Not today, pink elephants of doom
Blue Bulletin #1
Welcome to this month’s roundup, where I share what I’ve been digesting, and nuggets of insight or information I think will be relevant to my readers.
This time we’re exploring the Blue sphere, which covers relationships, identity, and culture.
Let’s dive in.
First off, some mini myth-busting:
It might seem trite to focus on relationships while the biosphere burns and fascists flaunt their victories. On the contrary, fascism is entirely about how we relate to each other. Fighting it requires self-awareness and communal care in equal measure.
We must be able to both articulate and practice ways of relating that transcend the strictures of school, work, and family. To do so, we also need to confront how our social institutions have influenced our most intimate and private spaces.
Such introspection can be scary work, but reading and collating this list felt deeply encouraging. It reminded me I’m not alone, how far I’ve come, and how far I have yet to go.
From why Luigi Mangione is everything we want in a man, to the silliness of functioning like an executive, to the grief of whales and dolphins, these posts turn on their heads long-standing assumptions that keep us from the world we want — in particular the relationships we long for.
Interact with Minors
Against the collective neglect of the young
But now that I am older, I understand it is children who are shackled most of all. What I hated about my former social role as a woman wasn’t that it linked me to children, but that it was unequal, forced upon me, and was not what I wanted for my body. No one does well when they lose control over their life and their body. And there is no group that has less power over their own lives and bodies than kids.
Welcome to the semantic apocalypse
Studio Ghibli style and the draining of meaning
,This is what I fear most about AI, at least in the immediate future. Not some superintelligence that eats the world (it can’t even beat Pokémon yet, a game many of us conquered at ten). Rather, a less noticeable apocalypse. Culture following the same collapse as community on the back of a whirring compute surplus of imitative power provided by Silicon Valley. An oversupply that satiates us at a cultural level, until we become divorced from the semantic meaning and see only the cheap bones of its structure. Once exposed, it’s a thing you have no relation to, really. Just pixels. Just syllables. In some order, yes. But who cares?
The Quietly Coercive Nature of “Vanilla” Sex
Sex is a buffet of endless, diverse options - and none of them are required
I think one of the biggest problems in how people conceive of diverse sexualities is by attempting to place all sex acts upon a single hierarchy from "extremely kinky" to "tame." Under this framework, activities like PIV and oral are viewed as neutral precursors to the racier and more extreme forms of sex that a person must "work themselves up" to -- and this obscures that those supposedly neutral sexual activities can be both incredibly exciting & fulfilling to some, and downright disturbing or traumatizing to others.
I will hereafter be referring to this belief system as the Vanilla-to-Kinky Staircase Model — and I believe that queer people, straight people, kinky people, hard-core fetishists, trauma survivors, and the supposedly “vanilla” alike are all shortchanged by it.
Luigi Mangione is setting a new standard and it’s over for straight men
It would be easy to dismiss the furore as silly: just shallow women and gay men simping over good looks. But that wouldn’t explain the lesbians also going feral for him. And, in some cases, even the straight men. Older women want to mother him. Older men love him like a son.
No, in the case of Luigi Mangione, it goes far, far beyond his looks. This mass infatuation is merely revealing deep-seated truths about our western collective consciousness, values system, and sociopolitical landscape (including outside of the USA)… as well as what women want and admire in a man.
But at the end of the day, I think it boils down to just one thing. Read till the end to find out what that is (yes, this is bait. I’ll do whatever I can to retain your frazzled attention span).
You Need To Function Like An Executive
, I always want to start in the middle, but I know I should start at the boring beginning, so: what is executive function?
It’s a term used across diagnostic categories, from autism to dementia to chronic fatigue, and it emerged in the literature during the 1970’s, although the idea of a hierarchical structure of inhibition in the human brain can be traced to European scientists in the late 19th century, when attention became a modern problem.
I’m not the first neurodivergent to turn a side-eye toward the concept — my friend and colleague Marta Rose has called it ‘a set of late capitalist values masquerading as skills’, the philosopher of neurodiversity Robert Chapman has referred to it as ‘a general list of skills required for getting a job as an office manager’, and the neuroethics scholar Andrew Ivan Brown has written that it’s ‘an example of how psychology establishes ‘inner truths’ about what it means to be naturally human.’
“Why Does Everything Feel So Sexual If We’re All So Sexless?”
, Nevertheless, there is a sexual visibility that is far more contemporary. People were just as freaky and horny throughout probably every other century of human history, but it was not a constant, public element of every culture… Sex was once relegated to specific spaces and arenas of our lives. Now, conceptually, it’s everywhere. Not even strictly through clothing or music, but literally, we now have constant, unlimited access to an inconceivable amount of pornography through our phones. It is this turn psychologically that I think is producing much of today’s sexlessness, paired with the general isolation and anomie of contemporary technology. Sex and eroticism are no longer a specific “thing” we must venture to certain places or pursue certain actions to obtain. They’re a concept, always already available and yet somehow still just out of reach.
How gratitude buttresses the myth of meritocracy
, Gratitude, in other words, is often a kind of assertion of meritocracy. You are grateful that you deserve success—a deservingness validated by the fact that other deserving people (or divine presences) have helped you to success. You are boosted by the virtuous because you, too, are virtuous. To express gratitude in this context is to express gratitude for one’s own worthiness, the stellar qualifies that have attracted fate, friends, professional contacts, and the public to help you on your ascent.
