We'll always have vanilla? No, of course not. We could lose it.

Climate change and deforestation destroy our planet piece by piece. We can lose vanilla.

"Extracted from the bean pod of a delicate orchid, vanilla must be grown under exceptionally precise conditions along a band of the earth between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. This supreme finickiness makes it unusually vulnerable to the growing shocks of climate change and deforestation."
— Aimee Nezhukumatathil, "This Is How the World’s Favorite Scent Disappears," New York Times, Aug. 4, 2024, part of the What to Eat on a Burning Planet series

Vanilla by gate74 from Pixabay

See what's happening:

Evacuations Ordered As 'Exceptionally Dangerous' Wildfire Rages Near Athens, Greece: Hundreds of firefighters backed by more than 30 water-dropping planes are battling a major wildfire raging out of control on the northern fringes of the Greek capital. Elena Becatoros, HuffPost, Aug 12, 2024

20th-century Zionism took many forms

Photo by Gidon Pico from Pixabay

One news article

Do Donald Trump and Kamala Harris identify as ‘Zionist’? Here’s what their campaigns told us, Ron Kampeas, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 12, 2024:

"Zionism, born as a modern ideology in the 19th century, sought to establish a Jewish polity in the Land of Israel. Since that was achieved with Israel’s establishment in 1948, its meaning has been contested, but is generally taken to signify support for Israel as a Jewish state, and for its citizens. Many Jews self-identify as Zionist, and antisemitism watchdogs caution that bigots will often use the word “Zionist” in their attacks on Jews."

One essay

From a 7,000-word article, "Israel’s Descent," by Adam Shatz, London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 12 · 20 June 2024

"...as Shlomo Sand reminds us in Deux peuples pour un état?, there was another, dissident Zionism, a ‘cultural Zionism’ that advocated the creation of a binational state based on Arab-Jewish co-operation, one that counted among its members Ahad Ha’am, Judah Magnes, Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt. In 1907, the cultural Zionist Yitzhak Epstein accused the Zionist movement of having forgotten ‘one small detail: that there is in our beloved land an entire people that has been attached to it for hundreds of years and has never considered leaving it’. Epstein and his allies, who founded Brit Shalom, the Alliance for Peace, in 1925, imagined Zion as a place of cultural and spiritual rebirth. Any attempt to create an exclusively Jewish state, they warned, would turn Zionism into a classical colonial movement and result in permanent warfare with the Palestinian Arabs. After the Arab riots of 1929, Brit Shalom’s secretary, Hans Kohn, denounced the official Zionist movement for ‘adopting the posture of wounded innocents’ and for dodging ‘the least debate with the people who live in this country. We have depended entirely on the force of British power. We have set ourselves goals that were inevitably going to degenerate into conflict.’

But this was no accident: conflict with the Arabs was essential to the Zionist mainstream. For the advocates of ‘muscular Zionism’, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has argued, the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine would allow Jews not only to achieve the ‘negation of exile’ but also, and paradoxically, to reinvent themselves as citizens of the white West – in Herzl’s words, as a ‘rampart of Europe against Asia’. Brit Shalom’s vision of reconciliation and co-operation with the indigenous population was unthinkable to most Zionists, because they regarded the Arabs of Palestine as squatters on sacred Jewish land."

After Israel was recognized as a state in 1948,

"Jewish critics of Israel who traced their roots to the cultural Zionism of Magnes and Buber – or to the anti-Zionist Jewish Labor Bund – would find themselves vilified as heretics and traitors. In Our Palestine Question, Geoffrey Levin shows how American Jewish critics of Israel were dislodged from Jewish institutions in the decades following the state’s formation."

There was

"Fayez Sayegh, the leading Palestinian spokesman in the US in the 1950s and early 1960s...joined forces with an anti-Zionist rabbi, Elmer Berger of the American Council for Judaism, who had already established himself as a critic of Zionism in his 1951 book, A Partisan History of Judaism, in which he assailed the movement for embracing ‘Hitler’s decree of separatism’ and betraying Judaism’s universalist message."

Today, "the most consequential wave of resistance may be the one we are seeing now from a generation of young Jews for whom identification with an explicitly illiberal, openly racist state, led by a close ally of Donald Trump, is impossible to stomach."

