Robert Gregory

The challenge that prompted this essay: I am actually interested in why so many in the group seem to have a negative view towards modern feminism? Radical feminists exist probably in all waves. And in my opinion, some theories such as toxic masculinity effect both men and women in negative ways. (Please not a shit show, I generally want to hear genuine counterarguments.)

But it gets even worse. More dangerous than any of this is the solution to the workplace problem propounded not merely on the fringes of feminism, but in the mainstream media: the solution that there shall be no children, that by various unnatural devices a woman shall set herself “free” from the most fundamental function of womanhood in order to serve some of the most superficial functions of modern civilisation. The very fact that the unnatural devices are considered necessary is itself instructive, for in that very fact the commercial sphere half-admits its essential inferiority to the domestic. Nuns, feeling themselves called to something higher than the family, have remained childless for professional purposes; but where is the woman who would take a vow of chastity for McDonald’s, and wear to work a habit with the “golden arches” hanging from a necklace? Where is the business man or woman foolish enough to expect her to do such a thing? Modern capitalism is neither as mad nor as noble as that. Instead of self-control we have birth control, which is designed to ensure that there will be no births to control, and abortion, which is very careful to keep quiet about what is being aborted.

If you're reading this, then you probably know that on Tuesday night, the Dodgers and Astros commenced the World Series. Everyone has their own theory as to who's going to win and why. And, as is always the case when two teams go into a series on different lengths of rest, the amount of rest each team has had since their last game features prominently in many theories. A recent article on Unbalanced opined that the extra days off enjoyed by the Dodgers will give them an advantage. Meanwhile, at an earlier stage in the playoffs, at least one television broadcaster expounded during a telecast the notion that extra days off throw a team off its rhythm and give an advantage to its competitor.

This is going to be a recurring theme in a lot of these essays, so I might as well get it out of the way now. We all love our liberties, or think we do, and I'm no exception. Yet most of you, as you read what I have to say, will feel that those liberties are being threatened at least once. So before you stick a knife in my side and daub in blood the legend SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS on the nearest wall, I think you deserve to know exactly what you'll be killing.

Fuck it, I'm going to do it. I've never wanted to be a writer, but until I can find more dignified employment, I'll have to be. One has to earn a living somehow; and since the conventional process of prostituting oneself in private doesn't work, all that remains is to prostitute oneself in public, to the public—and I use the word in its literal, Latin sense. Prostituere means to display for sale, and that is what a writer does. He mummifies himself alive, cutting out his own heart and brain and putting them in a jar for the world to see and scrutinise. His profoundest emotions, his most radical convictions, what to the common man are the most private parts of his personality, are all on display. Compared with him, the woman who walks the street with her body for rent is a model of modesty.