The Weekly Discourse: Psychosexual Hangups Of The Intelligentsia

In general — but especially in 2020 — Twitter is a platform filled with people telling on themselves with regards to their sexual psychoses. Any given week, you can find an ostensibly well-educated tweeter embarrassing themselves by needlessly and troublingly using sex as a metaphor for whatever hot take has popped into their brain. In the past, we've seen such hits as the Beto Sex Tweet, in which political journalist Leah McElrath imagined the "calf-cramping" prowess of then-potential Presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke, and Sandra Newman's AOC/Jeff Bezos Fanfiction which imagined congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez entering an illicit romance with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, reforming his miserly ways before the pair becomes a President/VP power-couple.

This week, however, the sex on Twitter had a nasty edge to it. While Media Twitter was appalled by a story of a former Bloomberg journalist risking it all for Martin Shkreli, there were plenty of other posts bursting with unnecessary sexual energy as people worked through their numerous and apparently deep-seated issues with the world.

Paul Joseph Watson's Pegging Tweets

Paul Joseph Watson has long had an adversarial relationship with all things libs that makes one wonder if he's okay, but he dialed it up a notch last Wednesday when he suggested that men who wear masks to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, during a pandemic that has killed over 1.7 million people worldwide, also enjoy being pegged by their girlfriends.

The correlation between mask-wearing and pegging-enjoyment is low, to say the least, but Watson's point was certainly an illuminating look into his brain. There's a lot to unpack here. Watson has constructed a highly-specific strawman complete with a girlfriend who does not want to peg her safety-conscious boyfriend but agrees to anyway because the man likes two things: not getting COVID and having sex with his girlfriend. And to be clear: this is not something to be proud of.

Naturally, dunks aplenty came Watson's way as he racked up a 7-1 quote-tweet to retweet ratio, but no dunk was as brutal as the one Watson inadvertently provided himself, as he'd already been photographed wearing a mask.

Rod Graham vs. Cinematic Sex

A tip for cinema aficionados arguing against too much sex in movies: use swear words. Rod Graham, an associate professor of sociology and criminology, briefly took on the role of Movie Twitter's main character when he suggested that movies cut it out with all the sex scenes. In his estimate, they don't move the plot along and should thus be cut. What makes the take truly transcendent, though, is his insistence that sex scenes are no more useful than "potty scenes."

While one could argue the merits of Graham's point, the academic and, let's say, "fuddy-duddy" tone of his tweet made it an eye-roller among movie buffs. The phrase "potty scenes" brings it to the realm of bad-tweet greatness, and it was ratioed at roughly 5-1 quote-tweets to retweets. Most of the responses were defenses of sex scenes and "potty scenes" in general, as well as dunking on Graham's avatar, as is customary when mocking another user. Graham's tweet was a bizarre hot take that has appeared multiple times on Twitter, leading some users to think something more sinister was afoot.

Kelly's Gitmo For White Leftist Men

The last tweet this week isn't necessarily overtly sexual, but it sure is loaded with subtext. It comes from user @kellyvhalen, a center-left Twitter user and therapist who posted her fantasy about creating a Gitmo Bay for White Leftist Men. Responding to the prompt, "whats your job on the leftist commune??", Kelly forewent the typical response, i.e. "Making coffee" or "teaching theory," with a hyper-specific fantasy centered on starving and torturing white men. She followed up with "did I create a new Gitmo type thingie sry. but it’s okay if it’s white leftist men."

It's not uncommon to find liberals on Twitter riled up at their political left, aka the Chapo Trap House fandom or the Bernie Bros, what have you. It's more rare to find such a pointed and fleshed out torture fantasy. More than one user noted that the tweet seemed suspiciously sexual, but what really drove it home was the 14 hours Kelly spent replying to seemingly every single one of the critiques in the thread (at the time of writing, there are 388 replies, and it seems as though half are Kelly's), a rare attempt at the "self-ratio," as one commenter pointed out.

It was a truly epic meltdown to wrap up 2020, and one of the glorious Twitter moments when a poster boldly continues to tweet on, posts against the current, shot forth ceaselessly out of their ass. We can only hope that 2021 brings us even more tremendous posts, at least until Twitter self-immolates from the heat of the takes.

The Weekly Discourse is a look at some of the spiciest hot takes on Twitter from the past week that may not have generated memes but were definitely bonkers.