Books referenced

Note: Deux peuples pour un État? is a translation from Sand's Hebrew into French by Michel Bilis.

A Partisan History of Judaism by Elmer Berger (Amazon)

Wikipedia

United States support for Israel in the Israel–Hamas war

Another essay

Jody Alyn reflects on kibbutz life in Israel in the year following the Yom Kippur War (which was in 1973). Some people at the kibbutz "made fierce argument for a shared future with Palestinian Israelis." Alyn points out:

"History depends on who tells it. The histories of Israel/Palestine are convoluted, conflicting and confused by colonialism and capitalism. They go back to World War II and the partition of Palestine in 1948. Or to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Or to Russian pogroms, the Ottoman Empire or to Judea and Samaria in the Iron and Bronze ages."

Here, "people who lived through the same events came out with different stories depending on where they sat in the system." Unfortunately, "Israel was favored—and used—by the British colonizers in power."

She says: "My idealism died in 1995 when Israeli Prime Minister and Nobel Laureate Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli settler. The oh-so-fragile peace process was also dealt a fatal blow." She found herself "ashamed, angry and afraid of what Israel had become."

"What we do to the 'other,' we do to ourselves," and therefore: "We must all call for a permanent cease-fire; for regime changes, for truth and reconciliation and for collaborative, cooperative rebuilding. Now and forevermore."

Read: Can I Take My Identity Back From Israel?: Reflections of one Jew on her life and times. Jody Alyn. Age of Empathy, Nov 29, 2023.

What do politicians use it to mean?

Returning to the JTA article, mentioned earlier:

"Asked by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency if Vice President Kamala Harris considers herself a Zionist, a campaign aide replied:

“The Vice President and Governor [Tim] Walz have been strong and longstanding supporters of Israel as a secure, democratic homeland for the Jewish people. They will always ensure Israel can defend itself from threats, including from Iran and Iran-backed terrorists such as Hamas and Hezbollah.”

Told that the first sentence of that response would meet perhaps the most common definition of “Zionist,” the aide replied that beyond the statement she relayed, she had “nothing for you.”"

Virginia Heffernan, Nov 2025:

"Catholics and Protestants are fighting again, and the subject is Israel.

In other terms, this grudge match is being widely reported on. But we misunderstand the whole thing when we portray it as entirely between isolationist nativists and Christian Zionists. True, the first group, exemplified by Nick Fuentes, hates Jews. The second, exemplified by Charlie Kirk, has made an uneasy alliance with them in anticipation of the Rapture.

But what’s more salient is that the first group are Catholics, and the second are Protestants (or Evangelicals, as the mainline Protestant denominations have essentially collapsed)."

Here's a religious point of view

Some time after October 7, 2023, Netanyahu cited a victim's mother who said she wanted Hamas destroyed. He said: "One thousand prosecutors at The Hague cannot stand even for a second" against what the woman had said, nor "against the justness of our moral path."

Of this, Peter Beinart commented:

"Such statements can best be understood as a kind of theology. Israel is righteous by definition. Its war in Gaza remains moral even when its crimes are documented for all to see. More than sixty years ago, Hannah Arendt warned that Jewish nationalism contained this danger. 'The greatness of this people was once that it believed in God,' she wrote in 1963. 'And now this people believes only in itself?' That's the real meaning of Netanyahu's words. When he proudly declares that a Jewish state cannot be judged by any external standard, he is making that state — and the Jewish people for whom it speaks — an object of worship."

He refers to the Biblical story of Korach:

He adds: "I wish leftist activists more often acknowledged that there's a tradition of cultural Zionism, championed in the mid-twentieth century by figures like Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, which wanted a thriving Jewish culture in Palestine–Israel but opposed a Jewish state."

Consider against the 19th-century seeds of fascism

A biography of the Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca Amat de Vallombrosa

“Deporting Jewish activists who visit the West Bank to engage in protective presence used to be unthinkable. But since October, five Jews have been deported for participating in Israeli- and Jewish-led solidarity initiatives. Are left-wing Jewish young adults really enemies of the state?” (Why Does the Jewish State Keep Deporting Diaspora Jews?, Sam Stein, Haaretz, June 11, 2026)

In 1998, Netanyahu gave a speech in Washington in which he differed from Clinton's policy about the peace process. By contrast, the speech was not in Congress, but at a private gathering of evangelical Christians.

