It’s been said, here at least, that when someone uses the term “emotional labour” unironically, the person doing the mouthing is most likely a bit of a nightmare. Say, the kind of woman who complains about the “emotional labour” of hiring a domestic cleaner. Or the kind who bitches about her husband and his shortcomings in the pages of a national magazine, where friends and colleagues of said husband, and perhaps his own children, can read on with amusement…

The psychological intricacies of Ms Hartley’s preferences regarding bathroom cleaning do not appear to have been expressed directly to Her Loving Other, who, we’re told, “willingly complies to any task I decide to assign to him.” Perhaps he, or one of his friends, will read Harper’s Bazaar, at which point the full scale of her discontent will become apparent. Why Ms Hartley chose not to convey this issue directly is not entirely clear. Though it seems she’s been quite busy publicly cataloguing her husband’s faults – which extend from telepathic inadequacy to a failure to return gift wrap to its usual storage location.

The Guardian’s leader writer, Susanna Rustin, is very much troubled by thoughts of impending catastrophe and is keen for your routine shopping – for groceries and maybe a pair of shoes – to be replaced, “painlessly,” with forms of “artistic expression and creativity.” Like dance lessons. It would, of course, be “a reordering of society.”

Because “dancing and singing could be part of the solution to the climate emergency.”

It turns out that the reckless visibility of a wedding photo may be crushing the self-esteem out of the touchily unwed. You see, the mere sight of a photo of someone’s happy day can “crowd out the experiences of people with minoritized social identities,” albeit in ways never quite explained. Other taboos include references to “simple activities like family dance parties,” which are apparently a thing, and “gardening with a spouse.”

Curiously, given the stated importance of “sensitivity” and being mindful of what things might mean, we aren’t invited to ponder the kind of person who would resent someone else’s wedding photo. And then complain about it. Or whether such neurotic affectations, these unhappy mental habits, are something to be actively encouraged. In the name of progress. At a university.

What follows is a catalogue of unobvious woe and amateur dramatics. “Activist Manuela Barón” – whose area of activism is left fashionably unspecified – explains how her ancient, battered water bottle had become a “part of” her, and how the loss of it, at airport security, resulted in a swell of emotional activity: “I cried as I went through the scanner and ran off to my gate; I didn’t realise it would be like saying goodbye to an old friend.”

At which point, it occurs to me I may be misusing the word explain.

The cards, we’re assured, are “a concrete way to deal with an unsafe situation.” Though given the consequences of recent attempts at intervention – or what Bay Area Rapid Transit refers to as “allyship” – readers may wonder whether prompt and meaningful assistance may be less frequent than one might wish. Perhaps we can look forward to the issuing of “I am being stabbed” cards. And some “The man next to me is masturbating” cards. It does have the makings of an unhappy board game.

By issuing little cards, they’re creating “new social norms.” To supposedly address the problem of having created other “new social norms” in which punishing criminals is deemed unjust, racist, and terribly old-fashioned.

But hey, if you’re travelling to work on a BART train and some deranged creep starts masturbating against your leg, or pissing on the floor, or you find yourself standing next to yet another knife fight, or overdose, or commuter mugging – and no-one else does anything, or dares to do anything, except watch impotently and demoralised – because even noticing such things is racist – at least you’ll have a little card to clutch. Apparently that’s something.

In short, female customers who perceive incongruity, discomfort, and possibly danger should simply ignore those perceptions. Danger, it seems, is something one can now just pretend away.

You see, in the progressive pecking order, the fantasies of sexually dysmorphic men – and the preferences of male sex offenders – are of much greater importance than any “discomfort” felt by the women and girls on whom the former groups choose to impose themselves. Women and girls whose role, it seems, is merely to understand and tacitly affirm. To be reluctant accessories to some strange man’s psychodrama, while remaining free of judgement. Which is frowned upon.

Because the modern, not-at-all-insane response to repeated acts of indecency and sexual intimidation – by a predatory man in the women’s changing rooms – is to ask him not to keep waving his erection at women and children. On grounds that what he’s waving could somehow be a lady’s penis. Such is the sophistication of our times.

If, for instance, I were considering whether to amuse myself by flinging tomato juice over people and over their computers and whatever, while grinning with satisfaction, I’d expect a not insignificant likelihood of consequently being punched in the face. This expectation is important.

The risk of being punched, vigorously, is important. It inhibits quite a lot of recreational malice.

Habitual car theft is a “victimless” crime. Says Nora the socialist. Nora doesn’t think that a third conviction for car theft should result in incarceration. Because, and I quote, the victims “get new cars though.” “I write books and I know things,” says Nora, who lives in Quebec, where, in the last year, the rate of car theft has practically doubled.

