Recent searches
Search options
Adam Serwer’s essay “The Cruelty Is the Point” changed the way I inhabit the world. I already had the pieces. I already understood them, sort of. Yet when I read his writing, something clicked for me. I see the world differently after reading it.
It’s a piece that is worth rereading now, all the way to its powerful final paragraph:
(Non-paywalled link, ht @mybarkingdogs@freeradical.zone: https://archive.is/bZyGQ)
1/2
@inthehands
It's this bit that haunts me all these years later:
"As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together."
"intimacy through contempt" was a gut punch because it described the basis of too many of my friendships
It rewrote my address book
@kims
Oof, a gut punch indeed.