Grace Lavery / Joseph Lavery & Daniel M. Lavery / Mallory Ortberg - "Straight with extra steps" couple trooning out to avoid "dwindling into mere heterosexuality"

[Friend of Dorothy Parker]

That pic of Mal is old, old, old. It’s her Simon & Schuster author pic from circa 2019-20.

This is the most current photo Mal has posted on IG, dated Jan 24, 2023:
View attachment 4949949

Thought so. And of course I should have known for sure because she's not wearing gaudy designer clown clothes in it.

 

[Dr. Butt]

View attachment 4949949

Mal, those clothes are for skinny people. Not you.

 

[monstrous bubo]

Mal, those clothes are for skinny people. Not you.

Hard disagree. Those clothes are for idiots with too much money. Perfect for Danny-dood and his hawt bitch.

 

[Kettle Cooked]

That pic of Mal is old, old, old. It’s her Simon & Schuster author pic from circa 2019-20.

This is the most current photo Mal has posted on IG, dated Jan 24, 2023:
View attachment 4949949

Bitch, you look like a potato. Fucking stop.

But hey I guess if every eye cast in your direction starts to spontaneously bleed, they won't notice. Good strategy?

 

[3MMA]

Bitch, you look like a potato

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

Thought so. And of course I should have known for sure because she's not wearing gaudy designer clown clothes in it.

I’m pretty sure those clothes are Dan trolling Mallory by telling her how cool she looks in fucking clown clothes.

Dan strikes me as the type of guy who only decides if something is cool or not once he checks how high the price. I can only imagine how much Mallory paid to look that foolish.

 

[Cnaiur urs Skiotha]

Obviously the NYT photog wasn't doing them any favors with the angles, but I think @FarmVille has it right, this is just how they look in the light of day. Besides, even if the angle highlights their collective rotundity, what's really awful about this picture are their "adult retard bagging groceries at the checkout" outfits and ridiculously bad hipster haircuts they are at least 10 years too old for. Can't blame the photographer for those.

Anyway, since it's such a gem of a photo and graphic design is my passion, here it is with my favorite Mallory quote

Spoiler: Extreme Autism

View attachment 4919770

This picture has such powerful vibes of a special needs teenage boy bringing his elderly, weirdly-dressed mother to prom. I love it

 

[FarmVille]

what’s the problem? Have none of you ever seen a closeted
Mormon divorcee picking through the lulalroe cast offs at goodwill before?

 

[Dromedary]

Bitch is so sadistic towards his mentally ill girlfriend. Having big trouble posting pics, Long story short: Joe : "Why is my husband a little hobbit in the big city?". Pic of Mallory at a NYC crosswalk. There's definitely a lot of S/M in this fucked up relationship. Joe abuses Mallory, she's totally into it. Sad shit, (Instagram)

Joe announces he will be Visiting Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Spring 2024. A year from now. Program for The Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality.". What's Joe's expertise in any of those things? Wht not throw men in there too? It would actually be more enlightening, Joe explaining why he's such a prancing fat faggot who munches lady muff except for Mallory's. Who he treats as a slave at this degrading point.

Whatever happened with/at Stanford? Something went down there. Joe seems to be announcing his exit. Bitch was tenured, even though he seems to barely spend an hour on the West Coast.lately. Something happened.

I know Joe reads here, just another hearty fuck-you to him, that appalling fraud.

 

[monstrous bubo]

Bitch is so sadistic towards his mentally ill girlfriend. Having big trouble posting pics, Long story short: Joe : "Why is my husband a little hobbit in the big city?". Pic of Mallory at a NYC crosswalk. There's definitely a lot of S/M in this fucked up relationship. Joe abuses Mallory, she's totally into it. Sad shit, (Instagram)

Joe announces he will be Visiting Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Spring 2024. A year from now. Program for The Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality.". What's Joe's expertise in any of those things? Wht not throw men in there too? It would actually be more enlightening, Joe explaining why he's such a prancing fat faggot who munches lady muff except for Mallory's. Who he treats as a slave at this degrading point.

