In April, Helen Joyce got her first book festival booking - a curious four years after her disreputable book ‘Trans’ was released. So I did a deep dive into the festival that hosted her, and found more than I bargained for:.

would recommend dating a game designer bc you go to their birthday party and you get to play 2 bespoke, professional quality, hour-long social strategy / puzzle games that they built for FUN

RT @_VashtiMedia: "The literary festival is an institution that deserves more suspicion than it gets" writes @uncanny_eli uncovering the ri….

I’m very thankful to Vashti (esp. Asha and Ben) for commissioning and edits; as a non-Jewish contributor to the magazine I am very thankful for the solidarities being built within the antizionist left, esp given the PA proscription yesterday.

But they’re just one festival - this is a wider piece about the vulnerability of liberal arts spaces (particularly literary festivals) to right-wing rhetoric in the midst of clampdowns on protest, and how the left needs to fight that right-wing encroachment.

The Oxford Literary Festival, troubled by financial and identity issues, has been pivoting hard towards prioritising ‘free speech’ and provocative ‘debates’ - a pivot that has made them an ideal platform for the team behind the right-wing Free Speech Union.

RT @sashabaker98: *taps sign*.

rarely have i ever read a chapter of a book that pissed me off so bad i had to check if we still had paracetamol in the house.

he keeps citing this study that says 1yo boys are 5x more aggressive than 1yo girls and i am curious about how that study defines aggression.

nobody’s gonna write a book defending my transsexual ass if i engage in Antisocial Behaviours.

as a man i can have sympathy for the causes of some men’s intransigence while also being like ‘hey i take care of myself and am responsible to my communities and i’m not overly impressed by guys who aren’t unless they are under unmanageable strain’.

that’s not a blame thing so much as it is a ‘it would take a more radical intervention than what you’re suggesting to fix men’s greater morbidity’ thing. same thing goes for many women, for people of all groups.

then there’s the stuff about how men are victim blamed for their problems. my view on this is that i dislike ‘just stop being a dumbass’ type rhetoric but it is amply demonstrated that men are very culturally invested in things that are harming them.

yeah bro you’re soooo right the reason support for feminism is impacted is because they’re ‘pathologizing masculinity’ rather than because of concerted conservative campaigns to demonise feminism i want someone to shove this guy into a locker and fill the locker with sand

oh my god this is near unprecedented levels of bridge buying. who’s got that ‘let men be masculine’ tumblr post

men are not taught by men to enjoy and relax into being men. feminists are ultimately not interrupting some male love-in. hegemonic masculinity is designed to make you paranoid!.

again we get this handwringing around the idea that ‘toxic masculinity’ as a term has taught boys that they are only problems, as if boyhood isn’t systematically valued over girlhood, as if this isn’t accepting the way the right /misrepresents/ the left

all this pissing and shitting about how ‘they wouldn’t call it toxic femininity when girls do X’ yeah they just say girls are mean bitches or whatever. the ‘masculinity’ framing is LESS essentialist than what girls generally get.

also that ‘immature or extreme expression’ thing is telling, like a Golden Mean theory of masculinity where everything wrong with how masculinity is culturally taught is just about insufficiency or excess.

yeah basically it’s that and he gets pissy about the press calling those hotness tier lists ‘toxic masculinity’. deeply bizarre injunction here. this is not ‘naturally occurring behaviour’; what he seems to be objecting to is ANY conjunction between a negative term & masculinity