THOMPSON, blog. Marvel at the mental contortions of our self-imagined betters.

Free-For-All Hair

Less Blow, More Cut

March 27, 2023 66 Comments

A salon in Sydney is spearheading workshops for hairdressers on how to steer small talk about the weather into conversations about global heating.

“More than 400 hairdressers have attended workshops” to “role-play how conversations might go.”

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

Reading time: 1 min

Written by: David

Ephemera

As old as time, the awkward threesome. || You want one and you know it. || Broad daylight heist. || Happy ending. || Today her name is Horus. || “Emily is a woman,” says Dr Fielding. || Fatty Fatgirl and other fashion brands. || Because you demanded it, the thrill of women’s basketball. || On concept cars. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || A compendium of CT scans. || Cocaine cat and other tales. || Shuttlecock calibration. || Today’s word is predation. || She’s not driving, she’s travelling. || Temple of note. || Fresh milk with bits. || Bit much, really. || Nommy nommy nom. || That’s not what I was expecting. || Trampoline 2.0 || And finally, because you deserve it, a project for the weekend.

Should you be tempted, you can follow me on Twitter.

Reading time: 1 min

Written by: David

Academia Politics Psychodrama

Elsewhere (317)

March 22, 2023 63 Comments

Heather Mac Donald on the feminised university and its pathologies:

Female students and administrators often exist in a co-dependent relationship, united by the concepts of victim identity and of trauma. For university females, there is not, apparently, strength in numbers. The more females’ ranks increase, the more we hear about a mass nervous breakdown on campus. Female students disproportionately patronise the burgeoning university wellness centres, massage therapies, relaxation oases, calming corners, and healing circles. Another newly installed female college president, Dartmouth’s Sian Leah Beilock, claims that the two “most pressing challenges of our time” are the “mental crisis among young people” and climate change.

Female dominance of the campus population is intimately tied to the rhetoric of unsafety and victimhood. Females on average score higher than males on the personality trait of neuroticism, defined as anxiety, emotional volatility, and susceptibility to depression. (Mentioning this long-accepted psychological fact got James Damore fired from Google.) Victorian neurasthenia has been reborn on campuses today as alleged trauma inflicted by such monuments of Western literature as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Hearing an argument that chromosomes, not whim, make males male and females female is another source of alleged existential threat.

When students claim to be felled by ideas that they disagree with, the feminised bureaucracy does not tell them to grow up and get a grip. It validates their self-pity… The most far-reaching effects of the feminised university are the intolerance of dissent from political orthodoxy and the attempt to require conformity to that orthodoxy. This intolerance is justified in the name of safety and “inclusivity.”

Christopher Rufo has some related thoughts:

Individual pathology is valorised as a form of marginalised identity. So when you have this victim narrative… all of a sudden individual psychopathologies, individual traumas, individual problems, individual personality disorders, something even like obesity, a kind of physical disorder or dysregulation, are elevated into marginalised identities that provide the moral centre of these new victim narratives… When you take the victim narrative… and you elevate individual pathology into a form of marginalised identity, you create a social system that incentivises certain kinds of behaviours.

Apparently, the way to entrance others and to suddenly become fascinating is to make yourself your own go-to subject.

And Anna Slatz on “inclusivity” and questionable role models:

Reading time: 3 min

Written by: David

Art Free-For-All The Thrill Of Powdered Cheese

Hard To Tell If It’s Going Well

March 21, 2023 79 Comments

I have, of late, been starving you of artistic sustenance. Here, let me fix that with a big dollop of the stuff. Specifically, 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 25 pounds of powdered cheese.

Come, sup ye at the teats of creativity.

Reading time: 1 min

Written by: David

Anthropology Parenting Pronouns Or Else

Look At My Shiny Identity

March 19, 2023 84 Comments

Via Mr Muldoon, a tale of what sounds like mid-life contrivance:

I told my husband I now use they and them pronouns after 15 years together. We are both learning how not to misgender me.

Imagine the fun.

The contriver in question is Amanda Elend, a scrupulously progressive woman whose list of causes is extensive, if somewhat predictable. She tells us,

My partner and I got married over a decade ago, knowing we might end up hating each other.

Ah, the basis of any sound marriage.

We understood people grew and that sometimes meant growing apart. But still, we thought our chances were good. Fifteen years later, we’re still happily married, but boy, did we grow. I now identify as a bisexual, nonbinary person, and my family is learning to adapt.

Coinciding, oddly enough, with the big four-oh:

At first, it was difficult to reconcile the fact that I’m bisexual and nonbinary at 40 years old. It felt like I was co-opting a label designated for younger generations. But it all felt right; they weren’t labels. They were my identity.

The idea of having an identity – one with boutique status and complications that have to be danced around in an affirming manner – is terribly important to Ms Elend. And as we’ve seen, self-definition is very in right now, and quite competitive. Plus, there’s so much potential for chiding and rituals of atonement:

[My husband] is still working to understand the complexities of my identity, but I know that he is trying. For example, he recently apologised for not defaulting to “they” when he talked about me.

Ms Elend’s children, aged six and nine, were also informed of their mother’s elevation to the role of Fascinating Being:

I suddenly decided to tell my kids in the car one day. They were in their booster seats in the back, and my partner was driving.

The word husband is used intermittently. Sometimes it’s partner.

Looking awkwardly back at them, I told them I never wanted to stop growing or getting to know myself and I recently realised that I’m nonbinary. I also told them that if I weren’t with their dad, I now knew that I would be open to relationships with those like me and those who’re different.

“Can we still call you mom?” my 9-year-old asked.

You see, every small child wants a mom whose new pronouns have to be memorised, and who reveals that their family is suddenly conditional, one option among many. A mom who, in middle-age, is still on a journey of self-absorption – sorry, self-discovery – and who could at any moment become a radically different, and altogether more fashionable, kind of entity. Quite what a six-year-old is supposed to do with such information, beyond feeling confused or insecure, is unclear.

Reading time: 4 min

Written by: David