Clarissa's Blog

I feel very young these days because I’m only vaguely aware of who this David Bowie fellow is.

This is very gratifying.

Not being attracted to people who look a certain way cannot be racist, transphobic, fat-shaming, sexist, hegemonic, or anything else that’s bad. Being attracted but not allowing oneself to be seen with them in public, for instance, that shit is definitely all the bad things. But genuine attraction knows no ideology. It’s entirely outside of our control and beyond the reach of any rationality. And that’s only scary to people who are terrified of sex and of themselves.

Trying to analyze attraction in terms of ideological concepts betrays a profound sexual dysfunction in those who do it. 

If a system or an institution doesn’t work for women, the immediate response is never to reform the system and make it work. It’s always to exclude women from public life.

Medical care doesn’t serve your needs? Give birth at home!

Police doesn’t assist you? Forget reporting any crime against you!

Streets are not safe? Stay home!

There are tons of cases where medical care, law and street safety fail men. But in those cases, the response is always about the need to reform medicine, criminal justice and policing. Some people agree, some disagree and say no reform is needed, but the discussions never turn towards the idea that men should not try to access these systems at all.

Bernie Sanders called for all rape accusations on college campuses to be handled through law enforcement, a controversial stance that puts him at odds with many advocates. Decrying rape and sexual assault on campuses as an “epidemic,” he said schools must not try to handle the issue internally.

Thank you, Bernie! Finally, a voice of reason among all the madness.

I’m so glad somebody has the brains and the guts to say the painfully obvious: rape is a serious crime and shouldn’t be made a mockery of through being prosecuted by well-meaning yet entirely incapable amateurs.

Bernie is very brave to say this because now he will be attacked by a bunch of clucking hens who believe that feminism is about excluding women from the institutions of society.

In the 1970s, capital sucked all the juice out of the existing Fordist model. The growth slowed, and that meant a new model of capital expansion had to be found.

Since then, capital liberated itself from being tied to specific territory. It no longer has much use for borders, so borders become less relevant. I always find it extraordinarily entertaining when fierce anti-capitalists proclaim, “I’m for open borders! Border guards, customs, passports – enough of that already!” Today, there is nothing more capitalist than contempt for borders and citizenships. And the only line of defense – feeble as that defense might be – against the ravages of capital is the nation-state with its borders, passports, and national myths.

Capital always gets what it wants. And what it wants is whatever will advance its principal goal: to keep growing, expanding, accumulating. What you want or I want or what is fair does not concern it. If we see any limits successfully placed on the free run of capital by human beings, we need to realize that the capital only allowed this to happen because that was useful for it at this particular point in time.

(Example: the “wild capitalism” of the Industrial Revolution era was substituted by the more “humane” capitalism of the welfare sate in the XXth century. Make no mistake, though: this was a development that was useful to capital, and that’s the only reason why it occurred. The ragged and starving factory workers of the XIXth century did not consume as actively as the orderly, well-fed, healthy and eager to purchase employees at Ford’s conveyor belts.)

I know that none of this flatters the sense of omnipotence that human beings so love but it’s simply what it is. It’s like climate change. If we shut out eyes really tight and pretend there is no climate change, will it go away? Obviously not. And neither will the power of capital.

“My daughter is 32 and she’s my best friend!” the Uber driver told me.

“Uh-oh,” I thought. “A tale of dysfunction extraordinaire is forthcoming.”

It turned out that the daughter can’t hold down a job or a boyfriend, lives with the mother, and the retired mother has to go out to work Uber to support them both. Of course, there are also two sons with jobs, families and normal lives. They were fortunate enough to remain sons and not be turned into “friends.”

Catholics and the Orthodox are opposed to in-vitro. It’s their right, of course, and far be it from me to tell them they shouldn’t be opposed. What I don’t get is the logic. They don’t accept in-vitro because some embryos get discarded. But without in-vitro, all follicles just go to waste and are eventually discarded by the body anyways. With in-vitro, at least some follicles get to turn into babies.

Or is it all about investing a follicle that has met a spermatozoon with a meaning that is different from the follicle that hasn’t yet met one?

I’m not getting an in-vitro or anything. I’m just wondering.

I’m tired of the obsession with the stupid El Chapo Guzmán. This gangster, that gangster, who cares? It’s kind of disgusting that all this fuss is being made over this nasty little prick as if he were a movie star.

Honestly, the American glorification of gangsters is infantile, sheltered and annoying.

The editors of the collections where my articles were accepted are driving me really hard to improve my work. They give oodles of suggestions, and all these suggestions are absolutely brilliant.

This is what somebody should have done for us: pushed us all the way from a final essay to an actual publication.

If I ever get to teach at a place with a graduate school, I’ll do this for my grad students. I think it would totally make sense for me to teach grad school. I mean, I’m great at teaching Beginner Spanish, but I think we can all agree I’m a tad wasted on such courses.