Hiya Web Surfer!

It's September 1st, which means it’s now spring. Here in Melbourne it’s also Orchid season, according to the local calendar. And according to the podcast Nymphet Alumni, we are just now leaving Female Sexual Aggression Summer.

That’s the term that my three favourite fashion podcasters have coined for the last few months of unabashed horniness during the Northern Hemisphere’s warmest months. They pinned its start on Hawk Tuah girl, but also as a broader reaction against the rise of male nonchalance. As it's trendy for more Gen-Z men to aura farm, more Gen-Z girls are needing to pursue their partners with (consensual) sexual aggression. Lola Young’s One Thing shows this off well. She has, “female sex pest vibes”, and is, “really, really creepy,” but Lola Young manages to put “her swag twist on it,” to quote the podcast.

“Save that big-dick energy for my mouth, yeah.”

“I wanna kiss you slow, wanna fuck you rough”

I always enjoy when the women in a song gets to be the one doing the fucking, rather than having the fucking done to her. There was a video from etymology nerd about the metaphors we use for intercourse: either as a violent act done by one party (fucking, banging, screwing) or as a mutual act done by both (sleeping together, having sex). I expect this discourse to proliferate in the wake of Female Sexual Aggression Summer.

The News

The first of my essays has been released: White Australia Needs Coffee. Thank you to my friend Ling for editing it for me. As I was going through my notes, I found my first skeletal outline of an essay on coffee and Australian identity from 2023. I suppose this reveals my biggest motivator for committing to one essay a month: working through the immense backlog. One a month is not enough to get through the backlog, but hopefully it’s a pace I can maintain. The next essay will be about something completely different but equally dear to my heart: websites. (Or maybe AI Writing if that idea coalesces sooner)

I also recently joined Bluesky. I am one those swag users whose handle is their swagged out website. You should join the platform, because for my next essay I'm planning on adding a comment section using Bluesky.

The Unforgivable Sin of Ms Rachel

I wanted to include a special section for Lindsay Ellis’s latest video. She's been one of my favourite thinkers for a long time now, and she recently published a video about children's entertainer Ms. Rachel, and the hate campaign she’s received for her activism for the children of Gaza. It's a really thorough look at the history of antisemitism, and the ending is so sad it made me break down in tears, please watch it.

Eddington

Last week I watched the American Western set during Covid: Eddington. I don’t think I can recommend the movie because it’s not very good, but I almost think it’s worthwhile watching just because it’s the first film I’ve seen that’s set during the Covid lockdowns. It’s been a weird Covid retrospective week for me as Tom Breihan’s column that reviews every number one hit in history, The Number Ones, has just hit the start of the pandemic. What Eddington and this review both reveal is that we aren’t far enough removed from the pandemic to talk about it rationally. To quote Breihan: “[One of the songwriters] mentions that they had “Tiger King on in the background” during the session, and that period-specific detail might plunge me into another dark spiral. Let’s just move on.”