Clarissa's Blog

I have received complaints from readers that the blog organization has become weird. One person says that the posts no longer appear in chronological order. Another pointed out that if you are not signed in, some posts are not even visible to you.

I want to reassure everybody that this is not happening in response to anything I did. I didn’t change anything. I didn’t introduce any new settings. I’m doing exactly what I’ve always done. WordPress routinely has these moments of strange experimentation where they mess up a well-functioning system in order to justify the existence of their team of employees.

This is very annoying. I hope it goes back to normal soon. I have been wondering why some good posts receive no comments, and now I realize that people are probably not even seeing them. The logic behind the suppression of some posts by WordPress is completely incomprehensible. I haven’t added any tags to posts in a very long time, so it’s not that. If anybody observes any logic behind this madness, please let me know.

The French philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa says that the goal of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s was “the abolition of all cultural obstacles to the unimpeded reign of economic relations.” What is the sexual revolution, after all, if not the belief that people can be reduced to objects of consumption to be used and discarded at whim?

Michéa says that once we repudiate the “obligations associated with family, group membership and linguistic, moral, and cultural heritage”, the promised utopia of complete freedom does not arrive. Instead, we become subjects to the “tyranny of the unconscious.” We turn into the slaves of the desires we cannot even articulate.

It is my very strong opinion that “a boyfriend of five years” deserves everything that’s coming to him. He strung this poor woman along for half a decade. She owes him nothing. Yes, the famous soccer player will discard her in a couple of weeks. But she’ll get a lot of expensive outfits out of him, which will help her in her search for a normal guy who might actually offer something beyond the status of a forever girlfriend.

Seriously, it’s like people who are commenting on the situation are incapable of hearing themselves. “A boyfriend of five years!! How could she?” Imagine the daily humiliation of that young woman. Everybody raising their eyebrows and giggling. What was she supposed to do? Wait around for five more years? Maybe then the dude would finally choose her? Or not, who knows.

Curiously, it is the exact same people who keep bitching about low birth rates that think this is a great life plan for a young woman. Sit there waiting for God knows what until it becomes way too late to have children.

Before I left for Florida, I had dinner with a friend who is the mother of a 24-year-old woman. This friend is politically very, very liberal. She is a fellow college professor. She said, “Josh proposed last week. Of course, they’ve been seeing each other for almost two years. There is no chance Emma [her daughter] would continue the relationship if a proposal was not coming at this point.” My friend might be as liberal as they get, but I know her well, and she would have personally made beef hash out of Josh if he had tried to turn her daughter into “a girlfriend of five years.” My point is that you don’t need to be a reactionary to notice that this is a bad situation for a young woman.

“Women delay childbirth until it’s too late. How horrible!” Yeah, because “faithful boyfriends of five years” are wasting their lives. It’s exactly like that character in Jem Calder’s new novel. After a twelve-year engagement, he kicks the fiancée to the curb and picks up an eager twenty-year-old at a bar.

And by the way, I’ve seen a variation on the posted comment in my feed on X in five different languages from at least three dozen accounts, all run by men. Who are either clinical morons or putting on a very convincing imitation.

Sade imagined a sexual utopia in which everyone has the right to everyone else, where human beings, reduced to their sexual organs, become absolutely anonymous and interchangeable. . . His ideal society… incorporated and carried to a surprising new conclusion Hobbes’s discovery that the destruction of paternalism and the subordination of all social relations to the market had stripped away the remaining restraints and mitigating illusions from the war of all against all. In the resulting state of organized anarchy, as Sade was the first to realize, pleasure becomes life’s only business.

In a society that has reduced reason to mere calculation, reason can impose no limits on the pursuit of pleasure—on the immediate gratification of every desire, no matter how perverse, insane, criminal, or merely immoral.

Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism

Enormous crowds of people waving the national flag came out to celebrate in every city of Spain. In Catalonia and the Basque Country, thousands of young people are chanting “We are Spanish” in a gesture of complete rejection of separatism. The narrative that the ruling Socialist party has tried to promote (“we won thanks to mass migration”) is mocked and rejected by the people. The winning players give interviews about their love of God, family, and the monarchy. The player who scored the winning goal in the final is making public appearances in a MAGA hat.

The problem in my current project is that the three volumes of Chirbes’s diaries are thick and heavy. I work in different places, such as:

– my office on campus
– my bedroom
– the library
– the other library
– a coffee shop
– and so on

I have to lug these volumes everywhere because I need all three at all times when I’m writing. I read gladly on Kindle, but for work, I need paper books. I can’t imagine having to find my way around the digital versions. Every scholar I’ve talked to agrees very enthusiastically that it’s impossible to work with digital copies. There is something in the structure of the human brain that requires a physical book you can touch and leaf through.

