I expect to be busy for a few days. However, being a gracious host, I’ll leave you with some items from the archives:

Marking Their Territory.

Two radical identity groups struggle for toilet dominion.

You’re Reading The Comments, Right?

When wokeness is ascendant and apparently quite stupefying.

The D-Words.

On supposedly racist traffic cameras.

No Relation.

“Diverse identities” and euphemistic convolutions.

Hard To Tell If It’s Going Well.

I bring you art. And atomised dairy products.

Consider this an open thread.

Time, I think, to better ourselves. Come, let us peek at the culture pages of the Guardian:

That’s Perth, Scotland. Lest there be confusion.

Bear with me. I’m setting the scene. Stoking your anticipation.

White horse. Big horn.

Again, big horn.

Ah, tat.

Brace yourselves for a full-on face-blast of culture:

Such wonders you’ll behold. Memories to treasure forever.

Because the above is “a modern symbol of the LGBTQI+ community.” And so, while claiming to give exposure to the supposedly marginalised and unseen, the virtuous by default, the curators are expecting visitors to be enthralled by objects of mass-produced banality that are, by their own admission, utterly ubiquitous.

But wait. There’s more.

One of the above. Presumably the most photogenic.

I’m just going to leave this here, I think. Consider it an illustration of what can be done. A cultural benchmark for our times.

Regarding the aforementioned seldomness, I briefly scanned recent listings and found that the museums and galleries busily “queering” their content include the British Museum (“Desire, Love, Identity: Exploring LGBTQ Histories”), the Victoria and Albert Museum (“A Queer History of Art”), Tate Britain, Tate Kids, Queer Britain (“A riot of voices, objects, and images from the worlds of activism, art, culture, and social history”), Brighton Museum, the London Art Fair, the Glasgow Women’s Library, the Museum of Transology, the Museum of London, National Museums Liverpool, National Museums Scotland, and the National Portrait Gallery.

So seldom. So terribly seldom.

Other vigorously “queered” content can be found at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art; the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam; and the Wellcome Collection, London, which among other things offers a “queer life-drawing workshop… focussing on queer bodies.” I have, due to space concerns – and the fear that readers may lose the will to live – omitted many more.

Despite which, Ashleigh Hibbins, the head of audiences at the Perth Museum, where unicorns await, tells us,

Ah yes, those unheard voices. The dear downtrodden.

Via Julia.

Lifestyle choice. || Where would we be without great art? || Got skillz. || His grandpa “thinks I am his grandson’s girlfriend.” Allegedly. || The German tongue. || Common interest. || Incoming. || “Strong women,” but no fitness test. || Fallen snow versus car. || Maximum fussing. || Meaty goodness. || White ghost apple. || Escape pod. || Pointing out hypocrisy is “white supremacy,” says educator. || Price paid. || Our betters opine. || Uppity hairdresser. I wonder what happens if her salon gets robbed. || Remaining calm in trying circumstances. || The Trautonium, circa 1930s. || Must be that “trans joy” we keep hearing about. || Ladies, he just wants to listen to you pee. || A database of 13,000 specimens. || And finally, it’s the “most transphobic” situation he’s ever had to deal with.

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Time for something grotesque, I think. Grotesque, but very of our times:

I’ll spare you the grim details, but what Mr Sonia did to the victim, a thirteen-year-old girl, over several months, was sufficiently vile to repel over a dozen jurors, who said they would be unable to sit on a case so disturbing. Suffice it to say, Mr Sonia was found guilty and incarcerated for a minimum of 22 years. During which time,

Or, convicted paedophile demands pampering, women’s undies.

As I said, it’s very now.

Because that’s what we do now with male child-rapists. And obviously, it can only go well. No bizarre complications could possibly ensue.

Despite this seemingly intermittent maleness, Mr Sonia has launched a lawsuit against staff at both the Washington Department of Corrections and his previous male prison, citing “cruel and unusual punishment.” Specifically, a failure to provide, at taxpayer expense, “breast augmentation” and “hair removal of the face, neck and jaw,” which is, we’re told, of “paramount importance.” And a lack of which allegedly results in “severe emotional anguish.”

Depending, one assumes, on whether Mr Sonia claims to be a man or a woman on any given day.

At which point, readers may wonder whether Mr Sonia’s mental health shortcomings predate their supposed causes.

Update, via the comments, where Mags suggests,

It does seem – shall we say, possible – that Mr Sonia is so irredeemably broken and malevolent, so committed to antagonism, that, having been obstructed from further child-raping, he now channels his antisocial urges into nuisance lawsuits and the feigning of victimhood.

I mean, it wouldn’t be surprising.

Jen adds,

Well, we’ve already seen the scrupulously intersectional priorities of, for instance, Canadian women’s shelters, in which a deranged dysmorphic man roaming the halls wearing only a bra and brandishing his genitals, along with several stolen kitchen knives, is deemed of much less importance than the fact that a female resident had dared to “misgender” him.

Can you not feel the progress…?

Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

Academia’s Clown Quarter, I mean:

The meaning of the term “marriage fundamentalism,” a term used repeatedly, isn’t made entirely clear, and its allegedly racist and life-crushing particulars are, inevitably, “hidden,” “invisible,” and conveniently vague – despite the loudly announced use of “an intersectional lens.” But it seems to mean something like the tendency of many adults to see marriage as of mutual benefit and an optimal way to raise children.

However, our stipulator of pronouns and lecturer in Critical Praxis in Education prefers a more dismissive formulation:

Well, statistically, and by almost any measure, it is superior. Hence, presumably, the espousal.

Stripped of contrivance, I’m assuming this is a roundabout admission that, on average, people who find marriage an alien concept and much too demanding, and who opt instead for transient partners, fatherless children, and unstable relationship trash fires, tend to do less well in life, along with their offspring. And quite possibly, in turn, their offspring too.

Though I’m not sure why the response should be to blame those who get their shit together, marry, and raise children more successfully. As if their competence in this matter, or good fortune or whatever, were somehow lamentable, and racist, and a basis for indignation. And from the child’s point of view, other, more credible candidates for resentment may come to mind.

A conclusion that is simply untrue. With the benefits of stable two-parent families – an exclusively “white” phenomenon, according to Professor Letiecq – actually extending to all racial groups:

The author of the study quoted above, Brad Wilcox, can be seen being interviewed here. An interview in which he points out,

Buy hey, let’s not let the numbers get in the way of our radical posturing. Instead, let’s offer the young and credulous really perverse advice, and bitch about marriage as merely an act of complicity in “white supremacy.”

And yes, we’ve been down this path before.

Update, via the comments – which you’re reading, of course:

Regarding this,

EmC replies, tersely,

Well, if little Don’t-Know-Who-My-Dad-Is is starting fires at school and looks destined for a life of delinquency and crime, this is not obviously the fault of the happily married Mr and Mrs Jefferson and their two non-fire-starting children. And no amount of chest-puffing about “heteropatriarchy,” “unequal power relations” and “white supremacy” seems likely to alter that fact.

A child in an unstable home and consequently on an unhappy trajectory may have things to grumble about, in between the brawling and disruption, and starting fires in the toilets. But those grumbles have little to do with other people’s parents making better choices. The grumbling, it seems to me, should probably be directed closer to home.

FredTheFourth adds,

That’s this argument here, for those who may have missed it. I recommend reading the linked post in full – there’s much to chew on, and much of it mirrors the assumptions aired by Professor Letiecq.