Whatever happened with/at Stanford? Something went down there. Joe seems to be announcing his exit. Bitch was tenured, even though he seems to barely spend an hour on the West Coast.lately. Something happened.

I know Joe reads here, just another hearty fuck-you to him, that appalling fraud.

I’d love to know what is happening at Berkeley that has made Baltimore of all places more attractive to Danny’s hawt bitch. Apart from being closer to New York, of course. Gracey-poo’s ratings have taken a slight dip on Rate My Professor - two ”averages” must sting. This comment was revealing:

The most unique professor I've had. She is brilliant, funny, unconventional, and made me look at sitcoms completely differently. That said, she is also extremely fast-paced, pedantic, and inattentive. Little communication, resources, opportunities for clarification, and the class was often canceled. She was also quick to disagree with students.

Sounds like he has skated by for years on charm and esoteric knowledge plus a bit of theory, which impresses the young, but stopped giving a shit about improving their minds. That’s the problem with an academic career: you can be a good teacher and mediocre thinker, or mediocre teacher but good to great thinker, and survive. Once you’re mediocre at both, you’re fucked, at least at the elite institutions. Who wants to pay top dollar for a shit teacher with no worthwhile reputation? What doors can Ass. Pro. Lavery open for students? And what other comfortable careers are open to a NSFW exhibitionist in a clown suit? So Joe has to take the show on the road, or get his shit together. At least Johns Hopkins can’t say it didn’t know what it was in for.


link | archive

 

[Trianon]

Bitch is so sadistic towards his mentally ill girlfriend. Having big trouble posting pics, Long story short: Joe : "Why is my husband a little hobbit in the big city?". Pic of Mallory at a NYC crosswalk. There's definitely a lot of S/M in this fucked up relationship. Joe abuses Mallory, she's totally into it. Sad shit, (Instagram)

Indistinguishable from Mal's dog posting. "Look at this sad, bug-eyed abomination, look how indistinguishable it is from the other similar thing that also lives in the house."

Joe announces he will be Visiting Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Spring 2024. A year from now. Program for The Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality.". What's Joe's expertise in any of those things? Wht not throw men in there too? It would actually be more enlightening, Joe explaining why he's such a prancing fat faggot who munches lady muff except for Mallory's. Who he treats as a slave at this degrading point.

twitter | archive

Whatever happened with/at Stanford? Something went down there. Joe seems to be announcing his exit. Bitch was tenured, even though he seems to barely spend an hour on the West Coast.lately. Something happened.

I know Joe reads here, just another hearty fuck-you to him, that appalling fraud.

We WILL find out, it is just a matter of time.

---

Turning 40 with disembodied girl arms.

twitter | archive

Joe's book is coming out soon. We have a summary, some blurbs, and a preview chapter:

In Pleasure and Efficacy, Grace Lavery investigates gender transition as it has been experienced and represented in the modern period. Considering examples that range from the novels of George Eliot to the psychoanalytic practice of Sigmund Freud to marriage manuals by Marie Stopes, Lavery explores the skepticism found in such works about whether it is truly possible to change one’s sex. This ambivalence, she argues, has contributed to both antitrans oppression and the civil rights claims with which trans people have confronted it. Lavery examines what she terms “trans pragmatism”—the ways that trans people resist medicalization and pathologization to achieve pleasure and freedom. Trans pragmatism, she writes, affirms that transition works, that it is possible, and that it happens.

