Menfolk, avert your eyes:

“How long, on average, do you go without washing your bra?” 

I, for one, have learned something today.

In progressive academia, you must watch what you say, even in jest:

“I decided I’d try something a little different, but maybe it was a little too outside… I apologise if I offended anyone, that certainly wasn’t my intention,” [café operator Sandor] Dosman said. “I wouldn’t have done it if I knew this was going to happen. I have no job now.”

The details of Mr Dosman’s unforgivable transgression can be found here. 

Readers may wonder whether Mr Dosman’s sudden unemployment was the result of students actually being offended on account of their improbably delicate sensibilities. Or more to do with the thrill of exerting power over an easy target, and the kinds of personalities attracted to such things.

Via RTW.

Don’t let Santa eat your children. // Curveball. // Christmas yet to come. // Soho striptease clubs, 1958. // The random Burroughs. // Made of balloons. // Bug-eating utensils. For when you want to look stylish while chewing on that scorpion. // I guess Picasso didn’t age well. // Why parents rarely want their children to be artists, part 17. // His disco glitter ball is bigger than yours. // Government. (h/t, Peter) // Radio garden. Browse stations of the world. // Handwriting robot. // These guys mimic animatronics better than you do. // Finger pillory, for mischievous urchins and the generally obstreperous. // Tiny paper engine. // The appeal of leaves. // Be like Hank. (h/t, Ben) // Wrinkled rocks. // And finally, gustatorily, it turns out that it’s possible to taste garlic with your feet.

Newcomers and the nostalgic will be thrilled to hear that the greatest hits archive has (finally) been updated. Among the additions are Laurie Penny’s not-at-all-disastrous lifestyle advice, how not being fat makes you an oppressor, why your erotic preferences are in need of egalitarian correction, and the Guardian’s Sarah Marsh on the traumatising horror of being offered free cake. 

So here’s a thing. A leftist anthropology professor named Mark Zajac – noted on the Rate My Professors website for being politically “opinionated” and “often going off on tangents about political topics which have no relation to the course” – discovered the existence of a website that advises parents and alumni of leftist professors whose views and behaviour are somewhat questionable. For instance, educators describing white people as “the face of the oppressor,” or calling conservative students “white supremacists,” or assaulting a student and then blaming their own behaviour on the “cultural legacy of slavery,” or repeatedly using the classroom as a political pulpit. 

Unhappy at this discovery, said professor then proceeded to use his classroom, and class time, to indulge in half an hour of factually dubious leftist sermonising. As the student who recorded Dr Zajac noted, “It’s unacceptable this is happening in a class where I’m supposed to be learning about ancient humans and how they painted caves and used tools.”

From the ‘style’ pages of Mic magazine, where the young and left-leaning can find “news to help you rethink the world”:

On election night, like so many, 26-year-old Nicole Narvaez’s feelings “kind of exploded.” “I went to bed in tears and woke up to the final news hysterical,” Narvaez recalled.

Hysterical. Her words.

“I cried on the train to work, at work, after work and many days since. Following the election I decided I wanted and needed to do something for myself that also meant something bigger.” And how she’d do that, she thought, was with a tattoo. “I needed to remind myself that our new president-elect and all the horrible things he has said and represents isn’t a representation of humanity, and to not let it eat me up entirely,” Narvaez said. “I needed something to remind myself of how strong I can be.”

Because the way to keep things in proportion and not be eaten up entirely by an election result is to have your body marked with a permanent reminder of it. And the strength-asserting tattoo chosen by the not-at-all-unstable Ms Narvaez?  

That night, after doing some research online, she walked into a tattoo parlour and got “GRL PWR” on her wrist and the Venus sign commonly associated with feminism on her pointer finger. “The two tattoos work in tandem when my hand is in a fist straight into the air,” Narvaez explained. “They work off one another.”

Tremble, ye patriarchs. This lady means business. Presumably, that fist-and-index-finger combo will be on display quite a lot in the post-election End Times.

The article, by Rachel Lubitz, goes on to inform its readers that Ms Narvaez is “not alone in feeling an urge to get something permanent on her body after the election,” that “feminist messages have been hugely popular,” and that this constitutes a “true insurgence.” Rather than, say, a display of impulse-control issues and possibly future regret. As illustrated, inadvertently, by a young feminist who wished to tell the world about her “belief in women’s rights” via the subtle medium of a large forearm tattoo. Specifically, one featuring “a coat hanger encircled in flowers with the words ‘We deserve better’ written below it.”