Perhaps it would be ungentlemanly to wish on dear Nora some first-hand experience of the crimes she so merrily diminishes when inflicted on someone else, someone who isn’t her. Though it is, I think, tempting.

Throughout the paper in question, the term “brilliance” is deployed no fewer than seventeen times, as if it were some obviously inherent, pre-existing attribute – of students who can’t be arsed to study, who don’t pay attention in class, who undermine the efforts of others, and whose grades, as a result, leave much to be desired.

Even more frequent is use of the term “whiteness,” an alleged phenomenon on which the paper is premised. Though readers in search of some clear and convincing definition, or some compelling evidence of its existence, may find their hopes dashed. We are, however, assured that “whiteness” is something that gets in the way of black students “maintaining their Blackness.”

Readers will note how any feelings of incompetence and not being welcome are immediately blamed on external causes, on some ectoplasmic “whiteness,” that Befouler Of All Things. As if such feelings had nothing whatsoever to do with the choices and behaviour, and the personal shortcomings, of the students themselves.

Instead, Dr Jasien and her colleagues expect the teaching of mathematics to be driven by the goal of “healing… intellectual trauma,” by paying “attention to the minds and bodies of students.” The students being, it seems, much less obliged to pay attention to anything beyond themselves.

And so we’re told that “exclamations” and “cacophony” are “to be both expected and valued.” Because when you picture a maths classroom and people getting to grips with differential equations or vector calculus, the first thing that springs to mind is the word cacophony.

It’s worth noting that the replies to Ms Malan’s fare-dodging dramas are almost entirely sympathetic. Her admirers applaud her recreational mooching, a measure of hipness, and offer tips on doing the same. “Best way to live,” says one. “God, I love this city,” adds a likeminded bint. “It’s a simple and beautiful life,” says another. Albeit a life based on exploiting, and sneering at, those more honest. The ones being left to pick up the tab…

As one might imagine, this modish, habitual freeloading – now estimated at 20% of users, possibly higher – has had certain consequences, including the alienation of many paying customers. Say, those not impressed by orange-vested climate activists who repeatedly screw the law-abiding, and the taxpayer, while applauding themselves for their belief that “Muni should be free.”

Left unchallenged or actively reinforced, the disregard for paying bills may of course spill into other areas of life, and losses from municipal parking garages are also mentioned as a “concern.” The fiscal state of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is described by insiders as “incredibly dire,” with a deficit projected to rise from a mere $15 million to a rather more impressive $322 million.

Ms Burgher approvingly cites Ms Robin DiAngelo, a fellow peddler of neurosis, the L Ron Hubbard of wokeness, and whose devotees, as we’ve seen, are often wildly unhinged and nakedly malevolent. Which probably tells us much of what we need to know about Ms Burgher and her racial affectations. The mindset she wishes to inflict on others. And by extension, those who succumb.

And so, Ms Burgher makes her unattractive tat, and calls it art, and treads on ceramic eggshells, and calls it performance art, while listing the hallucinatory evils of having pale skin. And while telling those sufficiently credulous that “whiteness is oppression,” the source of all that is wrong, a basis for eternal shame, and that white people should “not behave white.”

You see, we will purge the world of bigotry by embracing wholesale the mental habits of the bigot.

“You don’t even need to know the neighbour to get into his car,” says she. “It’s much more fun to share.” Because having neighbours and strangers, people you don’t know, taking your car, apparently at random, would be terribly progressive and super-convenient, and “fun,” and “not annoying.” 

Pst314 and Mr Muldoon point us to an “analysis” piece in Scientific American, in which we’re urged to fret about “the violence Black men experience in [American] football,” and in which we’re told that the physicality of the sport “disproportionately affects black men.” This is framed in the article so as to imply some systemic racial wrongdoing – “anti-Black practices” that are “inescapable” – rather than, say, being an unremarkable reflection of the sport’s demographics, in which, at professional levels, black players are a majority.

Or to put it another, no less scientific, way – the risk of injury while playing a contact sport disproportionately affects those who actually play it.

The author of the piece, Tracie Canada, is a “socio-cultural anthropologist whose ethnographic research uses sport to theorize race, kinship and care, gender, and the performing body.” Ms Canada, an assistant professor at Duke University, should perhaps be thanked for reminding us that in order to propagate a woke premise, and thereby grift, one may have to avoid thinking about fairly obvious things. 

Apparently, San Francisco’s elementary-school children are expected to have, or at least regurgitate, strong opinions on the Israeli military. Many young children are of course accustomed to being given a “word of the day,” though I would guess that such highlighted words don’t usually include “strike,” “ceasefire,” and “protest.” Nor, I suspect, would third-graders often be tasked with “disrupting whiteness,” which seems somewhat ambitious and just a tad question-begging, or with imagining “a world without police, money, or landlords.”

