Hello from Paris!
In case you didn’t notice, my Thursday serial Letters from Exile came to an end on May 12. I’m cogitating about what to do next. If you have ideas send them. I’m considering anything from an alternative cooking show to a podcast, or more photos of lesbians in bed (drinking coffee), Paris sites. You gotta give the people what they want.
At any rate, my marathon 10 days of touristing are over, and I’m back in front of the computer, struck by how weirdly uneven time is. When my friend was here, we had breakfast, left mid-morning, visited something or somewhere, had lunch, walked all day, visited a ton of places, went home and had a very late dinner before going to bed, slightly sunburnt from the weirdly nice spring weather which is reassuringly back to a drizzly grey.
It already seems like a dream. Now that I’ve returned to revising my book, somehow a whole day passes and I only get up from the screen to pee, maybe run downstairs for groceries, and it feels like time’s far too short, and my life’s too small when there are so many people and places in the world. Without the motion, seeing humans in their natural habitats, I go on social media, scroll and scroll. All the posts feel very ersatz, filtered, decontextualized, fake. I can’t even distinguish which truly are.
I really should delete my accounts, but I’m afraid. I’d be forced to create a life for myself, in the flesh, here in Paris. What if the pandemic returns full force and we go on lockdown again? What if I’m bored? Or lonely? How will I determine my value, assert it, no longer liking and withholding likes? Being played by the internet? It’s true I lose my judgement online. I compare myself to others (never turns out well). I share misinformation. Click like on things that turn out to be lies, then feel like an idiot.
Once, I found myself googling to see if it really was hard to determine sex as some trans activists claimed—it’s not. Also, sex is not a continuum. Apparently as long as humans remain mammals and we’re stuck with reproducing sexually, there are only two, one category, female, producing large gametes, a second, male, producing small ones. Exceptions are meaningless and insignificant—except to the people who have them. Even the most uneducated farmer in the most undeveloped country can tell which calves will be cows and which bulls without straining her brain. I could do it myself among the terrifying humans if I spent more time outside.
Gender is a different story.
My point is that after uninterrupted years online, the constant messaging that everything I learned in high school was wrong (it’s not), what I knew about sex eroded, and it felt legitimate to begin questioning the most basic, immutable facts. And if I stay plugged in, I wonder what other questions I’ll begin to have. If I’ll start believing that researchers really do inject microchips with every Covid vaccine, or lizard people run the government.
I’m not joking, not really. I’m reasonably smart, and smart people are very vulnerable to the kind of manipulation outlined in last year’s piece about QAnon and how it resembles the structure of a computer game, with each crumb of information leading you to another, encouraging you to look for them yourself, until you end up assembling your own proof that Hillary Clinton really is taking time out of her busy schedule to personally run a pedophile ring out of a fucking pizza parlor. Nothing could be more obvious.
That’s life now. We’ve all outsourced our brains. I think it’s time I reclaimed mine.
It helped to spend a week in the streets, walking around the city, remembering it existed, with its human ants moving through it. And remembering, too, the incredible joy of sitting in the sun at a Paris café without worrying about catching a plague. At least for the moment.
Sex is important beyond reproduction and abortion rights
Caroline Criado’s Invisible Women newsletter this week talks about how women are nearly twice as likely as men to become trapped following a car crash, much more likely to end up dead, and why there are significant sex differences in injuries.
Why?
women are not just small men. There are other differences, like muscle mass distribution and in spinal column flexibility. Women’s cervical vertebrae are smaller than men of equivalent head size, women’s torsos are shorter than the torsos of men of equivalent height, and, of course, as per last week’s newsletter, there are differences between the male and the female pelvis, with women’s being wider even when controlled for height difference.
If car manufacturers used test dummies based on women’s actual bodies, they could prevent a great many injuries and deaths, instead, they almost always use male dummies. When they do use a female dummy, it’s actually just a scaled down male one.
AND
the female dummy isn’t even used in most of the tests – and she isn’t tested at all in the driver seat, because of course, women don’t drive.
Fucking hell.
Appalled? You can do something about it. Scroll to the end of the newsletter, she explains how they’re getting ready to revise testing regulations in the U.S. and offers suggested tweets to @SecretaryPete, the US Secretary of Transportation.
France News
Olympic Lyonnais women won the European Champion’s League defeating an up-and-coming Barcelona team which didn’t have their usual sparkle. I was so sad. I loved Barcelona. And Mapi León is sizzling hot.
I was, though, really glad that Lyon did well in the tournament. They have a relatively new coach, Sonia Bompastor, and there just aren’t enough women coaches out there. She needed the win. For all of us.
Speaking of groundbreaking women…
There’s now a new prime minister, Elizabeth Borne, only the second woman to occupy that post, and an interesting choice. The left decries her as a soulless technocrat. After visiting the Paris Sewer Museum last week I have to say technocrat’s not a dirty word for me. I wish there were more of them. One of the many thing’s she’s supposed to do is push forward the transition to green energy. If she pulls that off, something that will require not just a huge budget, but a mastery of engineering and economic challenges, she’ll have all my respect.
In general, the new cabinet has sex-parity, and draws from the center and both the moderate left and right, though the right and center have more of the top jobs. The left side includes as education tzar the very unexpected choice of brilliant novelist Marie NDiaye’s brother Pap Ndiaye, himself a specialist on the African diaspora, particularly in the U.S. and France. (See what I did there? I used a woman to contextualize a man for a change.) Ndiaye being a big critic of French cops, the right-wing immediately threw a hissy fit at seeing him on the list.
How long this cabinet lasts depends on who ends up with a majority in the legislative elections coming up in June, and whether or not Macron is forced to co-habit with perennial far-left populist demagogue Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who wants to be Prime Minister.
Anyway, leave a comment. Tell me what you’d like to see on Thursdays.
That’s it for this week.
Disgruntledly yours,
Smelly Hogswell