And it falls from the sky. (h/t, Damian) // The great animal orchestra. // Cardboard cat ark. // I think there’s a story here. // Whatever you do, don’t push the button. // A brief history of sea monkeys and instant fish. // Big determined cat fits in a small mixing bowl. // Jim LeBlanc’s bad day in a NASA vacuum chamber. // Perhaps not. // Radium suppositories. // Good parents don’t let their children waste money on a gender studies course. // 3D-printed pancakes. SD card compatible. // The Amazon grocery store has no queues and no checkout. // He stacks coins better than you do. // A brief history of human population growth. // Stay tuned for deer and the odd raccoon. // And finally, their first mistake was marketing the drink as “bottled spunk.” Then things went downhill.

Attention, rubes, dupes and suckers. Do you pretend to experience crippling racial guilt in order to appear pious and fit in? Is “white supremacy,” “white privilege” and all that other pretentious angst weighing on your shoulders, harshing your buzz? Do you want to empower, or at least enrich, some “black femme freedom fighters”? Do you require monthly “tasks” – and a monthly bill of $100 – to atone for your pallor and “pay reparations” – to prove that, despite being white, you’re not a terrible person, unlike all those other awful white people? 

Then this is for you. 

Via dicentra, who reminds us that the above is not a work of satire. 

Speaking of wordplay, we’re once again being told that Baby, It’s Cold Outside is actually an ode to date rape. As so often, the umbrage-takers display a remarkable level of tin-earedness regarding the sentiment of the song, and a joke about feigned intoxication as an excuse for behaving as one might wish. And as noted in the comments over at Instapundit, “There was a time progressives would have said it was about a woman who obviously wants to have sex, but is being oppressed by slut-shamers through fear.”

Update, via the comments:

From the Huffington Post piece linked at Instapundit:

You’d think that self-styled singer-songwriters would be able to deduce things from lyrics, arrangement and intonation. And it’s interesting how the rather sour, supposedly progressive interpretation, wheeled out every year in near-identical articles, assumes that the woman in the song is somehow passive and a victim, rather than an equal and willing participant. As Darleen puts it in the comments here, the song is in fact a kind of lyrical tango, “an intricate dance where each partner consents to play a part.”

And from a related CNN article, where the point of the song is, again, spectacularly missed:

Somewhere, Mr and Mrs Loesser, the writers of Baby, It’s Cold Outside, are rolling their eyes in unison.

Inevitably, and in keeping with tradition, Laurie Penny also misses the point:

Don't get me started on 'Baby, It's Cold Outside.' A jolly festive tune about ignoring women's sexual agency. I've heard it twice today.

— Laurie Penny (@PennyRed) November 30, 2015

Readers are invited to ponder which party – the songwriters or Ms Penny – is actually “ignoring women’s sexual agency.” A demonstration, were one needed, of how rote feminism can bleach away any trace of subtlety.

To my ear, and plenty of others, the woman in the song is far from passive and is listing the customary reasons for leaving, almost all of which are external social pressures and proprieties – gossipy neighbours, maiden aunts with vicious minds – while very much wanting to stay. The crude feminist reading of the song, illustrated above, is of him trying to coerce her. It’s actually about both of them, together, very knowingly, pushing against the social conventions of the time. Which is probably why the song was once considered somewhat risqué.

Still, one has to marvel at how the default progressive line is not only tin-eared and wrong, but actually an inversion of the songwriters’ intent.

The song isn’t about ignoring or overriding the woman’s preferences, or indeed drugging her – but quite the opposite. Throughout the song, they’re both thinking of ways to delay her departure. Half a drink, another cigarette. And despite the woman running through the list of obstacles to her passion, and saying that she “ought to say no,” because social convention expects her to forego her own preferences, the song concludes with the woman deciding that she’s “gonna say” that she tried to go home but was thwarted by the blizzard.

The two of them then agree, in unison and in harmony, that the weather outside really is terrible.

Because you crave more feminist poetry and Ms Desireé Dallagiacomo feels the need to share:

“My thighs feel upset because you only offered one bite of your Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia.” Previously.