it’s nevertheless hard to shake the suspicion that, for many of the people inveighing against the morality of child-rearing, the prospect of a life without children appears to be less a sacrifice than a relief

we have to be careful while doing so not to abjure the very sense of agency that we would need to sustain such a revolt

The most well-known image of the quietist in the Republic is that of the philosopher in the bad city

What could I possibly get out of this exercise in prurient professional curiosity?

The notes scrawled in the margins in my loopy high school hand proclaim such portentous platitudes as “orgasm = death,”

In J. G. Ballard’s eerily oneiric Crash, a cabal of car crash fetishists ejaculate into the orifices of gaping lesions