Women who talk about the "male loneliness pandemic" and are like "guys don't forget it's men's mental health awareness month uwu" are not the problem. They are deeply empathetic and kind people. For the most part. It hurts to see someone be called a "pick-me" for quite honestly being a decent human, caring about the mental health struggles of others.
The problem is men do not have the same empathy for women.
Please never limit yourself to safe, agreeable reading. Read things that confound you. Read things that suck. Read across eras and political affiliations. Read the SCUM Manifesto and Females: A Concern back-to-back. Read Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism and then read Project 2025.
Even nightmare fuel is still fuel—you'll ultimately be better equipped as a human being if you can understand where other people are coming from, be they smart or shockingly stupid, insightful or painfully dense, magnanimous or frighteningly malevolent. Or all of the above simultaneously, like a funky thought salad.
@simonmikhail mentioned you on a post “According to KiwiFarms, there's a rumor on Twitter...”:
@llamhigyn-y-dwr I think it's real tbh, it makes sense because if Nick is actually into her he doesn't want the internet to know because people will try to ruin it because let's be honest Nick does have some deranged haters. Also Anna has gone quiet, she used to have more of social media presence but she's more hidden now and mostly just interacts with groypers now. Maybe that was part of the deal? She keeps a low profile and she gets to tap that Nick D.(ok that's vulgar i apologize)
Good for her honestly.
Huh, so this is her.
If Nick really does harbor some attraction to women (I'm reluctant to call him "straight" because that would imply he's not at all attracted to men, which, let's get real here), good for him. She's a babe.
A journalist job is to report the truth. Even when that conflicts with someone’s sense of identity
Dora Moutot is facing a complaint of “public insults and hatred” against trans people for naming the reality of biological sex.
French associations SOS Homophobie and Mousse filed a complaint against journalist Dora Moutot for “public insults because of gender identity, and public provocation to hatred or violence against a group of people because of their gender identity.” The two associations released a joint statement on February 15, 2023, after Moutot said on TV show Quelle Époque (France 2) that Marie Cau, the first trans-identified male elected as mayor in France, was a “transfeminine man.”
The remark about Marie Cau’s male biological sex was made after journalist Léa Salamé asked Moutot “Is Marie Cau a woman to you?”
The complaint also accuses Moutot of “transphobia” for an Instagram post she made on August 25, 2022, where she described an individual called Hanneli Escurier as a “trans-identified woman.” Escurier was born with female anatomy but self-declares as male. Moutot was “reacting” to a text published by Escurier, in which the trans activist wrote “One day very soon, I think, trans people will go and smash TERFS ( Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist: expression which designates activists who exclude trans women of feminist struggles, Editor's note)That's how it's going to end (...) It's not a call for violence, just a public premonition about something that will become inevitable.”
Moutot is said to have created a crowdfunding for her legal costs against the complaint filed against her.
Recently, an opinion piece in French publication Marianne with several personalities - journalists, historians and doctors - protested the allegations against Moutot. According to the piece, published on February 27, there was relentless “outcry” on the internet, describing Moutot as a “violent, transphobic and anti-trans activist.”
The authors of the article continue: “In her remarks, no hatred, [there was] no desire to damage anyone. She describes what she sees. She talks about her perception, her reality. She repeats it several times: for her, a woman is a female. Faced with several men who revile her and an audience who boos her (scenes cut during editing), she unfolds her arguments calmly. She worries about the practical consequences of transgender ideology for women, for children, for society as a whole. She didn't come to stigmatize trans people, she came to defend women.”
The opinion piece further argues that people should have the right to disagree with Moutot’s remarks, but claims that the journalist is being accused of “wrongthink,” quoting the words attributed to Voltaire: “I don't agree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for you to have the right to say it."
“With this complaint, for the first time in France… transidentitarian activists are seeking to put into practice their mantra (which was) limited to social networks: ‘Transphobia is not an opinion, it is a crime’.”
In 2022, Moutot teamed up with French feminist Marguerite Stern and formed the group Femelliste after both women have been subjected to years of harassment for their views on women’s rights. Moutot was talking about female sexuality on her Instagram account @TasJoui, when, in 2019, trans activists started “explaining to her that talking about clitorises was not inclusive of trans women,” according to their website.
The Femelliste website has been collecting and archiving evidence of the harassment women are being subjected to if they dare to talk about female issues. “FEMELLISTE was born out of the compelling desire to fight against harassment, violence and censorship of women referred to as ‘TERFs’.” Femelliste published their manifesto on January 9, 2023.
“The harassment, the insults, the threats and the cancel culture that we endure form a sprawling system,” says the Femelliste website. “For the past three years, we have been archiving what we experience. Downloading, filing and analyzing the thousands of screenshots.”
The Femelliste group warns that they are not the only ones to have been subjected to harassment for their views on women’s rights. “All over the world, other women who hold the same positions as us are also constantly harassed. Like us, they are referred to as TERFs - Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists. This term - used as an insult, and most of the time accompanied by threats - is a new way to disqualify women who oppose transgender ideology by affirming biological realities. In France, some associations and activists are calling for the exclusion of "TERFS" through the slogan "TERF out of our struggles".
"It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search."
The problem with the “it’s fine to write X as long as you don’t glorify/romanticise/promote it” argument for censorship is that the author is dead and interpretation of a text is inherently subjective. The message the author intended to send can never be the message perceived by 100% of readers. It’s just not going to happen. Someone will say that Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory and someone will say The Curtains Are Fucking Blue.
Someone somewhere is always going to take the wrong message away from a text. When I was in high school, my mother got very upset because of a copy of A Modest Proposal she found in with my language arts work. She didn’t realize it was satire. Keep in mind, I have actual trauma from the Senseless Tragedy Is Deep bent of the required reading list. And other short stories I’d come home with before included The Lottery (the ‘winner’ of the eponymous lottery is stoned to death as sacrifice for a good harvest) and To Build a Fire (a man freezes to death in graphic detail, but not before he tries and fails to kill his dog to stuff his frostbitten hands in its warm entrails in a last-ditch bid for survival; god that one was fucked up). She legitimately thought that my teachers had just upped the ante to forcing me to read pro-baby-eating screeds.
Now, my mother has been in a cult her whole life, and she takes an unironic Ignorance Is Bliss approach to the outside world. I won’t say that it makes her stupid--cults prey on emotional vulnerability, not intellectual--but it does mean that she’s more predisposed to taking narratives at face value.
And that’s what everyone’s afraid of when they talk about a work glorifying this or that, right? People taking it at face value? But here’s the ironic thing: Current “you’re allowed to enjoy this work as long as you’re critical of it” discourse doesn’t actually promote critical thinking. Calling for censorship of a work that shouldn’t be taken at face value doesn’t promote critical thinking, either! Those are both thought control methods to suppress wrongthink! You’re not actually giving people tools to think for themselves. You’re not actually encouraging people to think for themselves. You’re not actually trusting people to think for themselves.
And that need to control what other people are thinking and what media they’re consuming, lest they be exposed to and pick up the wrong thoughts? Is culty af and I’m done with that. I don’t need Jonathan Swift to hold my hand and whisper “don’t worry; I know that eating babies is actually wrong” to me to sleep at night.