highlyeccentric | Links, occasional and various

Miranda Johnson (Meanjin), Muting, unmuting and everything in between

JoAnn Wypijewski (LitHub), How capitalism created sexual dysfunction. This is both a very interesting article with some novel angles, and definitely not the whole story. It cites Rachel Maines' The Technology of Orgasm, and criticisms against her, but is frustratingly vague in WHAT exactly from Maines' work is challenged (quotes someone saying there's no support for her thesis... without giving a concise statement of what Maines' thesis is understood to be). It overstates the capitalism angle and blurs that with mass medicalisation, without enough nuance.
And I often feel like there's an underlying thread of disdain in anti-capitalist and some feminist arguments on the origin of the vibrator that assumes there's something wrong with reliance thereupon to reach orgasm: that either a woman so reliant (lbr these articles never talk about non-women) is physically alienated from her own sexuality, or duped by capitalism / sexual normativity into thinking she needs orgasms at all. This article, like many such, conflates inability to reach orgasm *through intercourse* with anorgasmia in general, and certainly never considers the possibility of women who *can* climax by PIV but not by the methods generally touted as What Works For Women.

Robin Wall Kimmerer (LitHub), Greed does not have to define our relationship to land: on choosing to belong to a place. Kimmerer addresses "Dear Readers—America, Colonists, Allies, and Ancestors-yet-to-be", uses the figure of the Windigo to interpret contemporary politics, and calls upon the reader to "put aside the mindset of the colonizer and become native to place*.

En Tous Genres blog, La langue neutre en français. I have been looking for this guide for many years. As expected, it's a tangled mess, involving not just neopronouns but a constantly shifting array of choices for adjective formation and phrasing. I would not feel in the slightest bit comfortable making those choices for anyone else, and while I can mostly remember neopronouns, the mind boggles at trying to keep separate in one's mind what each individual person prefers for each adjective cluster. At one point the advice was simply to avoid words like 'heureux' entirely - use 'en bon humeur' instead. THAT one could do, and it would be great fun for literary purposes, but ... odd, surely, to live in? A circumscribed vocabulary that declared one could never be happy, only in good humour, on account of gender?

Glenn Albrecht (Conversation AU), The Age of Solastalgia. I've had Missy Higgins' album of that name for years, but never actually looked up the term. Apparently it was coined w/r/t the environmental grief of (presumably mostly white? just because academic studies tend to attract mostly white people) citizens living in the Upper Hunter under the combined stress of the Millennium Drought and the massive landscape changes of open cut mining. Homesick for a place that no longer exists.

Maggie Doherty (LitHub), The creative communities that changed literature forever. Looks at a circle of women in the 1950s associated with the Radcliffe Institute, who called themselves 'The Equivalents', in comparison with various other better known writerly communities.

Jedyah from Jersey (Blog), Why bodegas are essential to black and brown communities.

Sarah Holder (CityLab), After police reform, crime falls in Camden, New Jersey. This was passed around as an example of what can happen when you defund the police, but actually I think it did involve an injection of funds - but more importantly a reallocation of funds within the department. I'm increasingly leaning toward abolitionist arguments, but a common claim seems to be that police reform doesn't work, just injects money and papers things over. This article stresses that factors are intersecting (the massive drop in homicides might not be a drop in assaults - it might be a result of a new police policy requiring the police to personally transport injured victims if no ambulance is forthcoming within a certain time, meaning fewer people die), and there's no broad robust data on 'community policing' because, simply put, not enough jurisdictions have both *started* and *gone through with* said reforms.

Amy McQuire (Saturday Paper), There cannot be 432 victims and no perpetrator. On Indigenous deaths in custody in Australia. The number is higher than 432 now.

Mike Seccombe (Saturday Paper), The RoboDebt class action. Despite the govt's intention to refund Robodebt payments, the class action is going ahead.

Menye Wyatt (on ABC Q&A), Monologue from City of Gold on anti-Indigenous racism. Transcript included.

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber III (LitHub), The politics of rejecting the poor. I might not be a Christian any more, but damn, I know a good sermon when I see it.

Dennis Altman (Meanjin), AIDS to COVID: we have been here before.

Neuroclastic (blog), The intersection of gender, misogyny and autism.

Lucas Iberico Lozada, interview with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (Guernica), DREAMer memoirs have their purpose, but that was not what I set out to write.

Myriam Gurba (Electric Lit), It's time to take California back from Joan Didion.

Daniel Lavery (ShatnerChatner), Is flesh a problem or an opportunity in the eyes of God?. Still not sure I'm fully on board with Danny's new more esoteric writing style, but this is worth a read.

Hannah Ross (LitHub), A brief feminist history of bike riding.

Nasrin Mahtoutchi (Overland), The trace of the place: on origins, imprisonment, refugee status, immigration, and Sydney.

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Strong Verbs Are Just Better

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Links, occasional and various

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May 2025

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