But Evangelicals have also played a role in disrupting the peace process. 'I was ambassador for four years of the peace process, and the Christian fundamentalists were vehemently opposed to the peace process,' says Itamar Rabinovich, who served as Israeli ambassador to the U.S. between 1993 and 1996, under the Labor governments of Rabin and Shimon Peres. 'They believed that the land belonged to Israel as a matter of divine right. So they immediately became part of a campaign by the Israeli right to undermine the peace process.'

No one played that card more forcefully than Benjamin 'Bibi' Netanyahu, who as prime minister used the Christian right to fend off pressure from the Clinton administration to proceed with the peace process.

On a visit to Washington, D.C., in 1998, Netanyahu hooked up with Jerry Falwell at the Mayflower Hotel the night before his scheduled meeting with Clinton.

'I put together 1,000 people or so to meet with Bibi and he spoke to us that night,' recalls Falwell. 'It was all planned by Netanyahu as an affront to Mr. Clinton.'

That evening, Falwell promised Netanyahu that he would mobilize pastors all over the country to resist the return of parts of the occupied West Bank territory to the Palestinians. Televangelist John Hagee, who gave $1 million to the United Jewish Appeal the following month, told the crowd that the Jewish return to the Holy Land signaled the 'rapidly approaching...final moments of history,' then brought them to a frenzy chanting, 'Not one inch!' -- a reference to how much of the West Bank should be transferred to Palestinian control.

The next day, Netanyahu met with Clinton at the White House. 'Bibi told me later,' Falwell recalls, 'that the next morning Bill Clinton said, 'I know where you were last night.' The pressure was really on Netanyahu to give away the farm in Israel. It was during the Monica Lewinsky scandal...Clinton had to save himself, so he terminated the demands [to relinquish West Bank territory] that would have been forthcoming during that meeting, and would have been very bad for Israel.'

"American Rapture," by Craig Unger, Vanity Fair, Dec. 2005. page 220.

Enslaved scribes of early Christian texts

Sarah E. Bond, author of Trade and Taboo...

...has a new article in Hyperallergic, "The Enslaved People Who Wrote Down the New Testament": Art history has long concealed the scribes who put swaths of the Bible and early Christian writings on paper. July 28, 2024.

"In ancient Egypt and early Imperial China, scribes were of high status," she says, but this contrasts with "many Greek and Roman cities, villas, libraries, churches, and even monasteries," where scribes were often enslaved.

These books are mentioned in the article:

The Slaves of the Churches: A History by Mary E. Sommar

She also directs us to "Female Scribes in Roman Antiquity and Early Christianity," an article by Kim Haines-Eitzen.

And another article: "In one study, ancient historian Adam Serfass reconstructs how Gregory gave enslaved people to his friends and ordered them bought at auction and even tortured."

Why this interests me

I've written about eunuchs in history.

When we read about eunuchs serving as scribes, we should look at the context of whether they were enslaved. Also, if sole authorship is credited to someone (eunuch or not), we should ask who was helping them (maybe enslaved people, some of whom may have been eunuchs.

You may also be interested:

On gendered argumentation in 20th-century New York

Just learned of this book:

It's about "the New York Intellectuals—a heavily Jewish scene, formed around Cold War liberalism and high modernist literary tastes, that profoundly shaped everything from art criticism to foreign policy," as David Klion, contributing editor to Jewish Currents, explains today.

Klion says:

"A rare work of academic history with crossover appeal to more mainstream readers, Write Like a Man is also the first book to give full attention to the fraught gender dynamics that shaped the New York Intellectuals. Most of the group was male, defined by names like Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Irving Howe. Grinberg not only gives fair due to the most prominent women in the group—chiefly Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, and Midge Decter—she also ingeniously demonstrates how gender shaped the actual writing produced by both male and female New York Intellectuals.

