In case you missed it in the comments:

The Secret Life of Pets 2… effectively acts as an animated ode to heteronormativity, toxic masculinity and patriarchal worldviews

Woke reviewer Carlos Aguilar watches an animated film intended for children and gets terribly upset.

It occurs to me that when the reviewer of a children’s cartoon is whining at length about a lack of discernibly gay pet-owning couples and the oppressive “heteronormativity” of a character choosing to get married and have a child – an act that is “conservative” and therefore bad, apparently – then the problem isn’t the film.

In the comments, Liz adds,

Reproduction is ‘conservative’. Normality is a ‘trope’. Sounds like someone’s been severely educated…

Such that Mr Aguilar, a 30-year-old man, is seeking validation of his own niche sexual politics in a children’s cartoon about talking dogs.

Due to events beyond my influence, you’ll have to throw together your own pile of links and oddities in the comments. I’ll set the ball rolling with some niche entertainment; a pet shop promotion of note; an excess of ears; a lady who wants some fries; and a lady who wants a kebab.

Oh, and a plot twist.

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

Weepy And Hysterical.

A philosophy lecturer, a specialist in “critical whiteness studies,” apologises, at length, for his own heterosexuality.

Professor Yancy goes on to denounce, on behalf of all men, “our sexually objectifying gazes… our pornographic imaginations.” Our “dominant phallic economy.” Indeed, he continues, “we are collectively complicit with a sexist mind-set and a poisonous masculinity.” You see, being aroused by women, while not quite rape in itself, is nonetheless, as it were, rape-adjacent, and constitutes “a violent, pathetic and problematic masculinity.” One wonders how a species of suitably corrected human beings, purged of such heterosexual inclinations, might propagate and flourish. Such that we can indulge the theatrical sorrows of woke philosophy lecturers.

The Perils Of Jogging.

Zoe Williams warns Guardian readers that exercise “makes you rightwing.”

According to Zoe, if you visit a gym, or cycle, or merely take the occasional brisk walk with a dog in tow – or presumably have any kind of goals, however modest, and then achieve them – you’ll become boastful, consumed with “self-love” and wicked delusions of “self-sufficiency,” a gateway to the greatest sin of all: not being leftwing. Because leftwing people, like Zoe, are free of vanity and unblemished by urges to signal superiority of one kind or another. Say, by telling us, quite often, that they’re not at all rightwing.

Still, it’s strange just how readily Zoe leaps from ‘people can be a bit tedious when banging on about their enthusiasms’ – the word blogging comes to mind – to ‘regular jogging will make you vote Conservative because feelings of achievement and capability are politically corrupting’. Presumably, leftist piety is arrived at via indolence, whining and half-arsed flummery. Though it’s not, perhaps, as strange as declaring one’s own piety and compassion – as opposed to all those dreadful rightwing people – while sneering at a cancer charity because its most direct beneficiaries are men.

How To Impress Your Boss, An Intersectional Guide. 

Self-described “educator” Sophia Stephens says that minority employees shouldn’t have to be reliable or competent.

While scanning the New York Times, Ben Sixsmith notes the odd parental priorities of author and journalist Jancee Dunn:

The article in question, titled My Marriage Has A Third Wheel: Our Child – and which helpfully includes a photo of the couple’s apparently problematic nine-year-old – can be found here. In it, we learn that the author “would never have dreamed of sharing anything remotely personal with my parents,” but “wanted a different kind of relationship with our daughter.” And hence happily directing a media spotlight onto said youngster while waiting for applause.  

Jancee Dunn is the author of How Not To Hate Your Husband After Kids, her account of an attempt to “salvage” a “faltering marriage.”

And yes, the family does live in Brooklyn. And no, they don’t share a surname. And yes, the adults have availed themselves of professional counselling services.

Also, open thread.

Dinnertime scenes. (h/t, Dicentra) || At last, 2-D Doom. || Cheeseburger aerodynamics. || Gives good tongue. || The tactical dad hoodie you’ve always wanted. || Hi, there. || Like many housewives, she knows the mortifying horror of hairy stairs. || Heh. || Also heh. (h/t, Dicentra) || Just how hard is magic? || Painted meat. || Privacy is “transphobic” and politely indulging transgender pronouns is “expressing transphobia.” || “Inflatable pads allow you to adjust the size of your pectorals, deltoids, biceps and triceps.” || Porthole scenes. || Improbable space suits and other things. || Space type generator. || Fashion tip. || Last meals. (h/t, Things) || No greater love. || And finally, niche satisfactions, #209.

In the comments, Mr Muldoon steers us to this girthy lady and her list of complaints:

Smaller plus-size people, please check your privilege. That includes a mid-fat like me who is FAR more privileged than folks larger than me. I’m honestly so sick of people including small fats and thinking that’s enough… and I’m sick of small fats not calling out the fact that they are the biggest people at the event/shoot/meeting or whatever it is. Fat people above a 20 exist, and we fucking matter. We deserve to be included and seen. Super fat people deserve to be included. Infini-fat people deserve to be included. Fat people of colour deserve to be included. Disabled fat people deserve to be included. We all matter too. Your body positivity isn’t shit if it doesn’t include us.

Setting aside the intersectional hierarchy of fatness – small-fat, mid-fat, super-fat and infini-fat – there is, I think, something odd about the chosen language. In woke usage, the word privilege implies arbitrariness, some random quirk of life, an attribute or circumstance unrelated to one’s own efforts or choices. As if becoming sufficiently vast to engage in fat activism, and bang on about privilege, were merely a matter of the planets aligning a certain way. As if anyone might become colossally fat spontaneously, overnight, with no warning, and through no action, or inaction, of their own. Which doesn’t sound terribly plausible. In fact, it sounds like an attempt to displace responsibility and thereby deceive.

