men just love to run their fucking mouth about what women do or do not want without even once considering consulting any actual women on the matter

The heatwave that affected England and Wales in June killed about 440 people a day during its three-day peak, scientists have estimated. Across the whole of the June heatwave, plus the one in May, about 2,700 people lost their lives prematurely.

[...]

For comparison, about four people die each day as a result of road traffic collisions and about 35 a day because of alcohol and drug use, according to government statistics.

[...]

The UKHSA previously found that more than 10,000 people died in Britain because of summer heatwaves between 2020 and 2024. The Climate Change Committee has warned for more than a decade that the UK’s plans to protect people from rapidly worsening extreme weather are inadequate. The June heatwave was the widest and most intense ever recorded in Europe and is estimated to have cost more than 20,000 lives. In Germany, where a record high of 41.7C was set, almost 5,500 people are thought to have died, according to preliminary government data. Schools, hospitals and transport have also been seriously affected.

i've outlined in a past post my opinion on the concept of pedophilia (thanks to tumblr's useless search function I can't find the post) but regardless, I subscribe to the model of human sexuality that goes as follows: it is so obviously socially constructed and conditioned there is really no point in arguing it is innate, and innate/'biological' arguments feed directly into reactionary sentiment surrounding sexuality. probably preaching to the choir here but felt the need to clarify regardless.

patriarchal societies (and resulting "family units") have widespread issues with child sexual abuse and sexuality. it has been stated before that incestuous abuse is an inevitable result of patriarchal family structure--especially with the role of the father. at the same time, there exists this persistent sexual shame and repression that--especially when coupled with entitlement--is a breeding ground for depravity. these things seem contradictory on the surface: everyone knows of the nefarious pedophile, but victims of sexual abuse (especially children) (especially if the perpetrator is a family member) are so often failed by law enforcement and peers alike when they try to do everything 'correctly'. everyone insists they hate pedophiles and rapists but the second that shadowy cartoon villain image is shattered by reality, they refuse to accept it. the reality is simple: perpetrators of such crimes are more likely to be someone you know, someone you trust, even someone you love. there are also common misconceptions about csa that I do hold the "innate" model of pedophilia accountable for: not enough people are aware that an adult can sexually abuse both children and adults, and be "attracted" to both. while some offenders may have a preferred age, they are still opportunists, and not all are wealthy or respected enough to have preferences in victims like those in the epstein files. I put "attracted" in quotes earlier because the way people who commit sex crimes are approached in most related research is frankly stupid as hell and it's very hard to take any of it seriously. or "interviews with pedophiles". to me this is about as useful and insightful as true crime content. oh well, it'll still be taken far more seriously by society at large than anything i'm saying here will, because terms like "feminism" and "social construct" are scary buzzwords to many.

now this is where I may upset people. a lot of discourse surrounding incest and pedophilia is extremely online. like i'm going to be so completely honest, I do not give a fuck if someone watches an anime with incest in it, or engages in some sort of sexual roleplay with another adult. do I think lolicon and shotacon are particularly helpful additions to society? no. but these did not appear out of nowhere as some sort of conspiracy to make people abuse children. rather, they feed into already existing power structures. cart before the horse type of situation. anime in particular gets a lot of flack for its themes but the men making whatever media you find acceptable will form secret societies, blackmail each other, and even travel internationally for the opportunity to rape children so perhaps the reality is capitalism and patriarchy reward this behavior universally.

the current attitude towards victims of csa/incest is hostile and far removed from reality and my recommendation is reading about how average people and the legal system actually react to these cases in real life. about how there are entire organizations whose purpose is defending child abusers. it's ironic, isn't it? how the fuck do you get to such a point, where "pedophile" is such a horrible thing to be, but the money and legal power sure seems to paint a very different picture? this is again where I mention the 'very online' phenomenon. a lot of outrage you see online is performative. I feel like as social media use becomes more common, this will be more and more of an issue. we have a unique ability today to hear from and communicate with more people than ever before. with that comes consequences if you do take internet algorithms driven by engagement as accurate portrayals of wider communities offline. remember outrage drives engagement. you are more likely to see something online that pisses you off. maybe it'll even be this post today.

father-daughter incest is the most commonly reported. this is only as "natural" as the concept of the nuclear family.

Then there is the YouTuber talking about Transformers, casually dropping the "Iraq war aesthetic" like it's a color palette. Desert punk. Military core. A vibe. This is what happens when your country hasn't had a war on its own soil in living memory; the violence becomes media, a backdrop for childhood toys. The explosions are no longer the sound of mothers screaming; they are cool action sequences. They are digesting the visual debris of massacre as a nostalgic fashion choice, scraping the trauma off and compressing it into a genre for their retro-futurist fantasies. The apocalypse becomes a mood board.

And finally, the girl recounting celebrity love triangles from her childhood, flippantly mentioning how the U.S. was "busy with the Iraq war or whatever." Or whatever. That single phrase is the thesis statement of American innocence. Over a million dead, a region destabilized for a century, an endless river of grief; and for her, it was the commercial break between pop culture segments. It didn't raise her rent. It didn't stop her Wi-Fi. The violence is geo-locked to brown skin and distant deserts, just background noise like a refrigerator humming. She has the luxury of forgetting because the machine doesn't eat her children, it eats yours.

so it wasn't as though he was writing it in by accident. in fact, it's extremely easy to read this passage and understand some of the examples i gave above as being purposeful. in idiot, rogozhin and nastasya both use queerness to manipulate myshkin and aglaya respectively. both characters are "damaged goods" both mentally and in terms of sexual development, leading to perversion. in the cases of trusotsky and stavrogin, both characters are explicitly villainous and their villainy comes in part from their willingness to corrupt other men by any means possible, including sexually.

i can't think of any god-fearing excuse for whatever the hell happens in netochka nezvanova. the state tried to execute him because they knew that if he wrote a complete novel with a lesbian protagonist he would be too powerful. sad!

obviously this isn't woke or anything, and there were authors writing in the same period and similar circumstances who wrote much more liberal viewpoints into their works. however dostoevsky was a conservative & intensely religious man, so this isn't exactly surprising. i just wish that people could talk about this subtext without being shot down or ignored. these toxic relationships are among the most interesting parts of dostoevsky's novels to me as a gay person and i'm sick of people pretending that dostoevsky couldn't have been a) an incredible writer b) a conservative christian c) purposefully engaging with a spectre of queerness.

anyway. here are some articles i've found that do discuss the topic. i haven't had a chance to read through all of them, but they at least look interesting (all free and available for download)

dostoevsky and the (missing) marriage plot by anna a. berman (2021)

dostoevsky's comley boy: homoerotic desire and aesthetic strategies in a raw youth by susanne fusso (2000)

+ fusso has a whole book called "discovering sexuality in dostoevsky"

a falliable narrator and an inscrutable object: desire as structure in dostoevsky's the eternal husband by james phillips (2024)

"mann-mannliche" love in dostoevsky's fiction (an approach to the possessed) by irene zohrab (2002)

dostoevsky in europe: "the life of a great sinner" as source material for "the possessed" and "the adolescent", and ulrichs's confessional 'third sex' theory and some court cases in germany by irene zohrab (2001)

dostoyevsky: epilepsy, mysticism, and homosexuality by j.r. maze (1981)