So Mayer

Every time Moms for Liberty etc talks about preserving young people's "innocence" through keeping them ignorant of age relevant sex education, what they mean is keeping kids vulnerable for predators.

So the projection is OFF THE CHARTS.

Women are always expected to imagine the world from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women. This runs so deep that many men react to any suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were itself an act of violence."

From David Graeber's Utopia Of Rules.

Bryher, a butch white person with dark hair, in the mid-late 30s, a decade she spent doing a great deal of heartbreaking psychoanalysis to try & cure herself of--or at least explain--her lifelong belief that she was a boy trapped in a girl's body (her words, circa 1920). Using "her" because Bryher did, though if he'd been alive today he would have been an insufferable bro with a weightroom set-up & a despicable job in finance. At the very least he would have boxed & told you too much about it.

Bryher, a butch white person with dark hair, in the 1930 Paul Robeson movie Borderline alongside Charlotte Arthur. They're standing in a bar. Bryher got a slouchy double-breasted coat situation happening, and Charlotte, in a wrinkled housecoat, is pretending to be, or is actually, smashed.

having written upwards of 90k, fiction & nonfiction, about-or-thinly-veiled-about my favorite Modernist antifascist wife-guy Bryher (pictured), there's now the possibility I might get to publish a bit of it in essay form this/next year. fingers crossed it happens, & grateful for the chance.

A good place to start for UK folks would be @netpol.org - they often have great advice on keeping yourself and others safe.

Ain't We Women, Too? For many incarcerated women, the state is their abuser, but the gender-based violence we experience behind bars goes ignored.

We decided to drop the paywall on @kwanetaharris.bsky.social because it's so powerful and urgent. Kwaneta writes about how the state is her abuser as an incarcerated woman. Read for free here: www.theflytrapmedia.com/aint-we-wome...

This is how enjambment can work in a poem. Bridge 77 on the Macclesfield Canal allows a horse to cross the canal without having to untie it from the canal boat.

Ah merci merci! This is super helpful!

Ahmed Al Maazmi - Portuguese Black Serpents Meet Safavid Dragons: The Intellectual World of Indian Ocean Imperialism

Join us for Dr Ahmed Al Maazmi's virtual CGS seminar, "Portuguese Black Serpents Meet Safavid Dragons: The Intellectual World of Indian Ocean Imperialism". Tuesday 10 Feb 2026, 17:00-18:30 London time. For details and to register: www.exeter.ac.uk/events/detai...

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Zola arrived by boat-train at Victoria with just a nightshirt after fleeing France... but how did his words circulate in the English-speaking world?

Freedom of expression nerds / French translators, do you know who first translated J'accuse into English in 1898 & where it was published? Merci bouquets 💐💐💐 #LangSky #BookSky

Lots of UK indies are now doing this one awesome trick... Peninsula and Cipher among them. Silver & Tilted Axis both have independent US distro too!

Yes there is! It is carried by the magnificent @asterismbooks.bsky.social so you can order from them, from bookshop dot org or from any indie North American bookstore! 🥳 All my recent books are with Asterism & I lurve them.

Ewwwurgh. I've cancelled my account totally & I'm hoping (probs against hope) they honour data legislation...

The whole world is wonderin’
What's wrong with the United States?

I don't mean to seem alarmed, but it appears Google's book search function is, just...gone.

In a sane country it would be a huge deal, front page news, that a privately owned utility that millions researches, from journalists to scholars, rely on every day to advance knowledge can just disappear.

Announcing the Cafe 53 Horror or Sci-Fi Author Temporary Residency. If you come to Hyde Park, Chicago, I'll take you out to lunch at my favorite Palestinian-owned lunch spot, Cafe 53, which has about 30 different sandwiches including many veggie/vegan options, and we'll talk about horror or sci-fi.

If you're like "wow So, you're citing your own book a lot these days, huh," then you are not wrong, because I wrote a book about language, sexual abuse & power, and what we do about their conjunction. Which is? Listen.

"He said / she said" is grammatically formatted to express an equivalence, rhetorical cover for the fact it reinforces a hierarchy, what Miranda Fricker calls "testimonial injustice." I talk about this in BAD LANGUAGE in relation to Kassandra, the Oresteia, prophecy, law & who gets heard.

No, you're not personally expected to have known and believed a survivor of rich people's sexual violence.

But you could have stopped using the phrase "he said / she said."

historically, that did in fact happen when the concept of handwashing before delivering babies was developed, and a lot of very offended male doctors killed a lot of women and infants as a result.

self-important wealthy men become offended when someone tells them to follow procedure, constantly.

Rape culture includes allowing rapists to be supported, like by supporting them. They are supported & held in place by many other people. It's not just the problem of individuals with a predatory nature, which rapists are, but a society who bows before them & keeps their secrets.

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This event was sold out but has now been moved to a bigger space and more tickets are available.

please listen to the it could happen here episodes about mpls. they are the only thing that provides a true look at the full scope of what’s happening. it is just so beautiful and inspiring to hear the story told.

thank you, @margaret.bsky.social for your coverage.

it's gender. the answer is that sexual violence is both the structuring logic of power in a patriarchal society and its chief enforcement mechanism, and there is no relationship of power more steep than adult/child-- the child's body is the archetypal site of legitimate, authority-producing violence

Grateful for your reading! Your course sounds amazing -- so many texts that have been so meaningful to me (Linda Tuhiwai Smith) & some new reading to follow.

This essay from @suchmayer.bsky.social is helping me get my head around it. Grateful for these words. www.somayer.net?na=view&id=6

Not facile at all! I love foxes & felt a microcosmic version of the helplessness i feel at the bigger fate of the world & so a microcosmic version of what it feels like to leave that aporia behind & do something small & led by the most affected. So I appreciate your response 🦊

What a wonderful project!