Also, open thread. 

My teeth… have written on my body and have been written on by my body. My canines speak volumes. My incisors have something to say. My bicuspids beg to be theorised. My molars desperately want to be understood. This story of my teeth is important because my straight teeth have not always been the way that they are… I realised the extent of the work that I have invested into straightening my teeth by reading Judith Butler.

In the nightmare, I’m held at gunpoint and for 24 hours am forced to read aloud works of “queer theory.” I begin with W. Benjamin Myers’ thoughts on “straight and white teeth as a metaphor for a straight and White identity” – and which allegedly reveal the “uninterrogated Whiteness” of routine dental hygiene and its role in maintaining “arrogant and ignorant straight and White identities.” 

Via Amir Sariaslan, who has more. Previously in hell. 

Here’s an idea! Change your parents’ bad voting habits by refusing to breed.

In the pages of Slate, Christina Cauterucci, whose enthusiasms include “gender and feminism,” wishes to share her wisdom:

The prospect of harnessing one’s sexual and reproductive powers for social good is a tempting one. So, I’d like to present what I humbly consider a much better proposal: Instead of a sex strike, let’s try a grandkid strike.

It’s a “brilliant new weapon of progressivism,” says Ms Cauterucci, and “exactly the kind of radical response today’s radical threats to equity, justice, and humanity demand.” Specifically,

It’s time to demand that baby boomers and Gen Xers decide which they’d rather have: their vague attachments to policies that have poisoned the earth and will soon make it difficult for anyone but the obscenely wealthy to live healthy, happy lives, or a pack of adorable munchkins in itty-bitty suspenders ready for unlimited tickle fights and cookie-baking sessions.

This is followed almost immediately by,

I’ve already decided that I’m not having kids,

Which, for the purposes of Ms Cauterucci’s article, is somewhat convenient. This reproductive decision was, we’re told, arrived at because,

Child care is extravagantly expensive, and paid family leave is a rare luxury. Bringing a new set of chubby cheeks and wonderfully incomprehensible babblings into the world is the most destructive thing one couple can do to the planet. It seems certain that today’s babies will be tomorrow’s survivors of famine, water shortages, unprecedented natural disasters, and refugee crises.

And furthermore,

It’s unethical, what with climate change and all. And it’s too dangerous—you’ve seen the news reports on school shootings and know how easy it is for violent men to get their hands on guns.

Um, okay then. Apparently, the thought of becoming a parent immediately conjures mental images of famine, earthquakes, shootings and death. Proof, if more were needed, that the exquisitely woke are just like thee and me. Not unhinged in any way.

I’m not entirely sure what it is, but you should buy some anyway. (h/t, Damian) || Cardboard piano. || Pretty good fingering. || Classical musicians react to K-Pop. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || At all times, dignity. || The eternal struggle. || Ordia is a game. || Signs of cultural decline, #3,004. || Always respect the media. || They have bodies. || He has a business card. (h/t, Holborn) || Miracle breakthrough. || He was embarrassed, you see. (h/t, Dicentra) || Magnetic construction kit of note. || Question answered. (h/t, Orwell) || With nails and a single thread. || OK Soda was not a success. || Amplified cat. || Honey, Queen and Bumble are here to help. || And finally, the faces of dogs after eating bees.

David Solway on the feminist enthusiasm for fatness: 

In a speech on the topic of “radical fat liberation” jointly sponsored by the Women and Gender Studies Department and the Centre for Equity and Inclusion at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, the prodigiously overweight Sonalee Rashatwar, a self-proclaimed Fat Sex Therapist, compared fitness trainers to Nazis, defined child dieting as sexual assault, attributed the Christchurch shooting to ‘thin” white supremacism, and condemned science as “fataphobic” for “promoting the idea that certain bodies are fit, able and desirable.” She wonders, rhetorically, “is it my fatness that causes my high blood pressure, or is it my experience of weight stigma?” She goes on to blame the Reagan administration for having refused to provide “social supports that also help me to subsidise my food costs.” 

When not equating routine health advice with eugenics and “Nazi science,” Ms Rashatwar claims that “diet culture and fat phobia are forms of sexual violence.” Mr Solway is the husband of Janice Fiamengo, whose own probing of feminist pathology has been mentioned here before.

Heather Mac Donald on cooking the books for “diversity”: 

The average white score on the SAT (1,123 out of a possible 1,600) is 177 points higher than the average black score (946), approximately a standard deviation of difference. This gap has persisted for decades. It is not explained by socioeconomic disparities. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reported in 1998 that white students from households with incomes of $10,000 or less score better on the SAT than black students from households with incomes of $80,000 to $100,000. In 2015, students with family incomes of $20,000 or less (a category that includes all racial groups) scored higher on average on the math SAT than the average math score of black students from all income levels… 

Those who rail against “white privilege” as a determinant of academic achievement have a nagging problem: Asians. Asian students outscore white students on the SAT by 100 points; they outscore blacks by 277 points. It is not Asian families’ economic capital that vaults them to the top of the academic totem pole; it is their emphasis on scholarly effort and self-discipline. Every year in New York City, Asian elementary school students vastly outperform every other racial and ethnic group on the admissions test for the city’s competitive public high schools, even though a disproportionate number of them come from poor immigrant families.

Somewhat related, on racism as an excuse. And related to that, on the absurd and rather sinister Implicit Association Test.