The title comes from a killer 1963 quote from NYRB co-founder Jason Epstein: 'With women in that crowd, the first thing you thought about was whether they were good-looking and if you could sleep with them. But if a woman could write like a man, that was enough.' To Grinberg, 'writing like a man' refers to a mode of rigorous, swaggering, aggressive argumentation rooted in the legendary cafeteria alcoves of then all-male City College, where many of the future New York Intellectuals spent the 1930s engaged in verbal duels with Stalinists. It's a style still recognizable today, and Grinberg portrays it as a means of assimilation for the sons of poor Yiddish-speaking immigrants trying to assert their masculinity in an America that stereotyped Jews as meek and effeminate. Grinberg’s female subjects, as the Epstein line suggests, held their own in the group because they were able to master this style—though as Grinberg also shows, the women in the scene who came from different backgrounds (either as gentiles or, in Arendt’s case, as a German Jewish emigre with formidable Old World academic credentials) received more deference from their male peers than the shtetl-descended women who were often treated simply as wives."

More on Jason Epstein

Michael Castleman explains how Jason Epstein invented trade paperbacks:

"In 1953, Jason Epstein was a recent Columbia University graduate working in publishing — temporarily, he thought — as an editorial assistant at Doubleday. He lived in Greenwich Village, a short walk from the funky but glorious (and now defunct) Eighth Street Bookshop, which counted among its patrons Jack Kerouac, Susan Sontag, E.E. Cummings, Edward Albee, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka.

To Epstein’s wide young eyes, the place was paradise. He visited after work, sometimes lingering for hours. But his editorial assistant’s salary paid so little (forty-five dollars a week) that he couldn’t afford hardcovers, and that was all Eighth Street Bookshop stocked.

One day Epstein asked the store’s owners if they might be interested in selling less expensive paperback editions of their hardcovers to appeal to working folks and young people like him.

Not Pocket Books. Heaven forbid!

No, Epstein explained, he envisioned a larger format and better paper..."

Excerpted from Michael Castleman, The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing (2024), excerpt reprinted in LitHub

Related

The Birth of Doubt: Confronting Uncertainty in Early Rabbinic Literature (2020)
Moshe Halbertal, trans. from Hebrew by Elli Fischer.
Series: Brown Judaic Studies.

Argument Isn’t Everything: On Creativity in Philosophy, Justin Weinberg. Daily Nous, December 10, 2025

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Project 2025 says 'porn' to mean 'imagined enemies of the family'

What does Roberts mean by "children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries." What is this "pornography" that Project 2025 says should be "outlawed"?

Melissa Gira Grant reminds us today in "The Real Targets of Project 2025’s War on Porn" (The New Republic):

"The prominence of pornography in Project 2025 is no mistake, of course; it’s absolutely core to the authors’ agenda for Trump. The attack on porn is inseparable from the attacks on abortion and contraception, on marriage equality and trans rights, and of course on drag queens and library books—all of which, they believe, threaten the straight, married family as the natural bedrock of society. All of these threats, to them, constitute pornography. By calling on the president to outlaw porn, they’re calling for the eradication of all these imagined enemies of the family.

Though Project 2025 does not define 'pornography,' their concern clearly extends beyond porn itself. Pornography, according to the Mandate, is responsible for the 'normalization' of non-normative gender expression and identity among young people—what the right often calls 'gender ideology.' Pornography could be anything that contributes to that purported normalization. 'Pornography,' Roberts continues, is 'manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.' And how should it be outlawed? 'The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.' Project 2025 is not targeting 'pornography' as something that’s harmful to children per se, but rather redefining anything concerning sexuality and gender that they say is harmful to children as pornography."

Pay attention:

"Behind all this is what philosopher Judith Butler calls anti-gender ideology and movements, which is how we should understand Project 2025’s anti-pornography rhetoric. It’s a transnational movement, fueling and also fueled by the reassertion of patriarchal order, of a return to normative sex and gender roles, and of ordering the world by sex and gender hierarchies. Gender in this movement has come to be regarded as a code, as Butler has described it—for pedophilia, for the destruction of the family, 'a plot by urban elites to impose their beliefs on ‘real’ people,' a threat to civilization, a threat to masculinity. When the fight is defined that way, a fight to save not just children and families but society and civilization, nearly any crackdown can be justified."

Read also: Exclusive: Justice Amy Coney Barrett defends overturning Roe v. Wade and reveals Supreme Court dynamics in new book Joan Biskupic, CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst, September 2, 2025

Aziz Rana on Republicans' constitutional control

Constitutional scholar Aziz Rana talked to The Ink. Rana is author of The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (2024). You can subscribe to the Ink if you like this stuff — in fact, now's the time.

