A part of me thinks it’s less that contemporary masculinity has become toxic as much as it has become aggressively ridiculous.

Awesome - thanks for the lead. I’ve always wondered how the behind-the-scenes GOP struggle plays out between the theatrical trolls who rile up the most fervent extremists in their base in order to accumulate power, and the folks more toward the center who want the party to remain at least marginally relevant and not…

“The Republican leadership has already taken to refusing him basic procedural courtesies in the Senate, which literally everyone gets.”

That’s also a perfect facsimile for Donald Trump.

There’s a remix by Gui Boratto that I’m pretty sure was expressly made for that, now that you mention it.

I second trip-hop - especially Massive Attack’s entire catalogue - wholeheartedly. Back in my early 20s, my girlfriend at the time and I would light up and have sex to songs from 100th Window. “Small Time Shot Away” is the perfect song for druggy, late night sex dead in the middle of summer. Lines like “Dropped a…

What happens if you try to order “animal style” at Eat Me Out?

A man must call a rapey man on a bicycle a creep.

I feel compelled to point this out - John Boehner is a notorious drunk. We’re talking ad agency executive in the 1960s caliber drunk. That’s why he seems to get all teary and emotional in interviews. The guy is half in the bag after 5:00pm on any given day (if not earlier).

Allegedly it’s on the rise in the UK and Europe as a whole.

I’d be happy to! What I was using was Christopher Hitchens’ modern paraphrasing. The exact quote from King Lear is:

“Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back.

Yeah, this right here - why serial murderers so frequently target sex workers, runaways, and the homeless. Least likely victims to draw investigation and legal recourse, least likely to appear “sympathetic” to a hand-wringing public. It’s why you’ll see weeks of news coverage for the kidnapping of one photogenic…

Bingo. Similar pathologies.

I’m reminded of that line from Shakespeare - “The policeman who lashes the whore often has a hot need to use her”. Obsessions with “degeneracy” and disturbances in sexuality can take some really dark forms in mentally unhinged men with religious fixations, more or less culminating in a deranged cycle of self-loathing…

Yeah, the weird factor in all this is that some serial killers have been unfortunately attractive. Both Richard Ramirez and Ted Bundy were arguably handsome (or at least had good features). There are probably some others who are less well-known and slip my recollection.

Well, this is kind of an outlier situation, but Ms. Sophist and I will sometimes... um... play a certain game that Depeche Mode once referred to as “Master and Servant”. (Well, more often than “sometimes” T-B-H) She’s got a great sense of humor and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if she picked up this shirt or…

This question is probably going to sound pseudo-cynical or more-jaded-than-thou, though I honestly mean it as neither of those. But why do people choose to have kids?

Pablo Escobar pulled off a similar persona in Columbia - bolstering violence and drug abuse for profits, and then making gestures of charity at the poor. It’s kind of an age-old mainstay for criminals (and even some terror organizations), and a relatively smart one at that. It’s not the rich and powerful who…

It’s not uncommon for survivors of extreme trauma - especially sexual abuse - to create metaphors (often of horrific or supernatural creatures) to describe in thematic terms what would be too harrowing to speak of directly. It might sound kind of silly on the surface, but the specter of a bear mauling might be the…

To be fair, even though that’s a walking instance of anti-logic, this line of thought has been used by the American right for years. I’ve heard some conservatives (especially southerners) argue that the “problem” with “the black community” is that they’re overly dependent on welfare and state support, and this has…