The truth is that meritocracy is a myth; the factors that lead to success tend to have a lot more to do with who has been blessed with generational capital, white support networks, or simple good luck, than with anything else.
The world’s most costly allergy
, The UN reports that 140 women and girls die every day at the hands of their sexual partner or close male relative. One every 10 minutes. Men are four times more likely to die by suicide than women—often citing reasons directly caused by patriarchal masculinity like not feeling like they could ask for help, failing to ‘be a man,’ and trying to toughen up instead of addressing grief.
Given its immense impact on the world, we should be discussing patriarchal masculinity every single day in Congress, in every religious sermon, in elementary schools, in board meetings, in the Supreme Court, in peace summits and in our families.
Instead we almost never talk about it. It’s madness.
Why I Said F*ck Building Community
, Many of us have terrible and traumatic experiences in spaces that exhausted us but initially promised community. We have been bullied into not showing up and we crave softness. Softness in the sense of holding each other’s flaws and perfections, hurts and happiness with a commitment to understanding and love. Really, we want humans without baggage. But baby, even if the baggage ain’t on you, it’s in you and in them. You can’t erase what was even if you think you’ve healed from it. Humans are complex and we must understand that yes, we deserve the community we envision, and we must be flexible in embracing the community that is around us.
Where the Fuck are the Normal People?
Social Media Only Works When You Feel Jealous
,I won’t deny that escapism is often a valid and necessary aspect of the Internet. However, when I think of the amount of time spent, eyes glued to screen, wasted on consuming unattainable influencer content… I feel a little nauseous. I won’t go full conspiracy here, but if many of us can be kept inside, at bay, behind doors, behind screens, watching the wealthy do more, have more, ‘be’ more. Where does that leave us? Social media works best when we’re jealous, keeping us in a cycle of longing that morphs with each swipe. “If I looked like that, if I had that house, if my fridge was that organized, if I had those friends, etc etc etc etc.” What if instead of looking up at the pseudo-aspirational, we looked directly at each other?
How Goddess Worship Was Suppressed to Give Rise to Patriarchy
In humanity’s earliest days, God was actually a woman
,It’s difficult to pinpoint when exactly this shift happened, not only because oral traditions make precise dating elusive but also because devotion to the Goddess often continued in secrecy. Still, at some point, this transformation clearly did take place.
The more crucial question, however, is not just when this happened but how. In The Shrinking Goddess, Schipper notes that a key tactic in the subjugation of the Goddess was the systematic rebranding of her power — transforming her from a loving creator into a chaotic force to be feared. This also likely coincided with the rise of agriculture.
What followed the ideological dismantling and physical destruction of the Goddess worship was also the slow erasure of her very existence from cultural memory.
Self-publishing my way through the gender wars
, At Rebel Girls, we did the opposite. We acknowledged that, yes, girls would face real challenges simply because they were girls. But there had been women before them who overcame these obstacles, and future girls would benefit from the obstacles they, too, would overcome.
Likewise, with Stellar Stories for Boys of the Future, I asked: What are the obstacles that boys will face because they are boys? What role does the system play in shaping boys’ lives? What is the dark side of male privilege, and what can be done to expose the fallacies of this system and make sure that boys learn that there may be an alternative?
Pink Elephants of Doom
Mental health at the end of the world
,The point of prepping isn’t to spend the rest of our lives indulging in fearmongering and doomscrolling. The point is to develop an accurate, realistic, grounded sense of what lies ahead for us, and to prepare for it the best we can. In genuine prepping, you have to imagine the scenario that takes you down.
The ultimate prep is preparing to die. It’s the biggest pink elephant.
For me, that means imagining the scenarios that will overwhelm my family’s resilience and ingenuity. It means seeing the things that could take us down, regardless of how well we prepare for them.
Once you’ve done that, something weird happens. It liberates you.
The grief of whales and dolphins
, For years, the idea that whales and dolphins could experience grief was seen as sentimental, unscientific, or even anthropomorphic. But research is now proving what shouldn't come as a surprise —that by living in these complex societies, whales and dolphins are capable of feeling deep, emotional loss when a member of their pod dies.
Knowing this, it’s clear that whales and dolphins don’t just recognise death—they feel its weight just like we do. Just like other highly social animals do. Elephants return to the bodies of fallen companions, touching and even carrying their bones. Chimpanzees have been seen sitting in silence beside their deceased, while giraffes stand guard over fallen herd members.
For me, Jeremy Bentham (an early animal welfare advocate) summed it up best in 1789 when he asked: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
Let it grow bigger
, Responding to a feeling with interpretation and analysis can obviously work (don’t unsubscribe!), but that day in London reminded me it can also be a form of avoidance. This is surprising, because technically speaking, I hadn’t avoided anything: I’d reflected on my feelings in private, then paused thinking about them to be present for other people, then been vulnerable, open, and curious about them with a friend. And yet that moment in the restaurant, when I let the feeling spread through my body, it felt like the first time I’d truly faced it. Suddenly the rest of my tinkering with it seemed like a kind of denial, a pushing away. Rather than accepting the pit at face value, as an emotion in its own right, I’d moralized it, then set out to solve it.
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Thank you Peter for including me! I'm honoured to be amongst so many other interesting reads too, so thanks also for these great recommendations! 💜
Thanks Peter!