#ozy brennan

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"I made gentle fun of [John] Woolman for his guilt about reading books and going sledding with his childhood friends. But all of his childhood friends grew up to own or trade slaves. Of course he’s skeptical of nice food and nice clothes, sleighs and ice skates. His friends, good people, people he loved, liked these seemingly innocent pleasures—and so to pay for them, they bought people who were violently kidnapped away from their families and carried to a foreign land, forced them to work from dawn to dusk, underfed them and dressed them in rags, sold their children away from them, tortured them, and supported laws that ensured that all this would continue forever. From Woolman’s point of view, to oppose slavery, you have to hate torturing innocent people more than you like ice skating. It turns out this is very hard and people mostly don’t."

-Ozy Brennan, On John Woolman

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In Western fanfiction, sad men are so popular that we’ve developed a rich vocabulary for describing particular flavors of sadness, such as whump and hurt/comfort. Fan favorites are often incredibly sad. Supernatural maintained its fanbase through steadily providing crying men, men too repressed to cry, men extracting bullets from their own bodies while shirtless, etc. An intense amount of erotic interest was directed toward Jonathan Sims, an unpleasant middle-aged man with almost no coolness or devotion who happens to spend all his time getting kidnapped, stabbed, burned, threatened with murder, enslaved by a cosmic horror, devoured by worms, lost in two different pocket dimensions, and almost transformed into clothing.

-Ozy Brennan, Romantic Tastes of Women

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The threat of hospitalization harms more people. Many people—suicidal people, psychotic people, people with certain types of OCD—don’t get therapy because they’re afraid of being hospitalized. Many people who do get therapy don’t disclose the true extent and nature of their mental illness, which means that the therapist can’t help with the problems that are most serious. Some people avoid telling certain medication side effects to their psychiatrists for similar reasons. One of the most important therapeutic tools is the strength of the therapist-patient relationship; how much damage does it do to the relationship if the therapist can, at any time and without meaningful due process, put the patient into jail?

-Ozy Brennan, On Mental Hospitals

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Our patients are here voluntarily. Of course, if they try to leave, we’ll force them to stay. But knowing this fact, they chose to stay of their own free will. Be sure to remind them of this regularly. You can only keep someone involuntarily for three days, but you can keep someone “voluntarily, but if they try to leave they’ll be stuck here for three days and if they go along with it they might get to leave sooner” for as long as you like. We’ll let our patients go when they aren’t depressed (or manic, or psychotic). Of course, they are depressed, because we spent all this effort making the environment depressing, and it doesn’t do much for mania or psychosis either. They only get to leave when they successfully keep up the facade that they are happy, the environment helped, they’re so grateful to all of the staff, and the group therapy gave them a bunch of important insights that they can’t wait to apply to their lives. We have other incentives, of course—restraint, forcible drugging—but dangling the chance to leave in front of them is the most powerful of them all. Sad people usually feel better when they get to cry it out or seek comfort. Depressed people generally have distorted thoughts, and one purpose of therapy is to help them figure out a more accurate view of the world. We remove all these options. Instead, we force a level of self-monitoring on them more typical of spies and courtiers of the more dysfunctional Chinese emperors. No matter how miserable they are, they must smile. If they want to stop being jailed, they must thank their jailers, sincerity in their voices and their eyes.

-Ozy Brennan, On Mental Hospitals

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The purpose of sexual orientation labels is to communicate to others: who should flirt with you, whether you would be interested in a discussion of Michelle Rodriguez in a tank top, whether you are a reasonable person to invite to Dyke Anime Night. If you decide to choose an inappropriate orientation label, you will be naturally punished via inappropriate flirtations, conversations about boobs, and anime night invitations. As a gold-star bisexual dating one enby man and one enby woman, words cannot express how little I care about the prospect that some college student or married woman is going to identify as bisexual for the clout. I’m just glad we have clout.

-Ozy Brennan, Contra Scott on Fake Bisexuality

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In general, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Mohists that societies could be rich. “It’s bad to steal money from hungry people to pay for elaborate musical performances” is a pretty sympathetic ethical position. But Mohists don’t seem to have believed that a society could ever be wealthy enough to afford both food and orchestras. To them, society would always be in a position of triage. This might explain the Mohists’ very short list of values. It’s difficult enough, if you’re in Warring States Period China, to imagine a society without war, crime, famine, or death from exposure. Anything else you care about is trading off against those things. Dancers and mourning periods, harems and fancy clothes, are all measured in dead children. Why bother to care about anything else? Getting everyone up to the minimal standard is hard enough.

-Ozy Brennan

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I know there’s a lot of discussion about abuse at mental hospitals, and I don’t want to detract from that. But even when all goes well mental hospitals are horrible. Most of the complaints are kind of petty: you don’t like watching CNN? You missed a party you were looking forward to? The food tastes bad? You want a cup of coffee? You want to hug your stuffed animal? It feels stupid to make those complaints. But, like… the plurality of the population of mental hospitals is people who felt so miserable that they wanted to kill themselves, and then almost died. Maybe we should be nice to people in this situation. Maybe they should have a chance to talk to the people who love them as much as they want. Maybe they should get good food and coffee and stuffed animals. When someone is in the hospital for a physical condition, if it’s physically safe, their family can visit as much as they want. I’m just saying.

-Ozy Brennan, On Mental Hospitals

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Studying historical porn is difficult, because no one archives their goddamn porn. Porn is dismissed as embarrassing, obscene, and of no historical relevance, leaving the hopeful porn historian with an absolutely bizarre sample. People are even less likely to archive pornographers’ diaries, letters, and business records, which would give us a sense of how the industry worked. Our most reliable source is legal cases, which excludes many people (such as anyone who was good at not getting caught).

-Ozy Brennan, Porn in Early Twentieth Century Britain