flâneur

The Pink | Issue 34 | n+1

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I suppose what I’m saying is not that the desire for a universal is politically defensible but, more simply, that the desire for a universal is synonymous with having a politics at all. In a punishing twist, feminism has become both the preferred name for this desire and the very politics which must not claim it. Indeed, the minimal definition of a feminist might be a person who, affirming that women will never constitute a political class, privately hopes it might happen anyway.

My cat was 2 the day I got my pussy. She had beaten me to it — bottom surgery, I mean — by some twenty-one months. By the time I found her, in a small shelter near the United Nations building in Manhattan, I had nearly thrown in the towel. Three days of leaving the house in the freezing January rain, holding the cat carrier I’d purchased on Amazon Prime; three days of returning after dark, damp and empty-handed. Getting a pussy is harder than you’d think. Cats mate in spring and summer, so adopting a kitten in the winter can be tricky. But on the fourth day, at the fifth shelter, I met a…

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