On this day (1959): Allen Ginsberg writes his poem “Lysergic Acid”, San Francisco.
Heteropessimism . Not in my OED app. Not in Merriam-Webster. Not in dictionary.com. Wiktionary: “(neologism) Disillusionment with heterosexuality, typically expressed in an ironic, performative manner and grounded in an essentialist or deterministic view of gender relations.”
“On Heteropessimism” [ Asa Seresin, The New Inquiry (2019)]. “”Heterosexuality always embarrasses me,” Maggie Nelson admits in The Argonauts, a book once so rabidly popular among women and queers that my first copy was swiped from my bag at a dyke bar in 2016…. Yet when I asked her about it during a Skype call held by a sexuality-studies workshop for graduate students, she backtracked. Denying that she is embarrassed by heterosexuality in general, Nelson claimed that she is only humiliated by her own heterosexuality, by moments in her life when she has entertained—or suffered from—a romantic attraction to cis men. At the time this caveat struck me as both unnecessarily defensive and disingenuous. Of all people, Nelson knows her queer theory, and thus knows that her own heterosexual experience only comes into focus via the cultural delineation of heterosexuality from other (less embarrassing?) forms of intimacy and attachment. It doesn’t make sense to extricate your own straight experience from straightness as an institution—if you are embarrassed by one, you are necessarily embarrassed by the other. Heterosexuality is nobody’s personal problem.” “Necessarily” is doing a lot of work, there. More: “What I now see is that Nelson’s caveat is typical of heteropessimism, a mode of feeling with a long history, and which is particularly palpable in the present. Heteropessimism consists of performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience. Heteropessimism generally has a heavy focus on men as the root of the problem. That these disaffiliations are ‘performative’ does not mean that they are insincere but rather that they are rarely accompanied by the actual abandonment of heterosexuality. Sure, some heteropessimists act on their beliefs, choosing celibacy or the now largely outmoded option of political lesbianism, yet most stick with heterosexuality even as they judge it to be irredeemable. Even incels, overflowing with heteropessimism, stress the involuntary nature of their condition. Social media is a playground of performative disidentification, and heteropessimism thrives there.” • I think I’ll just let “during a Skype call held by a sexuality-studies workshop for graduate students” linger on the tongue for awhile….
“What Is Heteropessimism and Do You Need to Stop With That Sh*t?” [Cosmopolitan]. “It’s become common among straight women (and women in hetero relationships) to engage in this little self-deprecation game when it comes to our sexuality as well. We complain that men are trash, heterosexuality is a curse, and joke about how much easier it would be if we were queer and could just date women instead. This is nothing new, obviously. Women have been complaining about dating men since well before the SATC gals started venting over brunch. But as queerness has increased in visibility and acceptance in recent decades, this run-of-the-mill frustration with the heterosexual experience has ripened into an embarrassment over the heterosexual identity itself. Straight women, especially those of us who like to consider ourselves sexually open-minded and evolved to a certain fashionable degree, might feel compelled to call ourselves out for being “boring straight people” or otherwise bemoan our lack of sexual fluidity. I’ve done this, I’ve heard friends do this, and if you’re a straight woman, I’d be willing to bet you’ve done some version of it too. As it turns out, there’s actually a name for it: heteropessimism.”
“Heteropessimist Horror” [Compact]. “Obsession, the box-office sensation directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker, is a sign that the economics of Hollywood are changing, with internet-incubated stories overtaking superannuated IP. It also marks the arrival of a new film genre: heteropessimist horror, which channels the despairing view of relationships that is typical of Gen Z.” If you take generational analysis either literally or seriously. When did it all start? WIth Thirtysomething (1987), the show about Yuppies? Wev: “n Obsession, Bear (Michael Johnston), a twenty-something music-store employee, tries and fails to ask out his friend Nikki (Inde Navarette). Everything changes when he buys a mysterious novelty item called “One Wish Willow” and uses it to wish that Nikki would love him “more than anyone in the entire world.” She does—with a demonic energy that reflects not her natural inclinations but the spell he has cast on her. That spell works as a metaphor for the loss of control suffered by individuals who fall in love: To be totally devoted to another, it turns out, is to lose your individuality, your will, your soul.” And: “Camilla Morrone, the 28-year-old actress who plays the heroine, talked to the Times about her peers’ fears of marriage: ‘Will it feel like death? Will I feel like I’m chained to the bottom of the ocean?’ These anxieties, she said, ‘have put my generation in a chokehold.’” And concluding: “What’s needed is a change in economic and social conditions, such that men have more to offer women than they currently do. Until that change comes about, the horrors of heteropessimism are unlikely to end.” • Yep.
Dad Joke of the Day: What’s blue and doesn’t weigh much? Light blue.
Dysregulation . From my OED app: “/ˌdɪsrɛɡjʊˈleɪʃn / ▸ noun [mass noun] alteration or impairment of the regulation of a metabolic, physiological, or psychological process: family dysfunction may contribute to emotional dysregulation [count noun] the phenomenon of narcolepsy can be understood in terms of a dysregulation of rapid eye movement sleep.”
“A test for Long COVID can’t leave anyone behind” [The Sick Times]. “That test will be a biomarker: a measurable sign of disease that a clinician can test for, track over time, and use to guide treatment. For Long COVID, that could mean detecting viral persistence, immune dysregulation, microvascular damage, neurologic inflammation, or some combination of these. It would transform a diagnosis that has relied on self-reporting and clinical judgment into one grounded in objective evidence.” • Hopefully. Remember when NIH spent a billion dollars on survey instruments, and didn’t look for biomarkers at all? Good times.