With Eliot and Freud as the guiding geniuses of the book, Lavery covers a vast range of modern culture—poetry, prose, criticism, philosophy, fiction, cinema, pop music, pornography, and memes. Since transition takes people out of one genre and deposits them in another, she suggests, it should be no surprise that a cultural history of gender transition will also provide, by accident, a history of genre transition. Considering the concept of technique and its associations with feminine craftiness, as opposed to masculine freedom, Lavery argues that techniques of giving and receiving pleasure are essential to the possibility of trans feminist thriving—even as they are suppressed by patriarchal and antitrans feminist philosophies. Contesting claims for the impossibility of transition, she offers a counterhistory of tricks and techniques, passed on by women to women, that comprises a body of knowledge written in the margins of history.

overview: link | archive

“Written with Lavery’s precision and daring, Pleasure and Efficacy is both a challenging theory of trans realism—developing the deep significance of DIY ethics and trans avowal over ontological approaches—and a lifeline of intellect and warmth in an era of transphobic violence.”—Rei Terada, author of Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity

“There is a big secret about sex: it’s rather easy to change. Worse, you might even like doing it. Grace Lavery’s incisive critique of queer studies’ romantic fantasy about the impossibility of transition announces not just an end to tired and defensive theories, but takes seriously the fascinating stakes of technique as wielded by those whose mundane reality has been fictionalized to ennoble their oppression. Arriving at a life not merely possible, but enjoyable, is but one of the many rewards of the trans pragmatism Pleasure and Efficacy lovingly embraces. —Jules Gill-Peterson, author of Histories of the Transgender Child

“Grace Lavery is a promiscuous and a polymorphously perverse reader of culture, theory, sexuality, and embodiment. Offering a series of ornate and stunning essays on trans realism, this book makes the case for reading George Eliot as trans, for reading transition as real, possible, and desirable and for creative critiques of the straight realisms that oppose the flourishing of trans life. Smoothly alternating between high and low cultures, Twitter and the archives of Victorian life, highbrow horror and lowbrow comedy, Lavery demonstrates complete mastery of the essay form while disavowing mastery itself. Prepare to be vexed, outraged, seduced, and entertained. Prepare to enter an alternate reality with Lavery as your charming guide.”—Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure and Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire

blurbs: link

"mastery of the essay form while disavowing mastery itself" = this reads like garbage

sample chapter: link | archive





Joe continues his attempts to trans Eliot. At first, he simply says it's not "proven persuasive" to him that she isn't trans and leaves it there. He picks the topic up again as an aside at the end of the chapter.



You see, if you ever use a pen name for any reason, you are trans. Not being read as trans is transphobic. So to trans George Eliot is to be antitransphobic.



Because, you dumb clod, the Brontes wrote at length about why they picked their names, partly out of a sense of sexism within publishing and critical circles, and partly out of fear that using their real identities would jeopardize their social standing among friends and neighbors, since a lot of their work was based on autobiographical details that are pretty recognizable if you knew the source. When Charlotte's identity was discovered by her neighbors, she was petrified that her life would be over until she realized they didn't care and already admired her work. After her sisters died (quite young), Charlotte revealed their true identities in the next republication and happily affirmed that their Bronte-ness, their real life, was more important to them than how they were perceived as pseudonymous writers.

Charlotte still had anxiety about her fame, though, and her last book was only published under "Currer Bell" because she could not convince her publishers to let her use a different pseudonym. It was clearly about anonymity for them, providing distance from their real life, rather than building up an oeuvre tied to a particular name.

"George Eliot" wanted her literary work to be distinguished from her other writing and continued to use it to build her portfolio, even when her identity was known. It keeps it all neat and tidy. "Mark Twain" wanted his name to be part of the cheeky narrative persona that drove his newspaper columns and later novels. Had "Robert Galbraith" been a breakout star, whose real name wasn't tied to another set of popular books, we might still refer to her as that when discussing the work or the mind behind it.

The rest of the Eliot argument is basically "wow, George Eliot used pronouns sometimes without referring to a character by name. TRANS." Also, any empathetic character who feels like they can understand other characters? TRANS.



People yelling the explanation in Joe's direction--he doesn't hear.

He then gets in a sexual dig at her for some reason. That's the end of the chapter.



