pick up your sword, bruh

If you feel this like, inviolate respect for women and deep, primal terror that your male sexuality is inherently predatory and invasive and that you should just be as quietly nonthreatening as possible for the continued privilege of being around them instead of having to either be alone or hang out with other boys: you're probably a girl. Like, probably in the way that 99.9999~ is "probable".

The fact I hung out with TWO lesbians who I was deeply regretful I'd never be able to get to date, how pretty I thought their non-feminine gender presentations were, the way I held desperately onto the nail polish a girl had put on my nails during a school event for as long as I possibly could - the way I had been the only "boy" to ask her to do it.

The way I felt fundamentally vulnerable and afraid whenever I was in the boy's changing room, idling and freezing up until they started to trickle out and I could quickly change and be the last one out the door.

Word already had a word count?! That WORKED?

venmo

1. "insisting that eggplant can never take on the genuine character of yumminess is vulgar materialism"

this claim rests on a premise which i did not in fact put forward. i do not argue that eggplant possesses an immutable, ahistorical tendency towards grossness; only that a real, existing dish containing eggplant, under the current historical circumstances, cannot be considered by any but the ignorant or the wholly unscrupulous to be yummies. on the frontier of scientific development, advances in genetic engineering, or the invention of new quality culinary techniques, may well lead to breakthroughs producing entirely new categories of yummies in the future. but we are not utopians, and so we make a clear distinction between such speculation, and the material conditions of the present. just as the real science of nuclear chemistry had no relevance to the false claims made by pre-modern alchemists of transmuting the elements, we should not allow the invocation of what might be possible under a higher stage of development to misguide us. for by this rhetorical sleight-of-hand, i.e., hinting coyly at a form of eggplant which, by some unknown technological process, takes on the true nature of yummies, jiejie implies thusly that the dish which is right now in front of our eyes may constitute such an instance, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary! whether eggplant could be converted into yummies in theory is entirely beside the point. the dinner of tomorrow, while a compelling topic in its own right, must not blind us to the dinner of today.

2. "it's good for you"