“Why the immune system turns on women more often than men” [Straight Arrow News]. “A growing body of research has linked exposure to environmental pollutants and endocrine-disrupting chemicals — including substances found in plastics, pesticides, industrial chemicals and air pollution — to immune dysregulation and increased risk of autoimmune disease, though scientists are investigating which exposures may be most harmful and how they alter immune function over time. Smoking, for example, remains one of the clearest established environmental risk factors for diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.” But: “Researchers are moving toward a consensus on why women appear to be far more vulnerable to many [autoimmune diseases]. For one, women generally mount stronger adaptive immune responses than men. The adaptive immune system is the branch responsible for learning and memory, creating specialized T cells and antibodies that remember previous infections and respond rapidly when the body encounters them again. Following an infection or vaccination, women produce higher levels of antibodies and generate more vigorous inflammatory responses. Women also tend to clear some infections more efficiently. The reason for this might be evolutionary. Females across many species appear biologically ‘hard-wired’ to invest more energy into immunity and long-term health maintenance… perhaps because reproductive success historically depended on surviving pregnancy and protecting offspring…Some evolutionary biologists have proposed that autoimmunity may be an unintended consequence of the female immune system’s unusual flexibility: Pregnancy requires the body to tolerate a fetus that is genetically half foreign — something that would normally trigger an immune attack.” • Hmm.
“Gad Saad Is Very Mad That His Books Are Bad and Sad” [Jacobin]. “Nominally the book is about the rise of ‘suicidal empathy.’ Undeniably a catchy neologism, Saad defines suicidal empathy as a ‘dysregulation of an otherwise noble virtue.’ While he acknowledges that empathy is valuable in some contexts, in the hands of woke progressives it has become an existentially damaging force.” Note that “dysregulate” suggests a mechanism when there is none. How the heck do you “dysregulate” a virtue? More: “The ‘suicidally empathetic’ person feels guilty that they were born in the West, whereas others were not so fortunate. They feel guilty that they were born with white skin and hence suffer from ‘Dermatological Original Sin.’ By committing ‘Civilization Seppuku’, they can demonstrate their noble virtues as a form of pious self-hatred.” • All that Buzzword Bait in Initial Caps like nouns in the Original German!
Fortune: I hate quotations. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
Garlic. From my OED app: “/ˈɡɑːlɪk / ▸ noun [mass noun] 1 a strong-smelling pungent-tasting bulb, used as a flavouring in cooking and in herbal medicine: [as modifier] garlic butter. 2 the central Asian plant, closely related to the onion, which produces garlic. Allium sativum, family Liliaceae (or Alliaceae). ▪ used in names of plants with a similar smell or flavour to garlic, e.g. wild garlic. – ORIGIN Old English gārlēac, from gār ‘spear’ (because the shape of a clove resembles the head of a spear) + lēac ‘leek’.” • Ah! The almighty signifier!
“The Prehistory of A.I. Slop” [Long Reads]. “In 2017, AI researcher Janelle Shane trained a neural network to generate recipes. The results were what we’d call “slop” today, not just because they were nonsense but because they sounded so hilariously unappetizing. If Artichoke Gelatin Dogs don’t do it for you, then Crimm Grunk Garlic Cleas should—or, god forbid, Beef Soup with Swamp Peef and Cheese. The point is, long before ChatGPT kickstarted the modern LLM era, people have been trying to coach machines to write.” • That’s not writing. It’s typing. —Truman Capote (more or less).
“Why Garlic Repels Mosquitoes and Keeps Them From Breeding” [Wired]. “According to an article published in the journal Cell, garlic specifically activates a group of bitter taste-sensitive neurons containing this receptor. This activation not only provokes a physical avoidance reaction but also changes at the molecular level by modifying the expression of various genes. Among the alterations identified, that of a gene closely related to the sensation of satiety stands out, suggesting that contact with garlic compounds directly interferes with the biological processes that regulate appetite and feeding in these insects.The authors posit that increased satiety appears to drive behaviors that limit mating and reproduction, primarily in females.” And: ‘In addition to fruit flies, the experiments were replicated in other flying insects, including two species of mosquitoes that transmit diseases such as yellow fever, dengue, and Zika virus, as well as tsetse flies. In all cases, the tests showed that garlic can act as an effective remedy to discourage reproduction. The researchers’ findings suggest that this plant, Allium sativum, could be used as a tool to control various insect pests harmful to both human health and agriculture.” • Certainly this would be healthier than petroleum-based sprays.
“How Medieval Doctors, Christian and Muslim, Treated the Black Death” [Literary Hub]. “Many who lived through the pandemic—and witnessed this inability to combat the lethal pestilence—developed scornful opinions of the medical profession. In the mid-1350s, after the pestilence had died down, Petrarch launched a scathing attack on doctors, classing them as ‘the very dregs’ of society, and portraying them as liars who ‘despoil [patients] of both their money and their health.’” Seems familiar. That said: “For all of this voluble criticism, it is clear that many medical practitioners did stay in their posts, striving to aid the sick, even at the risk of their own lives…. [I]n Cairo’s renowned Mansuri bimaristan the noted Iraqi doctor Ibn al-Akfani died while treating Black Death patients.” Seems familiar. The search for “natural remedies seems familiar too: “[Gentile da Foligno] also answered direct ‘questions posed by the common people’ regarding the efficacy of garlic, which he maintained could be employed as a medicine by ‘ordinary and rustic men’ and had ‘some effect against disease,’ but was not particularly useful when treating plague…”