, girls never indulge in. Presumably, we should only be sexually attracted to personalities, and never the fleshy packaging.

There was no wiggle room for me to be both antisexist and antimisogynistic and yet a heterosexual young boy. You see, other males had rewarded his gaze by joining in the objectifying practice: “Look at that butt!” It was a collective act of devaluation.

Or possibly the reverse.

The acts of soul murder had already begun.

I’ll just leave that one there, I think.

The following is lifted from an article titled Why Are So Many Smart, Gorgeous Women Single? It’s Almost An Epidemic: 

7. We’re Becoming Our Own Husbands.

Thanks to feminism and our ability not only to work but to take on positions of leadership in our careers, women are now able to provide ourselves all the benefits husbands used to provide us. We don’t need a guy to spoil us or buy us a house – we’ve got that locked down already. We don’t even need a husband for kids; if we really want to become mothers, there are ways to achieve that without having to tie the knot with someone we’ll just end up divorcing a few years later.

As Damian Counsell quips in reply,

And you know the worst thing about men these days? Their seemingly endless sense of male entitlement.  

Oh, and from the same publication, this.