Clarissa's Blog

The feminists and the anti-feminists have united around the shared cause of disliking men:

When Klara was an infant and I’d get up at night to feed her, one thing that always made me feel happy was seeing N sleeping cozily and comfortably.

The abortion scene from Girls we’ve been discussing portrays a woman who is completely in control of her emotions. She’s not emotionally incontinent, doesn’t pose as a victim, and doesn’t screech about mental loads. She projects strength and self-reliance.

And she’s a total sociopath.

This always happens. Whenever a competent, emotionally contained woman appears on the screen or in mass market books (think Gone Girl or House of Cards), she’s a total evildoer and murderer. This is how we learn that a good woman is an emotional wreck and we end up with all those women posting their freakouts on TikTok and writing screeds about mental loads.

Americans are obsessed with swimming. And potties, but that’s a story for another time. I don’t know what it is about swimming in land-locked Illinois that gets people going all gaga but every time I said I’m not putting my kid in swimming lessons, I’d get the same reaction as if I said I refuse to feed her. “But what if she never learns!!” Yeah, what if, we could think about that or watch paint dry because that would be less boring.

Klara decided she was ready to swim last Saturday. So she swam. That’s it, no lessons, no weird experiments like in this nutso-crazy-boom-boom video. Incidentally, it was the same with the weird ritual people call “potty-training.” I ran out of diapers one day, couldn’t be bothered to drive to the store, told her it’s toilet from now on, and that was the end of the “training.”

People complicate their lives unnecessarily. With potties I can at least understand the need but swimming baffles me. Everybody learns eventually. Or not. May that be our biggest problem in life, seriously.

Here goes my Fulbrighter from Yemen. The backup was from Libya, so that one goes, too.

It’s fine, it was time to take a break from teaching Arabic. I’ve had only negative experiences with Arabic Fulbrighters for several years.

I am so on Lutnick’s side, it’s not even funny:

I am so, so glad that finally, FINALLY, somebody in politics is stepping away from the neoliberal dogma of “removing all trade barriers”. No trade barriers means no nation-state. It means no country as a meaningful concept. It means uncontrolled migration. It means no culture, no civilization, and no America. It means one enormous global favela with a tiny oligarchy conducting medical experiments on the vast, undifferentiated mass of miserable, poor peasants.

I so voted for what Lutnick is saying. You go, Lutnick.

I rarely agree with this guy but I agree with him here:

Trump did well by kicking Elon to the curb. Elon is neoliberal, and doesn’t see anything beyond his neoliberal obsessions.

Yes, Trump is also neoliberal. Everybody is neoliberal. I’m neoliberal. But it’s a question of degree. Musk is out-there neoliberal compared to the rest of us. That’s why he can’t function without huge doses of drugs.

Alan Abrahamson — a seasoned American journalist and member of the International Olympic Committee’s press committee — just published an excerpt of Khelif’s 2023 test results from a certified and accredited lab that stated “chromosome analysis reveals male karyotype.”

Test Results Confirm How Bad the Fact-Checking Was on Algerian Boxer Imane Khelif

It’s ok, you don’t have to apologize. All I ask is, please consider why the very obvious fact that he’s a man was not obvious to you. And why “believe women” was suspended in the case of an Italian female boxer who stood very close to Khelif and got hit in the face by him. Why can’t we trust that a woman knows if she was hit by a man? Can we trust women at all or only when no man finds their conclusions objectionable?

That’s fine but I spent 15 minutes with ChatGPT yesterday, reading long and inventive explanations on how having sex with underage kids is not pedophilia if it’s done by Harvey Milk. Let’s definitely hand over these economically valuable tasks to an algorithm that considers pedophilia to be a great thing.

Orgasm, Inc is a Netflix documentary about a Silicon Valley startup “One Taste” that sold sexual empowerment to women. The dreaded principle of “markets in everything” has managed to turn even sex into something that requires a pyramid scheme of seminars and coaching sessions.

What “One Taste” did was have women get sexually serviced in public. The really funny part is that, 60 years into the sexual revolution, people still haven’t figured out that in any scenario of sexual freedom many women will discover that they were coerced into sex and only agreed to participate because they wanted to be liked. This is exactly what happened, and the female-owned and female-run company was #MeTooted all the way into an FBI investigation and criminal charges.

There’s a telling moment in the documentary when one of the former workers and enthusiasts of the company was asked by the owner of “One Taste” to reveal her deepest fantasy. The woman struggled for a while but finally blurted out, “I want a baby!” This did not sit well with the owner whose business model was about selling orgasms.

While the story of the orgasm startup is hilarious, Netflix doesn’t tell it well. The creators of the movie don’t have the words to explain what the company did wrong. Sex orgies are supposed to be great and liberating. So how to criticize the startup and for what? Netflix concocts weird accusations, such as, for example, that “a queer woman” was teased at the company for not being feminine and finally realized – such horror! – that nobody at the startup “really cared” about her.

I saw a 10,5 ounce candle at a store yesterday called Carby Musk Candle. It cost $80. As in eighty. Dollars.

Is it some sort of a status symbol? What am I not understanding?

Yes, I smelled it. It has a strongly masculine scent. Is it supposed to attract dudes? Or make women feel like they have a dude? Because I’m very certain there’s no man on the planet who’d buy it.