I genuinely have no idea what’s happening anymore.

A dowsing stick.

I’m the complete opposite.  I think cooked celery is absolutely repulsive, but raw celery is great for getting as much ranch dressing as possible into your pie hole.

Be a good person. The bar is set really fucking low.

This is why all prison labor ought to be banned. As soon as you have free or near free labor then the priorities shift from rehabilitating people and reducing incarceration, and onto preserving low cost labor. It is a perversion. Pay people for their labor, pay them fully, and if you have a shortage then obey the laws…

Man there are a lot of gatekeepers to the term “roguelike.”

That’s why I just got so tired of Harry Potter... Every time there was a problem, they summoned a demon. Hey, basilisk in the basement, we better summon a demon. I gotta fight a dragon, I’m gonna summon a demon. Sirius is in danger, let’s summon a demon to save him. It was just so predictable that they would solve…

The problem of blame arises when people try to take reasonable micro advice and apply it writ large to the systemic macro issues.

Getting drunk around people (read: men) you know pretty well can also be dangerous.

Yoffe was horrible. I recall a Dear Prudence column in which a woman who was self-consciously flat-chested was asking for advice because whenever she and her (guy) dates would get to the light petting stage, she felt as if the guys were surprised/dismayed/put off by her flatness.

This is a good way of putting it. I’ve also seen it said that when you tell a girl not to wear a short skirt or get drunk, you’re really saying, “make sure he rapes some other girl.”

Perhaps there’s a specific name for that trope (and maybe someone reading this can educate me) 

I (a woman, despite the username) intentionally undertrain my biceps because the suckers get huge with very little stimulation. I don’t have an aversion to muscle but it’s disproportionate to the rest of my upper body and while I’m not knocking it, “professional arm wrestler” is not my desired physique.

Mangu-Ward adds that, more broadly, “the virulent reaction online [to Yoffe’s story] is a perfect demonstration of the phenomenon Yoffe is describing in her piece.”

Yoffe has always straight-up misrepresented sexual misconduct stories. I remember one specifically where a young woman was performing oral sex for the first time on a guy she liked when she discovered with her tongue that he had an STI he hadn’t told her about. She stopped immediately and wanted to leave. He wouldn’t…

Her reactions re: sexual assault were just so bizarre it’s hard not to wonder where the hell they were coming from. I still remember that nightmare of a Dear Prudence letter where a letter-writer who was clearly suffering a lot while trying to sort out issues of consent with her husband, and Yoffe responded by…

You’re not going to get bulky by accident.

Daniel Ortberg gives fantastic advice, I really enjoy reading DP now that Yoffe is no longer attached to it.

I used to read Dear Prudence and remember that while a lot of the advice was good, Emily Yoffee would go off the rails whenever anybody talked about rape or consent. It’s really odd that she would proactively choose write about rape and sexual harrassement stories in defense of the potential criminals. Even if she…

Yoffe’s Slate pieces about rape were abhorrent. I get that she was trying to be sympathetic or rational, but she always kept hammering away at the culpability of sexual assault survivors.