For real. These people are like the Pawnee villagers who put their whole mouths around the water fountain spout:

Twist! I actually know people know Ariel Castro is not a literal monster.

I thought about that, about whether he "escalated" or whether he knew from the beginning he was gonna end up taking three women.

In identifying Ariel Castro as a man, and a more or less normal one at that, I don't mean to take a shit on men. I mean to say that I think that human beings have a dark side we need to confront.

To be clear, I do not deny that there is something inherently wrong with Ariel Castro or that he is evil. My point is that he was inspired to do the specific things he did in a context: which is a society that fetishizes what he did.

This. More or less. Though I'm certainly not implying that there isn't something inherently wrong with men Ariel Castro, or that he is not evil. Just that, in being evil, he has followed a script that was already provided by society.

This is morbid. But I can't help thinking about the moment that Ariel Castro decided he was going to kidnap three women and turn them into his sex slaves.

Wow. You have willfully missed the point.

Everyone can say, "I don't need to waste my time listening to this monster." But he's right. He's not a monster. He's a human being, variety male. He's not essentially different from you or me or any other human being. He's not a different species. And he's probably telling the truth about the fact that he's a very…

To be honest though, if we were going to hold one city responsible fore sexual harassment, why not San Diego?

Remember the Taco Bell employee who handcuffed himself to his ex-coworker when she was leaving their Taco Bell because she refused to date him? (I think he'd already been fired because he wouldn't stop asking her out.) The coverage of that case was disgusting because he was portrayed as an overly-eager suitor and…

Ha ha. THANK you! And Sandberg can go to hell.

I think that today the problem with having longer hair if you are a professional is that its semiotic value has been redefined by reality TV. Because of programs like Real Housewives, Bachelorette, Millionaire Matchmaker, Dance Moms etc. etc. where the uniform is long strait hair with highlights (usually achieved with…

I know. Besides the ill-fitting jacket detail, it is 70s perfection.

That's one of the best things about the seventies I think. I love illustration. And honestly, for instruction manuals focusing on fashion, sex and cooking I think illustration is best. People focus more on the information and not on comparing themselves to the models when they see illustrations.

The rise in STEM has decimated humanities programs at ALL kinds of institutions, just in different ways.

Oh. Absolutely. I'm not actually an English person, but fields like English are super paternalistic that way. You get tons of middle-tier programs where 90% of the students are female and 90% of the senior faculty are male and NOTHING good can come from that. At best, you'll get a situation where the faculty just hand…

Ok. I concede that given the severity of these crimes... yeah, you'd probably have to be in the "entertainment division" (i.e. the athletic division) of academia to get away with them for so long. But in general, I think humanists get away with more garden variety predation than non-humanists. I know the "English…

That's true. If you're trying to get pregnant you're kind of fucked. Also, don't you mean a reacharound? Mwahahahahaaa.

You're obvs not in the humanities.