Yes, men are losing rights in the age of feminism

Liked Yes, men are losing rights* in the age of feminism (tacit.livejournal.com)

That’s the pesky asterisk in “men are losing rights*”. And it’s a different argument than “ha ha ha LOL shut up you haven’t lost any rights.” Men have lost rights. Unpacking why, and whether we shoud’ve ever had them to begin with, is a different conversation, and one I think we need to be willing to have if we are to deconstruct the weird entitlement of the manosphere.

Salt Crystals by Cristina Bendek

Read Salt Crystals by Cristina Bendek ( )

San Andrés rises gently from the Caribbean, part of Colombia but closer to Nicaragua, the largest island in an archipelago claimed by the Spanish, colonized by the Puritans, worked by slaves, and home to Arab traders, migrants from the mainland, and the descendents of everyone who came before.

For Victoria – whose origins on the island go back generations, but whose identity is contested by her accent, her skin color, her years far away – the sun-burned tourists and sewage blooms, sudden storms, and ‘thinking rundowns’ where liberation is plotted and dinner served from a giant communal pot, bring her into vivid, intimate contact with the island she thought she knew, her own history, and the possibility for a real future for herself and San Andrés.

This is the second-to-last novel of an old Charco Press bundle I bought. Charco Press is a small but mighty independent publisher which started in 2017 in Scotland and specialises in translation of novels from Latin America. Their books are out of the ordinary, make me discover new horizons, and they also look really pretty…

Fastest, Highest, Strongest: A Critique of High-Performance Sport by Rob Beamish & Ian Ritchie

Read Fastest, highest, strongest : a critique of high-performance sport

Explores the use of drugs and other performance-enhancing practices in sport, tracing the development of the situation through its socio-political history. This work presents a critique of the use of athletes as representatives of political regimes, and the constant striving for medals that has altered the ethos of the Olympic Games.

This was an interesting and thought-provoking read on high performance sport and mostly on doping. Doping is a highly emotional issue and going through its history with a new lens took me out of my comfort zone − and it was fascinating. Beamish seems to have a very clear opinion that anti-doping policies are a…

Sur la dalle

Read Sur la dalle by Fred Vargas ( )

– Le dolmen dont tu m’as parlé, Johan, il est bien sur la route du petit pont ?
– À deux kilomètres après le petit pont, ne te trompe pas. Sur ta gauche, tu ne peux pas le manquer. Il est splendide, toutes ses pierres sont encore debout.
– ça date de quand, un dolmen ?
– Environ quatre mille ans.
– Donc des pierres pénétrées par les siècles. C’est parfait pour moi.
– Mais parfait pour quoi?
– Et cela servirait à quoi, ces dolmens? demanda Adamsberg sans répondre.
– Ce sont des monuments funéraires. Des tombes, si tu préfères, faites de pierres dressées recouvertes par de grandes dalles. J’espère que cela ne te gêne pas.
– En rien. C’est là que je vais aller m’allonger, en hauteur sur la dalle, sous le soleil.
– Qu’est-ce que tu vas foutre là-dessus ?
– Je ne sais pas, Johan.

Fred Vargas fait partie de mes amours littéraires adolescentes. J’étais obsédé par les « colocs du vingtième siècle », je voulais tellement être eux ! J’ai oublié, ensuite, ses romans, et l’ai perdue de vue une bonne décennie. Jusqu’à ce que Quand sort la recluse fasse son apparition dans une boîte à livres de mon…