For the longest time, I thought that people who patronize this place are insane. It sells pickled cucumbers steeped in Kool-Aid or jam. I once accepted a sample while queuing up for another stall. One lick of a pickled cucumber smothered in maraschino cherry goo almost sent me into a hyperglycemic coma. To say that it tastes bad is like saying that the sun is warm. I’m from the USSR. I have tasted the most bizarre gastronomic concoctions. Plus, I adore pickles. But that candied pickle was atrocious beyond my scariest imaginings.

Finally, after a random YouTube segment, I figured out this place’s mystery. It’s an African-American tradition, a cultural thing. Twenty-eight years in North America, and nobody bothered to explain. Far be it from me to criticize anybody’s culinary traditions given that I’ve seen people look in horror at the Soviet-style buckwheat we chomp up like it’s nobody’s business. But I would have appreciated a hint.

Speaking of culture-specific foodstuffs, today I bought five 1 lb tubs of this:

I would have gotten more, but that’s all they had. People of my cultural background are dedicated to this thing. I had it for dinner today with plain kefir and cinnamon. We use it to make pies or quiche sort of dishes. A Kool-Aid pickle it isn’t, but it’s an example of a culture-specific food.

People are clueless. The pro-life ethicist in question is as unhirable as a mega-feminist, one who believes in abortion until kindergarten. Nobody’s getting hired. Gender studies programs died a very long time ago. This is a war over the gnawed-down bones of a long-expired dinosaur. None of this is remotely relevant to what is actually happening in higher education.

The idea that anybody cares about anybody’s opinion at this point is so quaint as to border on deranged. If we get permission to hire, we receive it so late that all we can squeeze into the search process is one rushed conversation with a candidate. In the humanities, and especially in gender studies, there are no tenure-track jobs. There are not even instructorships. We’re talking about lecturer positions for which universities almost invariably conduct hiring without a formal interview. Neither lecturers nor instructors are expected to conduct research, so their opinions do not come into play at any point during hiring.

I’ve been hiring for six years. The idea that I would have time or interest to inquire about any candidate’s opinions on any subject is downright outlandish.

I can imagine approaching the person who heads our gender studies program. She is, of course, untenured and directs this program as a sort of a volunteer gig on the side. If I were to address her with a sentence starting with the words “In your hiring process,” she would think I’m experiencing a severe neurological event. She has less likelihood of ever getting to hire anybody than I do of walking on the Moon.

Numbers 2 and 3 on this list are coquettishness. “Looking for a relationship” sounds needy and sad. Everybody wants to pretend they aren’t even looking because one is in such high demand that one doesn’t need to look.

Number 1 is concerning, and the people to blame are the moms. Where do young women observe married mothers? First and foremost, at home and in the lives of their friends. It has become fashionable to assume the put-upon, perennially aggrieved and overburdened persona if you are a married mother. I hang out with literally zero married mothers because even though I understand and they understand that it’s all a performance, I can’t take the constant self-pity and negativity.

Number 4 on the list is, in my very strong opinion, entirely down to men. Young women aren’t dating anybody seriously because nobody is offering. I once again strongly recommend Jem Calder’s novel I Want You To Be Happy for a detailed portrayal of what that looks like.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. What is causing the problem is our shared, utterly misguided understanding of happiness and freedom. We are confusing these young people and leading them to loneliness and misery.

The World Cup is the apotheosis of the nation-state. Of course, so is the American Super Bowl. I stayed up last night reading Argentinians’ tributes to Messi. People were brimming with pride for their country. “I’m so grateful to be Argentinian,” they said. It’s the national flags, the anthems, the exultation of the imaginary community of the nation that suddenly becomes not so imaginary when people recognize each other because of their team shirts, even in faraway lands.

There has been a lot of moaning among right-wingers over the success of Christopher Nolan’s new movie. “We lost the culture,” they weep even though that part of culture was always extremely left-wing. Whatever a Hollywood movie from seventy years ago might seem today, back when it was created, it was very progressivist. The acting profession never led people to highly moral, traditionalist behaviors because of its very nature.

So forget movies. We never have and never will dominate movies. We will never dominate gangsta rap either, and it’s time to make peace with that. I can’t even say that this is bad news because it’s not news at all.

In the absence of bad news, there is good news, which is that the nation-state is very much alive.