Young people today seem so psychologically distant from me that I don’t feel like I understand them. Perhaps this is always true as people get older and a new generation comes of age. I’m really hoping that what I say in the following is a minority view, even among young people, and I’m not that out of touch with their contemporary world. [This post originally appeared on my Substack. See the postscript at the end for an end of season update (pending)] I have been thinking about Woke storytelling recently. How writers that have “woke” commitments tell stories that are different from more trad ..read more

Critical Theory has developed considerably since the last time I encountered it in graduate school. That was over a decade ago. I remember social construction, problematizing, contestation, subversion, performativity, patriarchy, false consciousness, and Queer theory. I remember Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler. Since then, it has taken on many new concepts I hadn’t seen before, like authentic lived experience, diversity, inclusion, equity, all the new genders and sexualities, all the various phobias, male privilege, white fragility, toxic masculinity, transgenderism, cis-hete ..read more

Sleeping Hermaphroditus For the last several years, “woke” activists for trans people have been attempting to construct new social genders (to extend gender definitions beyond the traditional biological “man” and “women”). I use the word social the emphasize that these activists deny the relevance of biology and genetics to expressions of gender (that gender is connected to one’s biological sex), rather they emphasize the “socially constructed” nature of gender as something that is created by culture and one is socialized into it. This is the conclusion that Gender Studies professors in colleg ..read more

The following was originally written as part of an introduction to a blog, but these paragraphs took on a sarcastic tone that was inconsistent with the rest of the post (and it was way too long), so I extracted this passage and present it here separately. The complete introduction also appeared on my Substack under the title: “On Fanfiction and Annoying Wokeness: What is your personal victimhood score?” which I hope you will visit and maybe subscribe. It’s totally free. Currently, I have been fascinated with Supernatural (the TV show) and fanfiction written about it. I even wrote some of my o ..read more

In the title of this post, I put the word “women” in quotation marks because many younger female persons no longer identify as women anymore. Woman no longer exists as a designation for someone with an adult female body. For many young gender activists, woman is no longer a biological fact but rather exists only as a subjective identity. Many younger females (as assigned at birth) today now identify as queer, trans, and non-binary, non-gender conforming, and have rejected the label of woman. In the past, these young women would probably have been more likely to identify as lesbians (women who ..read more

It’s strange sometimes, being a gay male listening in on women talking and writing about gay men, like some kind of voyeur. I often sigh and mutter to myself: “oh, if gay men really were like that.” Yeah, gay men have romantic fantasies too, but the reality of gay dating rarely resembles the scenarios that play out in women’s m/m romance fictions. So, when I read the Destiel romances that ladies spin out, I sometimes get caught up in the fantasy too. When I first stumbled into Destiel fanfiction (Dean/Castiel slash fiction) I didn’t realize that the vast majority of fanfiction writers in this ..read more

I’ve been reading Supernatural fanfiction for a while now. When I first started, I didn’t know anything about fanfiction and the people who write it. I started by looking at m/m (male/male) romance and eventually found my way to Destiel slash (Dean/Castiel). I love Dean and Cas as a gay/bi couple especially because the TV show on which this pairing is based got so close to making them a canonical couple, stopping just short, and leaving the rest to the fan’s imagination at the ending of the show’s 15-year run. I hated and felt traumatized by the show’s finale (I wrote about that in a differen ..read more

In the title of this post, I put the word “women” in quotation marks because many younger female persons no longer identify as women anymore. Woman no longer exists as a designation for someone with a female body. For many young gender activists, woman is no longer a biological fact but rather exists only as a subjective identity. Many younger females (as assigned at birth) today now identify as queer, trans, and non-binary, non-gender conforming, and have rejected the label of woman. In the past, these young women would probably have been more likely to identify as lesbians (women who are sex ..read more

It’s strange sometimes, being a gay male listening in on women talking and writing about gay men, like some kind of voyeur. I often sigh and mutter to myself: “oh, if gay men really were like that.” Yeah, gay men have romantic fantasies too, but the reality of gay dating rarely resembles the scenarios that play out in women’s m/m romance fictions. So, when I read the Destiel romances that ladies spin out, I sometimes get caught up in the fantasy too. When I first stumbled into Destiel fanfiction (Dean/Castiel slash fiction) I didn’t realize that the vast majority of fanfiction writers in this ..read more

I’ve been reading Supernatural fanfiction for a while now. When I first started, I didn’t know anything about fanfiction and the people who write it. I started by looking at m/m (male/male) romance and eventually found my way to Destiel slash (Dean/Castiel). I love Dean and Cas as a gay/bi couple especially because the TV show on which this pairing is based got so close to making them a canonical couple, stopping just short, and leaving the rest to the fan’s imagination at the ending of the show’s 15-year run. I hated and felt traumatized by the show’s finale (I wrote about that in a differen ..read more