I attempted to read the rest of the chapter. The basic gist is that living in reality/wanting to be realistic is so passé. How can things be real and objective when sometimes we think subjective things? And those things are real? So we should be able to change sex. The end.

 

[Bookwork]

I had to look up the word "distinguished." The meaning's changed over the years.

Merriam-Wokester, 13th edition​

perverse, needy, and requiring attention​

"a distinguished pedant"​

 

[Trianon]

Mallory piercing the facade of FaceTune while on a train!

Fantasy:


Reality:



Cruelty:
link | archive / archive 2

Spoiler: Mallory spergs about trains

Also Mallory's Dear Prudence book came out and features a whole lot more editorializing and self-aggrandizement than I realized. Here are some early Goodreads reviews.

link | archive


link | archive

 

[David Glowie]

Mal's pictures of ol' Joe are BRUTAL. Well done girl, I didn't think you had it in you.

 

[AirdropShitposts]

Lavery explores the skepticism found in such works about whether it is truly possible to change one’s sex. This ambivalence, she argues, has contributed to both antitrans oppression and the civil rights claims with which trans people have confronted it.

Trans pragmatism, she writes, affirms that transition works, that it is possible, and that it happens.

Since transition takes people out of one genre and deposits them in another, she suggests, it should be no surprise that a cultural history of gender transition will also provide, by accident, a history of genre transition.

ontesting claims for the impossibility of transition, she offers a counterhistory of tricks and techniques, passed on by women to women, that comprises a body of knowledge written in the margins of history.

a challenging theory of trans realism—developing the deep significance of DIY ethics and trans avowal over ontological approaches

There is a big secret about sex: it’s rather easy to change. Worse, you might even like doing it. Grace Lavery’s incisive critique of queer studies’ romantic fantasy about the impossibility of transition announces not just an end to tired and defensive theories, but takes seriously the fascinating stakes of technique as wielded by those whose mundane reality has been fictionalized to ennoble their oppression.

this book makes the case for reading George Eliot as trans, for reading transition as real, possible, and desirable and for creative critiques of the straight realisms that oppose the flourishing of trans life.

Okay, but hear me out: unlike things are not exactly alike in every way.

Also, you yourself don't believe your own thesis or else you wouldn't have written a book in a common shared language while following the rules of it. You would have just transformed reality so we all knew it. By putting it in writing, specifically English and then publishing it you admit there is a constrained objective reality and your thesis is inherently false. If you disagree with me then prove I didn't alter reality or your perceptions or the structure of the English language so that transition is not possible. Or maybe it was made to be simply impossible in my own subjective reality. Spirbs pwubsl wiejbal osvpn kdkdkdkdieygr shiablpw. I just called created an entire new language and called you fat. Don't try to box me in to just your reality, transphobe. I am transitioning beyond corporeal existence. Transition for sex is not possible in my reality because there is no sex, no such simplistic bounded concepts exist in my reality except for the singular concept of myself as an idea in my own mind. This is why Berkeley should give me your salary to not teach classes instead. Oh, and by the way, you're not just fat, I wouldn't have sex with you.

 

[monstrous bubo]

Mal's pictures of ol' Joe are BRUTAL. Well done girl, I didn't think you had it in you.

Their relationship is The bitter tears of Petra von Kant minus hot lesbians.

 

[OttoWest]

Their relationship is The bitter tears of Petra von Kant minus hot lesbians.

Let’s hope it doesn’t end like In a Year of 13 Moons, at least for Mal’s sake.

 

[Norman B. Normal]

There are no words for how much I want Joe to die.

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

View attachment 5061387
There are no words for how much I want Joe to die.

He looks like a dirty old man who just pissed himself and is getting a thrill out of offending everyone with the odor.

 

[FarmVille]

He looks like every old man in Berkeley, CA which is probably why he had to move to the other side of the continent lest he be reminded daily of his fat, frumpy reality