Friday Digest: From the Archives

Happy Friday! 🥳

This week I’m doing something a little bit different, and that is share some of the essays out of my Substack archive as well as links to the articles I have published recently in other outlets.

Since I’ve had quite a few new people sign up in the last couple of weeks, I thought it wouldn’t do any harm to re-post some of my essays from last year. A highlight reel, if you will.

Saving Lena Dunham

First up, the one where I imagined being a Big Sister to chronic over-sharer Lena Dunham:

Here’s what I would do if I was Lena Dunham’s Big Sister: we’d read Camille Paglia and Jordan Peterson together. I’d show her videos of Candace Owens so she’d learn to see past the harmful negative stereotype that all black women are left-wing feminists. We’d meet up in the park and do burpees because let’s face it, we both have a lot of weight to lose, and we’d laugh at how ridiculous we look, and then high-five when we’re done. I’d introduce her to my chef/small-business owner boyfriend, so he could carefully school her in how the minimum wage is an evil government tool designed to keep working-class people poor and undermine financial independence. And most importantly, I’d be her shoulder to cry on when the jealous race bullies and mean girls attack her — which happens every time she has any kind of success whatsoever. I’d be all like, “Lena, it just drives them crazy that a chunky over-sharer got a TV show while they toil away at click-bait content farms, drowning in hook-ups and student loan debt, starving themselves and binging on cocaine or Adderall with their many roommates.”

Unfortunately, I never got to be Lena’s mentor of anti-wokeness. But I still hold out hope for her!

12 Rules for Life, Lady Version

Staying with the ‘self-help for confused liberal women’ vibe, I did my own version of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, but focused on what women need. My rules include: “Stop worrying. Right now. Just stop” and “Learn to live without the approval of your peers and be alone if necessary.”

Eight-year-old me, learning how not to seek the approval of my peers

I’m the Aunt Jemima of feminism, apparently

Last year I was interviewed on GB News about why I think feminism is not the antidote to misogyny. In response, someone on Twitter said I was the Aunt Jemima of feminism and I quite liked that.

Toward a new class analysis

It is ever clearer that the terms “left” and “right” as political signifiers are increasingly meaningless. This has been a key preoccupation of mine for several years now — in part because I was being accused of being a “right-winger.” But also because without good terms to describe where we are on the political spectrum, is good faith discussion even possible? From my essay on our lack of a strong class-based analytic framework:

I am now politically homeless, but I understand them, the people on the other side; how they viewed the brazen antagonism of Donald Trump as terrifying and intolerable. These concerns (which I once shared) were ramped up by media coverage of his shady business dealings (which I believed) and his many other perceived failures. But there is a qualitative distinction between those who have stayed with the left-leaning intelligentsia and those who have moved away. Those of us who have left the left share a deep concern about ever-increasing government power and the overweening administrative state. Those who stayed with the left, seeing their cherished dreams of a better society disappear, demand even more of the government policies that failed to deliver that better society in the first place. The government, in turn, is happy to oblige as it allows them to increase their power.

Woke media is bad for democracy

I highly recommend the book Bad News by Batya Ungar-Sargon, which I reviewed for Spiked! last December.

“The Times and all of its cohorts in the corporate press are no longer in the business of reporting the news. They are in the business of selling the illusion of moral exoneration to a pampered elite, like the Catholic Church selling indulgences in the Middle Ages. But I read the New York Times – I can’t possibly be racist! ‘Wokeness perpetuates the economic interests of affluent white liberals’, writes Ungar-Sargon. It allows them to preserve their own and their children’s status while still allowing them to feel ‘like the heroes of a story about social justice… vastly superior to their conservative and even slightly less radical friends’.”

The dangerous narcissism of American liberals

A few news cycles ago — before Will Smith slapped Chris Rock but after Kim Kardashian started dating Pete Davison — some has-been actress wrote a poem for Putin. It sent me over the edge:

“I can see the funny side, of course. And it’s tempting simply to shrug this off as a dumb stunt. But this is actually no laughing matter. It’s a sign that the West has become so intellectually debased that we no longer deserve to be in charge. Stop the ride. I want to get off. McCord is being widely criticised, but that’s of little comfort. This video is not an aberration. It’s an extreme example of behaviour that is pretty typical of the most overindulged and cosseted group of people in world history: well-off American liberals. And the problem is that these people – and the decrepit, corrupt Boomers leading them, clammy fingers clasped firmly around the reins of power – are undermining society’s capacity for sensible self-governance. They offer sickly sweet pronouncements about kindness and protecting the vulnerable. But these merely mask their truly scary authoritarian impulses. I find McCord’s Putin poem horrifying. Are rich liberals so far removed from any understanding of what real human suffering is that they think they can solve war with hugs?”

Feminism is the new misogyny

In February I wrote my first piece for Feminist Current — which to my knowledge is the only feminist publication brave enough to stand up to the “women have penises” craziness. (If there are other publications, let me know in the comments, I want to write for them!)

Meghan Murphy is a force for good in this world, in my humble opinion, so I was delighted that she agreed to publish my ramblings!

“Taken as a whole, feminism has neither fortified society against the voyeuristic encroachment of male fetishists into womanhood, nor has it given three generations of women and girls reason to celebrate the very thing that makes us women: our bodies. And so misogyny is, once again, the common sense of society. And it is, once again, the most vulnerable of women who are sacrificed in service to the dark fantasies of the world’s oldest prejudice.”

Have a great weekend everyone!