Rana says there were

"specific dynamics in the mid-20th century. From the New Deal to World War II, through the Cold War and decolonization, that created the conditions for political agreement rather than anything that's there in the text of the Constitution. And now all of that has gone away. I worry that liberals oftentimes invoke that broken set of agreements whenever you see even more brazen acts of misbehavior by either the Court or political actors like Trump. And I just don't know that that's going to work going forward."

That agreement "defined politics in the mid-20th century." It was a time when "there was some degree of center-right, center-left consensus around the terms of the institutions, how folks operated with respect to each other, which types of discretionary misbehavior were out of bounds, and which kinds of discretionary misbehavior would be papered over." But now, it has broken down. We have "nostalgia" for it, but that doesn't help. The breakdown explains why "we're in this moment."

Some liberals appeal to what the Constitution supposedly really says or should mean, at least on a symbolic level if not with any real-world political force that they could leverage to promote their ideas. Although "Constitutional veneration...can provide some constraints," in the long term it may be unhelpful, as it legitimizes the whole system that lets certain people get away with bad behavior.

More specifically:

"The problem, in my view, is that the long-term trajectory of American power and the centrality of the presidential office to the national security state and the national security apparatus have over the long term overwhelmed these proceduralist constraints such that the War Powers Resolution is deeply ineffective.

The courts overwhelmingly ended up deferring to presidential authority. And I'd say that the collapse of the Soviet Union was seen as a validation of not just the American Cold War project but specifically the belligerent, aggressive Reaganite approach to the Cold War. That was very closely tied to market fundamentalism, to a kind of belligerent posture towards the world, to unilateralism globally.

And all of this got built into the cultural politics of the country, and made it very, very difficult, in Congress and certainly in the courts, to constrain the presidency. And we saw this dynamic play out again in the War on Terror."

Sure, "use whatever constitutional devices that are available to try to hold Trump accountable," but recognize "why those devices fail time and time again."

With Republicans in control of the Supreme Court,

"the internal disagreements of the right — how much immunity is too much immunity, how much of the administrative state to gut, whether or not to completely get rid of the right to abortion or just to functionally get rid of it by systematically undermining the checks on laws that would constrain reproductive rights — that is the sum total of the legal universe. And that means that the rest of us are effectively now just subject to their internal disagreements."

Democrats and journalists still imagine an "ideological spectrum" that used to exist in the Supreme Court but no longer does. The justices will only agree to hear cases on things they care about ("affirmative action, abortion, Trump's immunity, the nature of the administrative state"), and they'll debate the answers from their own perspectives. Issues that matter to many Americans today — "the carceral state," "a fundamental right to education" — are never going to be taken up by the court.

We need "systematic changes to constitutional structure, including some very fundamental reforms to the structure of the Supreme Court itself." More justices on the court, term limits for them, and better procedures to amend the Constitution.

Rana's book:

2026 addendum

"It does not matter, in practical terms, whether ICE’s actions are legal. In mafia states, legal is a malleable notion. What matters is that they are wrong. What matters is how they can be stopped." Sarah Kendzior, January 15, 2026

Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959–1968

Today, CNN has an article: "In upstate New York, Casa Susanna was a safe haven for trans women in 1960s America," Suyin Haynes, CNN, June 26, 2024

"With coiffed black hair, pearls, a hand on her hip and a high-heeled pointed toe, a woman poses jubilantly for the camera on the steps outside her home. Her name is Susanna Valenti, and her home is Casa Susanna, located in the Catskills, in upstate New York. In the 1950s and ’60s, Casa Susanna served as a safe haven and a sanctuary for people to explore their gender identity and expression in ways they were not able to in daily life. ... Purchased in 2004 at a New York City flea market by two art dealers and later acquired by the AGO in 2015, this particular selection of 340 Casa Susanna images are part of a much wider archive, including some currently in the personal collection of photographer Cindy Sherman. ... In the last decade, Casa Susanna has inspired a Broadway play, Harvey Fierstein’s “Casa Valentina”; been referenced in the television series “Transparent”; and was the subject of an acclaimed documentary film released last year."

