Or, So Empowered, Yet Oppressed By Everything. 

Faced as we are with the news that Everyday Feminism may soon flicker out of existence, leaving a gaping void in our intellectual lives, perhaps it’s time to revisit some of the many offerings to have entertained us, albeit inadvertently:  

Lofty Beings. 

Feminist “creative” and “multi-dimensional creature” Katherine Garcia attempts to justify her sub-optimal life choices. Things go badly wrong.

The Mouthing Of Bollocks. 

Rachel Kuo tells us how to order takeaway in a suitably fretful and intersectional manner.

Undone By Her Radical ‘Do.

A “white grrl with dreadlocks” atones for her “whiteness” and “appropriated” hair.

An Intellectual Being. 

Melissa Fabello is a feminist intellectual and therefore terribly oppressed. How dare you question her?

Fat We Can Fix, The Excuses Are Trickier. 

An empowered feminist of girth says not being fat makes you complicit in her oppression.

Poverty And How To Get There. 

“Social justice” devotee describes herself to employers as “a political troublemaker,” and wonders why employment is hard to find.

Do Not Date Bedlamites. 

Melissa Fabello shares her interracial dating advice with those less enlightened. Naturally, it’s complicated.

Unseen Energies. 

“As a witch,” says Kris Nelson, “it is my responsibility to engage in radical politics.” She’s also clairvoyant and sells magic sea shells.

Oh, you laugh now, but who will scold us when they’re gone?

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

An Intellectual Being Rides Again. 

Empowered feminist Melissa Fabello explains the deep, deep trauma of being disagreed with.

Ms Fabello chastises those who ironically use the term “social justice warrior” – which, she explains, is an “invalidating behaviour,” one that can get “really oppressive really quickly.”

We Can’t Promise Not To Hit You. 

The Clown Quarter is a foretaste of left’s corrected, more compassionate society. Hence all the threats and punching.  

To recap, the university’s stated rationale for censorship is that it can’t protect either the speakers or their audience from disruption and thuggery by its own students, which is quite an admission, really. And as we’ve seen, the threat of physical intimidation and mob harassment – by these would-be intellectuals of the left – is quite real. What the university doesn’t admit, however, is that this problem won’t be solved by banning any speakers deemed remotely controversial – in this case, two speakers who prefer evidence and debate over threats and hysteria. The problem will only be addressed, or begin to be addressed, when leftist students no longer feel that mob censorship and physical intimidation are things they can get away with, and get away with repeatedly, without facing consequences. Say, being expelled.

You’re Doing It All Wrong.

Avowed “feminist killjoy” Josefin Hedlund wants to correct your erotic preferences and make them egalitarian. For “social justice.”

Love and sex are unequally “distributed,” says Ms Hedlund, with an unfair amount of both going to people who are deemed lovable and attractive by the people loving them, and not to insufferable sociopaths with horrific disfigurements. Or, one suspects, self-styled “feminist killjoys.” And this is because of capitalism. It’s “obvious,” you see. 

There’s more, should you want it, in the greatest hits. And tickling the tip jar is what keeps this place afloat. 

In which we glimpse the world through the eyes of our self-imagined betters.

The year began with news that living in Glasgow is now to be considered a work of art, according to Ellie Harrison, a taxpayer-funded artist who, coincidentally, lives in Glasgow. We also witnessed the talents of Sandrine Schaeffer, who teaches the subtleties of performance art to those less gifted than herself, and who unveiled “a series of research based actions in public spaces” – i.e., walking repeatedly past automatic doors. Gorged on art, our attention then turned to academic matters and the ruminations of Dr Riyad A Shahjahan, an exponent of “social justice theory” and “pedagogies of dissent.” Dr Shahjahan wished to impress on us that “the norms of neoliberal higher education” – specifically, expectations of punctuality and academic competence – are both racist and oppressive.

February saw a multi-million-dollar experiment in progressive crime prevention – a project that was as bold as it was unsuccessful – namely, bribing known criminals to not commit further crimes. And Ms Celia Edell, a “24-year-old feminist philosopher interested in social justice,” explored the thorny conundrum of whether feminism is compatible with the eating of bacon sandwiches.

In March, we beheld the artistic work of Sandrine Schaeffer’s students – feats that included drooling, doomed horticulture and masochistic thigh-scarring. And feminist “creative” Katherine Garcia attempted to justify her sub-optimal life choices. Ms Garcia, who describes herself as a “multi-dimensional creature” doing “enlightening work,” was shocked to discover that getting heavily into debt to pursue a grad school degree in Women and Gender Studies isn’t a sure-fire path to status and prosperity.

April was enlivened by the highly-wound students at Edinburgh University, whose meetings forbid expressions and gestures that “denote disagreement,” and where even quietly shaking one’s head is a scandalous transgression. In the pages of Everyday Feminism, Ms Kai Cheng Tom bemoaned the fact that “disorders like violent psychopathy” are “generally considered unlikeable,” and that “compassion for psychopaths, pathological liars, or narcissists” – people such as herself – is hard to come by. And over at the Guardian, Grayson Perry, a part-time transvestite and maker of unattractive pottery, disdained masculinity as “useless” and “counter-productive,” a mere “hangover” from more primitive, less Guardian-friendly times.

In May, the “social justice” juggernaut Hari Ziyad railed against conformism and idle stereotypes, while denouncing the “white supremacist cisheteropatriarchal capitalistic gaze,” and exhorting us to spend more time fretting about “gender non-conforming Indigenous people with disabilities.” And the no less non-conformist Laurie Penny announced that she “leans towards anarcho-communism,” which, rather conveniently, means that your money actually belongs to her.

For newcomers, more items from the archives:

Well, Soil Is Sort Of Brown. 

Your furniture choices are informed by the “crisis in white identity,” says sociology lecturer. And Gardeners’ Question Time is all about race.

Given the Guardian’s intense gravitational pull on certain kinds of stupid, it was perhaps inevitable that Dr Pitcher would find a welcome there. Now it turns out that squirrels are yet another proxy for “our” unspoken racial sentiment. Our esteemed intellectual, who divines hidden racism by means of his third eye, is hurt by the avalanche of mockery aimed at his earlier pronouncements, claiming his words have been misconstrued, while also claiming that same derision proves him right, and while repeating the very claims that resulted in laughter. He does, however, concede that “the uprooting of… Japanese knotweed is… not necessarily motivated by racist intent.”  

Ladies First. 

You men must learn your place in the progressive pecking order.

“On television interviews, on platforms and political meetings, at any presentations — if there’s no woman speaker, then the event does not take place,” says Professor Haiven. By which she means, such gatherings should not be permitted. She’s quite emphatic on this point. Professor Haiven is also keen on punishing people who say things of which she doesn’t approve, and which she casually conflates with acts of violence. And this great thinker can denounce the evils of an alleged male “monopoly” in an environment where women outnumber men by quite some margin, and while sitting on a panel with no male participants, and with no-one willing to argue a substantively different view. 

Answers On A Postcard, Please.

Squat enthusiast invites readers to “imagine what you and your friends could do with a crowbar, a guitar,” and someone else’s property. 

Says Ms Cosslett, “Communes represented a different way of being – sharing the cooking, the cleaning and the childcare was not only practical but also beneficial to the wellbeing of the members.” Readers who as students shared a house and cleaning duties, in theory at least, will no doubt testify to the practicality of this approach and the lofty hygiene standards that invariably resulted. Now imagine those high standards applied to parenting and childcare.

There’s more, should you want it, in the greatest hits. And tickling the tip jar is what keeps this place afloat.

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.