Yet here we are.

Akiea “Ki” Gross, who identifies as they/them, goes on to declare her “unwavering love and care and compassion for children.” Which would doubtless explain her indifference to whether those children can read or have mastered basic arithmetic. Instead, our loving and compassionate educator propagates racial animosity, by invoking the evils of “whiteness,” and rails against a small country in the Middle East, whose influence on the illiteracy of schoolchildren half a world away is, shall we say, somewhat unclear.

Those presented as victims of injustice, of “racial inequity,” include Mr Rodney Perry, whose photograph accompanies the piece, and who, in a single year, has received eight tickets for speeding and three for running red lights. The article appears not to have had room to include the views of those injured or bereaved by Chicago’s law-breaking motorists, despite an eye-widening spike in accidents, fatalities, and hit-and-run crashes. Nor, it seems, was there room to consider the possible effect of endless, widespread excuse-making for antisocial behaviour, and its role in making such behaviour more likely, not less.

It seems we’re supposed to believe – emphatically and indignantly – that Mr Perry and Mr Olatunji Oboi Reed, our candidates for victimhood, are being induced to break the law and to drive in ways that are dangerous to others, including repeatedly running red lights, because of “fewer pedestrians and more vacant lots.” Cyclists and dog walkers are also invoked as possible factors, along with the claim that a black person may have to drive to the nearest grocery store, a feat rarely undertaken by people of pallor, obviously.

And all of this is presented as if the gentlemen’s behaviour, their choices, could only have external causes. Other variables apparently being unworthy of consideration. And so, Mr Reed, an “activist for racial equity,” expects city officials to “eliminate any racial… disparities in camera ticketing,” while avoiding any mention of behaviour and personal responsibility. “The root cause of traffic violence in our society that is disproportionately impacting Black and brown people is structural racism,” says he.

As a result, the default narrative, the woke conceit, is just a little odd. Namely, if black people are being injured or killed as a result of reckless driving, very often by other black people, this is “traffic violence” and “structural racism.” But attempts to enforce the law and reduce the number of such incidents are also “structural racism” and must therefore be done away with. 

Here, let me bring you artistic sustenance, with some “performance documentation” from Manhattan’s Grace Exhibition Space. The mighty talent featured in the following video is artist, educator and “community organiser” Alex Romania, whose work teeters on the edge of profundity, as will doubtless become clear, via juddering and convulsion, and the strategic deployment of twenty-five pounds of powdered cheese.

Readers are invited to ponder the prospect of a dinner party at which, in order to be polite and suitably affirming, you’re obliged to insinuate that the host is rapist material. And to do it convincingly. Rather than, say, compliment the cooking or the décor.

We’re also told, “A gendered spin on the character can open up more potential for exploring Bond’s individuality.” And this exploration of the character’s individuality will apparently be achieved by erasing a rather fundamental aspect of the character – his maleness – and replacing him with an entirely different person of a different sex.

Readers are invited to ponder whether similar transitions might enrich the character of, say, Miss Marple, who, via similar logic, could be depicted as male, and as always having been male. Thereby exploring her individuality.

Answers on a postcard, please.

The recent, sex-swapped iteration of Doctor Who is invoked as a “positive example” on this front, as if Jodie Whittaker’s brief, unloved manifestation had been a rip-roaring success – despite the terrible writing and wildly unpopular retconning, both loudly derided by fans, and despite the subsequent, rapid death-spiral of viewing figures. Because boring and alienating much of your audience, and shrinking it dramatically, is a political triumph. A breath of “new life.”

At which point, readers may suspect that the imperative is not so much being creative, but being creative in London, a notoriously expensive city, but in which one can draw attention to the fact that one lives and works in London, a notoriously expensive city. Thereby glowing with a kind of location status.

Readers may also note the article’s, shall we say, coyness regarding the art on offer – all that cruelly underfunded creativity. None of which is displayed to sway readers of the Observer. The nearest we get is a photo of Ms Kwan standing next to a creation that we cannot actually see, and a photo of Grayson Perry in a hideous frock.

Other questions generated by means of Queer Theorising include, “Do I think I’m having sex with my dogs when they kiss my face?” Apparently, for Dr Kathy Rudy, a Professor of Women’s Studies, being licked by a dog is difficult to distinguish from kissing grandma on the cheek or being lost in a full-on erotic fever. And thus, we’re told, “The line between ‘animal lover’ and zoophile is not only thin, it is non-existent.”