I hope to get a copy of this book, Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959-1968, to find out if Spanish was spoken there. As CNN says:

"Born in Chile in 1917, Valenti met her wife at a wig shop — popular with crossdressers — that Tonell ran in New York City. Casa Susanna was Tonell’s property in the Catskills; those who frequented the home included Gloria, a millionaire from Michigan; Jessica, a Colombian heiress; and Felicity, an airline pilot and World War II veteran who was the sibling of photographer Lee Miller."

Learn more about the book, a hardcover with 400 color illustrations, on the publisher's website.

Or buy it through Bookshop:

Just learned of this book, which has 400 color illustrations! "In the 1950s and '60s, an underground network of transgender women, gender nonconforming people, and men who dressed as women found refuge at a modest house in the Catskills, New York."

[image or embed]

— Tucker Lieberman (@tuckerlieberman.bsky.social) Jun 26, 2024 at 4:06 PM

Putting effort into ethics

A pithy way of saying that it's important to put effort into living an ethical life:

"When easy doesn’t bring ease

Ease is a simple concept in theory. For example, we might put beeswax on the tracks of a dresser drawer that’s sticking, so the drawer slides with greater ease. Things are more aligned, so they’re easier.

But in modern industry, easier usually means something more like, “less thought is required.” In MarketingSpeak that’s pronounced “convenient”. Ironically these easier choices often don’t bring ease. They bring misalignment with core values. They bring dis-ease."

— B. Lorraine Smith, "Putting ease into easy," email newsletter, June 21, 2024

False "ease" leading to "dis-ease": What feels easy in the short-term won't be in the long-term. Ease eats itself, inverts itself.

Cameron Summers: 'Technology is not the protagonist of history'

Cameron Summers writes for Broken Hands (What is Technology? (Contraslop, Part 1), June 19, 2024):

"Now, students, like most people, mean something very particular when they talk about technology: they always mean, specifically, digital, technology, and usually mean technologies that have been popularized in the last 5-10 years. Maybe they stretch it a bit older and include social media, but usually it’s a very limited slice of time.

My standard move here is to point out that things such as cars, washing machines, printing presses, and usable fire are all forms of technology and request that they refer to the category that they’re talking about as digital technology."

Why?

"This is actually a fairly important thing for me: I believe that discussing this is key to teaching students how to live in the world. One must not treat technology as a special category that only deals with the latest 0.003% of human existence."

Think:

"Here's a question, "broadly: if it offers no benefit, and no path to anything that clearly offers benefit, why are we spending time on it?

Technological determinism – the idea that there is some solid, continuous thing called technology and that this force, this entity, is the protagonist of our historical drama and the mainspring behind other kinds of change – is a false idea.

* * *

This isn’t to say that technology can’t drive change, simply that it doesn’t do that as a primary effect. It’s brought in to do one thing, and then it achieves something else as a side effect because it can extend its function in an interesting and novel way."

"My point is this: technology is not the protagonist of history, especially when we narrowly define it. It is, instead, the inventory of solutions that we have to our problems. Oftentimes they create a new set of problems, and require further solutions to keep using them, though if an alternate solution that lacks the new problems crops up and its own externalities are less pernicious, then people will switch over to the second technology."

It's a long article, and I recommend it.

If you wed yourself to the gender binary, you can't see past it

Regarding:

Claire Dederer. Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.

Unlike people who transform their outrage into art, where it can be a "powerful and subtle hammer," Valerie Solanas

“is like a rat in a trap by the end. She understands, on some level, that material circumstances shape our lives, and must be altered if we are to improve the world. But she’s held back by the limits of her critique—she can’t see past gender. In this way, she exposes the limits of radical feminism. Seeing the world through a binary lens—men versus women—has its uses, but she can’t build a revolution out of that schism. The divide between male and female becomes a kind of spectacle she loses herself in.”

And by “taking us to the farthest extreme of a certain kind of radical feminism, she’s given us a glimpse of its limits. She sacrifices a true vision of liberation on the altar of gender essentialism.”

As Dederer phrases it: “She makes me wonder: How much is my preoccupation with the crimes of men blinkering me? What am I not seeing when I monster the monstrous men?

But as I’d put a slight twist or reemphasis on it: When we think in terms of a binary, and we preoccupy ourselves with monstering one side of it, we blinker ourselves. There will always be much that we’re not seeing.

You may also be interested: Metaphorical Gender in English: Feminine Boats, Masculine Tools and Neuter Animals, Language Matters - October 2, 2017 - 4 min