Flattened Ears

The first essay included in The Return of the Primitive centers on the Berkeley "Free Speech Movement" protests of the 1960s, and it also forces me to commit a typographical crime in the form of a double end-quote due to how I format my post titles. The reason for this is because Ayn Rand is the Sargon of Akkad of the 1970s. More on that later. The more specific reason for this is because Rand wants to make it clear that she doesn't consider these students to really be rebels, she considers them to be conformists who merely appropriate the image of rebellion for the sake of branding and to feel cool, and for the first couple paragraphs and the title of the essay she'll persist in putting scare-quotes around the words "rebel" and "rebellion" to drive this point home. This is a consistent tactic of Rand when writing on movements or viewpoints she disagrees with; she modifies the aesthetic perception of the subject, usually while providing vague or...

One of the hot button issues of the day when it comes to gender and sexual politics is the question of "is it gay for a cis dude to date a transgirl," a topic often discussed mostly by cis dudes who are maybe kinda just a little bit homophobic or transphobic. Now I'm not suggesting that asking the question is in itself a hateful or bigoted thing, and for that matter I wouldn't really use the term "hateful" to refer to most of the people asking; I don't think that it represents some epidemic of people who despise or fear gay dudes or transwomen and want to take away their rights; more so it just seems to be a conversation that's mostly had by mildly insecure straight guys who seem to have a vested interest in not being gay, and the discussion will often center around at least an implication of transgirls as "not really women," intentionally or otherwise. Obviously this leaves something to be desired. Enter postmodern/feminist/trans-cen...