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The return of the femcel 

Where male incels blame feminism for their inability to get laid, femcels identify misogyny, power imbalances and unrealistic beauty standards as the cause of their struggles. Unlike previous waves of political lesbianism, the #femcelrights movement to opt out of sexual relations with men is more of a signal than a concrete commitment.

Real men eat meat

Men eat meat. And if a man does not, his masculinity will be in question; emasculation shall be his malnourishment. Many of us today mock the ‘real men eat meat’ refrain. Yet society still insists that meat consumption is a marker of manliness – and the redder the meat, the manlier the man.

No place like home

There are more than 4.4 million disabled people in Australia. We constitute 18 per cent of the population, and over 90 per cent of us live in private dwellings. Yet only 5 per cent of private houses built here meet national accessibility standards.

Being David Cohen

Recently, I typed ‘David Cohen’ into Google Books, just for the modest thrill of seeing my name appear. The thrill quickly gave way to dismay when I saw how many other writers there are named David Cohen: dozens of the bastards.

To speak or not to speak

What does silence say about our views, the way we use our platforms, our moral capacities, our ethics, our willingness to be silenced or the (always unstated) pecuniary and reputational purposes for which many use public social media profiles? It’s also helpful to consider the implications of silence.

Mix ’n’ mash 

There's a huge amount of luck and discovery involved with the collage technique where – if it’s not reaching the randomness of aleatory music – it’s pretty darn close to genuine randomness and dumb luck.

Nostalgia on demand

The observed correlation between the Covid pandemic and what we might call the nostalgia boom is in one respect no mystery. The Covid years were a time of stress, and people responded to that stress with behaviours that immersed them in broadly pleasant feelings. But Covid didn’t occur in a vacuum, and the stresses associated with it were not reducible to the fear of getting sick. Indeed, for many, the stress of Covid derived not from the virus itself but from the lockdowns aimed at arresting its spread.

Time plays tricks

Ten years ago, the late, great cultural theorist Mark Fisher posited that our ‘montaging of earlier eras’ had reached such fever pitch that we no longer even noticed our submersion in a sea of bygones. And sitting alongside this purported cultural inertia are our increasingly divergent attitudes towards history – the far-right impulse to romanticise the past, the far-left desire to remedy its wrongs – and how they inflect our politics. 

James and the Giant BLEEP

I’m not the first to observe that our desire to keep literature safe, in both senses of the term, reconciles the rubrics of conservative and progressive politics alike, defying even our best attempts to position it ‘neatly and conveniently’ at only one end of the ideological spectrum. As Trisha Tucker points out in The Conversation, what harmonises these efforts is ‘a professed desire to protect young readers from dangerous content’, which seems sensible enough on the surface. Look a little deeper, though, and another consensus starts to materialise, one that elaborates the effects or results that ‘dangerous content’ only implies. ‘In all times and places’, writes Jonathan Zimmerman, a historian of education, the ‘deepest fear of the censor’ is that readers will ‘get the wrong idea’ – and this is true, experts have noted since at least the 1980s, ‘whether the call for censorship comes from the right or from the left’. It seems that whichever way we lean, the ascendant value of reading coagulates around some kind of connection between what we read and how we think, a collective vision that amplifies literature as cultural intervention.

The fall of the madmen

The problem with a fear-based workplace – and indeed world – is that caution and compliance are not compatible with creativity. Creativity searches for the things that have never been done before, on which, by definition, there is as yet no data. Scott Nowell argues that the obsession with data has made us lose faith in our own instincts, so it’s not surprising that creativity is not valued the way it once was. And the source of creativity has shifted to the ­consumers themselves.

Nothing ever lasts

But I hate thinking of myself as the diversity hire. As I said, I’ve worked in the industry for over a decade. ‘I belong in this room,’ I told myself. I’m not a token – despite being called that so many times in my career that I’ve lost count. I’ve earned my place.

Glitter and guts 

All those years I had been excluded from the Anzac narrative because the Defence Act had outlawed Black enlistment. Lest we forget morphs into satire when you uncover the depths of collective amnesia surrounding Black service in World War I and Black resistance since colonisation. The more accurate catchphrase would be Best we forget. How can we be ‘one’ when we are not allowed to remember equally? Nostalgia is selective about remembrance.

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