A small neighborhood bookstore in Pontevedra shocked my sensibilities, and not in a good way. Books weren’t arranged by author’s name, genre, country, or language. They were strewn around in untidy, careless piles. There was no principle behind the arrangement unless there’s such a thing as principled messiness. It took effort to prevent myself from sorting them nicely.
Only an absolute maniac could find anything in that ungodly disarray. Thankfully, I am a maniac, and here is my haul:
Prepare yourselves, my friends. Five of these are not fiction, so we’ll be able to discover new ideas.
Wendy Brown does criticize neoliberalism. However, her idea of a solution to all neoliberal ills is… open borders. Every leftie who tries to say something against neoliberalism ends up getting scared and almost immediately reverts to a screeching defense of mass migration.
An anti-neoliberal liberal is a contradiction in terms. You either think that freedom from all constraints, including biological, is possible and good or you don’t. If freedom sounds more appealing than duty and permanence, criticizing some minor manifestations of this deification of freedom is mostly a waste of time.
Lefties twist themselves into weird shapes, claiming that cutting off a mentally disabled woman’s breasts is wonderful and freedom-making but cutting off her disability benefits is bad and unacceptable. They want to condemn the neoliberal economy but hysterically celebrate the neoliberal mentality that only came into existence to make that economy possible. I spent years trying to contort myself into a similar shape until I realized that the problem isn’t with some obscure aspect of neoliberalism. The whole thing stinks. It stinks in its entirety.
Does anybody have any interesting topics to suggest? I’m traveling, and so I read little and think less. But I’m eager to opine if only I could settle on the subject of opining.
Why do women not have a fulfilling sex life? Because they try to get something in exchange for sex. This is fulfilling for a very small number of women with a very specific disorder. The rest don’t have the capacity physically to enjoy transactional sex. Unlike men, they have the capacity to engage in sex without desiring it but nobody would call such sex acts fulfilling.
What is transactional sex? It isn’t only sex for money, which is something that most women don’t do. But it also includes having sex to get something other than sexual enjoyment out of it. To be in a relationship, to feel desired, to have something to tell your girlfriends, to get gifts, to have somebody to spend the holidays, to feel pretty, to please, not to feel like a loser, or, like we’ve seen in the recently discussed article about Neil Gaiman, to purchase a fantasy of a secure, comfortable existence. Read the article for very clear, if extreme, examples of women engaging in transactional sex and feeling terrible as a result.
If you are married, though, you already have everything on the above list. You don’t need to offer sex to get this stuff out of dudes. You’ll already have a relationship, the status it confers, and the benefits it offers. Now you can relax and figure out what works sexually. Which – and I know this tends to provoke great anger – for women tends to take time and effort.
While emotional life is easier for women, practical daily life is easier for men. I’m following the artistic journey of a writer who spent several years of his youth backpacking it around the country, riding trains with hobos, dumpster diving for food, sleeping rough, and gaining the kind of experience that now infuses his art. None of this is possible for a woman unless she travels with a man. Forget sleeping rough, only this morning I needed my husband to lug my suitcase downstairs. It’s a suitcase he wouldn’t need to bring on a trip of this duration because he doesn’t need as much stuff as I do. Plus, he got me a free Uber because he has a meeting and can’t drive me to the airport, and free access to a lounge where I can eat diabetic-friendly, and a voucher for a massage at the layover, and a stack of gift cards to use at the hotel to pay for food. Yes, I could have done it for myself. And I wouldn’t engage in transactional sex to get a man to do it for me. But many women would.
So yeah, get married. Totally recommended for women and men alike.
