Category: Essays
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Morality of Agency and Objectification
CJ Trowbridge 2021-06-28 PHIL 455 Sex and the Law Term Paper Everybody thinks pedophilia is bad, right? There is widespread consensus about that, right? Maybe not. I think this popular misunderstanding of the nature of ongoing support for pedophilia is one of the main reasons it has not been meaningfully addressed, particularly in contemporary…
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Your Actions Stem Inexorably From Your Principles
Your actions stem inexorably from your principles. “Even if you don’t believe, you cannot travel in any other way than the road your senses show you. And you must walk that road to the end.” -American Gods I see a common theme in popular discourse where people look at a given situation and think, “Oh…
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Wrangling Metaphenomena
This semester, a professor in one of my classes made the claim that almost no person or organization is aware or its core principles. Maybe they have some vague nonsense mission statement or political identity that could be used to argue literally anything, and that’s basically the point. They don’t have a set of claims…
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Variations in Sexuality
CJ Trowbridge 2020-12-06 SOC 400 – Term Paper I have struggled since my first degrees in Sociology and LGBT Studies and throughout this class to find a concise and plausible scientific explanation accounting for the development of diverse sexual orientations in humans. I think I’ve finally identified one that works. The ideas of sex, gender,…
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XXI
“Drunk one night, Sarah had told me Women are the race… No two ways about it. Male is just a mutation with more muscle and half the nerves. Fighting, fucking machines… To be a woman was a sensory experience beyond the male. Touch and texture ran deeper, an interface with environment that male flesh seemed…
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Misogynoir and Reproductive Conversations
Prompt: Why are we so afraid of reproductive technologies?” Who is “we?” Intro Systems of oppression exist on three levels. First, the pervasive and ubiquitous sociocultural level which encompasses all the ideas (or discourses) in our society’s collective culture. Second, the institutional level, where people enact the sociocultural discourses as policy in order to make…
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It *HAS* to be you.
Sorry this will be long and I’m asking something unreasonable of you. First, there was a dude named Alinsky who wrote a book called “Rules for Radicals.” I’m happy to share a copy of the audiobook. It was a simple set of rules for how to build communities. It spawned the field we now…
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“Intelligence” Is A Racist Lie
IQ tests, SAT tests, GMAT tests, etc are racist. “Preferences” for people who score high on these tests are preferences for people who are a part of white culture. Let’s look at some examples of statistical racism to illustrate exactly why this idea that “intelligence is a real thing” is so problematic. Statistical racism is…
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The Core Strength of Community-Centered Activism Built on Radical Queer Anarcho-Communism
One of the huge advantages of anarcho-communist radical queer organizations comes as a deliberate result of the way they were constructed. Early gay leaders like Harry Hay started nonprofits like Mattachine Society in order to advocate for gay rights from within the structures of the political establishment. At the time, COINTELPRO was an FBI…
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The Slow-Motion Mass Suicide Of American Neo-Conservatism
I’m sure you’ve heard the claim, “You’ll get more conservative as you get older.” Throughout the middle of the twentieth century, the reality was that our society was designed to kill anyone who wasn’t a conservative. In the last six months, this trend has reversed in a big way. War and racism were the two…