Clarissa's Blog

Neoliberal Love currently stands at 87,000 words. I started writing a little under 2 years ago. Given that I wrote and published another full-length book and a bunch of articles in these 2 years—while being department Chair —is not bad at all.

I’m qualified to write about neoliberal love because I know its terrible power. It makes you capable of things that are so impossible they sound ridiculous. It’s a conflagration that burns every obstacle in its way.

I’m still battling with the introduction to Neoliberal Love. My second book was criticized as “undertheorized”, and the criticism was completely fair. I was afraid to say what I really wanted to say in 2015. I was still wearing a saucer-sized badge of the Hillary Clinton campaign (photographic evidence provided upon request) but what I wanted to say in the book was the exact opposite. As a result, I wrote so cautiously that I failed to express what I really wanted. The book was still very successful but I perceive it as a missed opportunity in many ways.

In Neoliberal Love, which is my magnum opus, I want to say everything. I’m battling against caution, self-doubt, and fear. I want it to be clear. Not roundabout, not vague.

You, people, have been of invaluable help throughout the process. If I didn’t discuss these ideas here daily, I wouldn’t have them. I simply wouldn’t have them. And I want to be done but it’s taking its bloody time.

Hot take on the red pill stuff. Based on my extensive experience in watching my millennial daughter try to find a suitable husband vs my millennial son doing the same for a wife, my opinion is that worthless young men created a lot of the problem, for which others are now paying.

— Old West (@OldWest1453) September 24, 2025

Based on my much more extensive experience of observing young people in great numbers daily for 20 years as my actual job, I have to say that this take is off by a mile. Young men are wonderful. A young woman who is not managing to get paired up with a good, solid, reliable dude should do some soul-searching.

By the way, the only male student who asked me for accommodations in the past several years was blind. Not a single male student asks for accommodations for mental issues, nervousness, anxiety, or anything.

Yesterday, a student came to my office to work on his research project, and I asked what his motivating idea in life was. He said it’s to become a good provider and a reliable, responsible presence for his future children. If that’s not ideal young masculinity, I don’t know what is.

Serena Williams saw a cotton plant decorating a hallway in a hotel and took leftist umbrage. It’s not 2020, so nobody cares. But this is the perfect encapsulation of the entirety of the liberal ideology. A small group of extremely wealthy people presiding over the immiseration of everybody else while feeling grievously victimized by the people whom they are robbing. This is the plan.

In 2020, the hotel would immediately start firing people for the terrible offense of decorating a room with a potted plant. But we’ve all moved on from there and hopefully aren’t going back.

What a wonderful, wonderful country. Such heights of human ingenuity.

NYTimes published a long article about the people who are eager to vote for Mamdani. They are all young, highly-paid, successful in diversity Olympics, and very pouty.

This is fascinating. It reads like a report from another planet.

I am very, very grateful that I am not surrounded by such people.

We had another family over for dinner tonight and the Mom asked me what brand of mashed potatoes we were using because they were so good and my daughter was like "….they grew in the yard? They are yard potatoes." *sigh* We've got to work on her marketing. These are local grown,…

— Julie (@JulieLovesFluff) September 24, 2025

Spend two minutes trying to decide the words “brand of mashed potatoes.”

Anything to avoid working on the concluding paragraph of my introduction.

Julie sounds insufferable, by the way.

This is only from Reuters. CNN, ABC and others have been publishing about this for years. There has been over a decade of studies. Which is how I knew. How everybody knew until Trump mentioned it and suddenly it became controversial.

In my first pregnancy, when I had a severe form of PUPPPs, I was in extreme pain for months. Not a single time did I take any brand of acetaminophen because I knew that for pregnant women it’s out of the question. My OB-GYN said, “I know this is torture but please remember you can’t take anything. Try oatmeal baths.” And I said, “Oh, of course, I wouldn’t take anything.”

Oatmeal baths did fuck all other than gunk up my bathtub, by the way. But the point is that it’s nuts to start pretending now that this is controversial knowledge. Besides, nobody really needs Tylenol. It’s not insulin. Tylenol is for mild pain. What’s the big deal with not taking it for a few months? I’ve taken it maybe twice in my life (with no noticeable effect), and I’m somehow surviving. I’ve had four major surgeries without post-op painkillers. Taking a break from acetaminophen for the duration of a pregnancy can’t possibly be a bad idea.

I hate stupid, infantile contrarianism both on the left and on the right. And during pregnancy it’s especially ludicrous. I’d let myself be sliced into ribbons, and I pretty much did do exactly that, to ensure that my baby is fine. Trump, schmump, you have a person inside you. And you are making bloody Tik Tok videos instead of going for a quiet walk, relaxing, and making sure your baby isn’t drowning in adrenaline? Your baby is not a prop for your political opinions.

This whole controversy is very triggering to me for obvious reasons. A healthy, easy pregnancy is a miracle. Which doesn’t mean it’s abnormal. I know I’m an outlier, and almost nobody has it that bad. But if you are pregnant, that should be the absolute focus of your life because you only can have a handful of them at most in your lifetime. Your body is doing the most amazing thing it’s capable of doing. Just bloody let it. Trump can wait.

I believe, by the way, that most women in those videos aren’t really taking Tylenol. They have to be faking it. I also think that the story about the woman who overdosed and is rumored to be dying is fake. But the emotion they are showing in those videos is real. And it’s not healthy for a baby.

I keep hearing that everybody lives in their own ideological bubble. This opinion is advanced by liberal people. They truly do live in an information bubble and think everybody else has a similar experience.

A conservative ideological bubble, however, is utterly impossible. If you have gone to school in the past 50 years, if you have turned on cable TV, streamed a Netflix show, watched a sitcom, used Duolingo, done a Google search, been to the movies, walked into a chain bookstore, visited Amazon’s landing page, patronized a public library—in short, if you live in society and not an Amish village—you receive a constant stream of liberal ideology daily.

You can find conservative ideology if you look for it. You’ll have to put in time and effort. Search through Substack posts and X feeds to find mentions of tiny publishing houses that print conservative thinkers. Liberal ideology doesn’t have to be searched for. It’s always there. It’s the air we breathe.

As of now, the count of far-FAR-left books that I was forced to read against my will at work stands at five. We are a state university. How would I be able to avoid being forced to read this material? How could I manage to inhabit a right-wing bubble? How can anybody avoid knowing every permutation of left-wing dogma?

Something is definitely up with Amazon. I pre-ordered a new release by a Spanish author I follow. On the release date, the book didn’t arrive.

I contacted customer service. One after another, customer service representatives named Anuj, Gowtham, and Snow Machi asked increasingly bizarre questions about the order. It got to the point where I started to doubt whether I had really ordered an innocent autobiography by an author famous for his extremely clean and unobjectionable writing style or had mistakenly pressed a button for some sort of a terrorist manual.

In the end, after endless imprecations for me not to worry (which I didn’t because why should I), Snow Machi pompously agreed to refund the book and let me order again. Which I did. And again the book failed to materialize.

I gave up and ordered it on Google Books but it’s been really weird with Amazon recently.