Why do we speak positively about a person creating a business “empire,” when empire is the most brutal political innovation of all time, an organized force of conquest raping, enslaving, stealing, and murdering to extend the faceless power of a state across the globe?

What a hollow consolation prize, to get revenge on those in power by working frantically to become just like them.

As useful as trauma can be as a lens to understand our pain and the paths our lives take, it is also a limited one. Too often sex workers and women who sell their sex appeal are treated like trauma zombies, unthinkingly carrying out their self-destruction, led along by pain from childhood.

The most basic lesson of social change is that we will not dismantle power by collaborating with it, and yet we need to learn it again and again.

It was inevitable that I would grow up with warped ideas about my body, sex, and power, shaped as they were by an atmosphere of both conservative Christian backlash and gonzo exhibitionism, which colluded to create a culture of violent sexual obsession with teenage girls.

Gamergate revealed a group of people who had allowed themselves to be shaped by the rubrics of their marketing demographic and were not about to give up that ready-made identity; who had come to conflate being a man and consuming in a manly way; who policed their friends’ and brothers’ performance of masculinity, judging others using the criteria

Indeed, a person is free to buy an AR-15 but is not free from the fear of mass shootings. We are not free from the excesses of the superrich, even when they are hoarding resources and destroying the environment. They are free—and many of them think they should be free from criticism, too—because they earned it with their wealth. Freedom is not a

Thank God, at least, for small pleasures. There seem to be fewer all the time.

These entertainments are so well devised that we have all but accepted that dreamworlds are there for us to consume, but we should not actually expect to live in one.