"The Sydney attacker was desperate for a girlfriend, his family has revealed as police confirmed that he had targeted women.
Joel Cauchi killed five women and one man during a knife attack on the Bondi Junction Westfield shopping centre on Saturday.
Karen Webb, the New South Wales police commissioner, said: “The videos speak for themselves. It’s obvious the offender had focused on women and avoided the men.”
The majority of the 12 people Cauchi seriously wounded were female, including a baby girl.
Andrew Cauchi, his father, said on Monday he knew why his mentally unwell son had targeted women.
The 76-year-old told reporters outside his home in Queensland: “Because he wanted a girlfriend and he’s got no social skills and he was frustrated out of his brain.”"
Sydney knifeman who targeted women ‘was desperate for a girlfriend’ (Andrea Hamblin, The Telegraph, April 15 2024)
police: oh yeah it's sus that he killed women, we'll be looking into that for sure
also police: but the killings are definitely not ideological! not terror! please don't use those words for a man who kills women!
Sydney stabbing suspect Joel Cauchi identified by police after Bondi mall attack (Jay Savage, BBC News, April 14 2024)
I ordered this shirt and thought you Tumblr weirdos would appreciate the vibe I'm going for:
the painting is by mijn landgenoot aka compatriot Peter Paul Rubens and is called "The Recognition of Phililpoemen"
for the record I tried to be a good girl and find something from the women's section but tops/shirts were always too short or an awkward fit on me (tall freak)
so I gave up and went on a quest to find something not-painfully-boring on men's side of things
I'm still not 100% sure I'm going for this but..... I could very well be
I remember discovering the fire of Notre Dame on tumblr, so I'm very sorry to inform everyone that the Danish Stock Exchange in Copenhagen, completed in 1625, is burning. Its unique spire has fallen, and as the building is, to a larger degree than Notre Dame, made of wood, mortar, and stucco, there may be very real structural damage. As you can see from the image, they were in the process of restoring it, just as it was the case with the church. Very real reconsideration should be done to how we restore very old buildings if we keep setting them on fire during the work.
People off the street have been seen running into the building and bringing out historical art pieces, primarily paintings. If you are close by, DO NOT do this! I know it appears the heroic thing to do, but no human life is worth the risk to save a painting, no matter how significant.
Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity (Peggy Ornstein, 2020)
"By his sophomore year of high school, Mason was spending about an hour a day immersed in porn.
He watched in his bedroom. He watched in the den. He watched in the bathroom stalls at school. He watched at parties.
It was, he said, as integral to his life as brushing his teeth, eating, drinking, sleeping.
“You can spend so much time in this porn fantasy world that you don’t even look up and live your real life,” he said.
Once, he popped in his earbuds and scrolled through his downloads in the back of the family car after a dentist appointment (no drilling jokes, please), as his brother and mom chatted in the front seat.
“That’s how normalized it became,” he said. “If it was going to be thirty minutes in the car, I might as well watch porn.”
Although at this point Mason had never kissed a girl or even held hands, he said that he half expected that at any moment a “hot woman” would appear out of nowhere and demand to have sex with him.
“That was my whole perception of how it was supposed to go,” he said.
“In porn, women are portrayed as these sexually driven animals. It’s all they want; it’s all they care about. It warped my perception for so long.”
He didn’t realize how much, though, until, at age sixteen, while surfing a Russian social network that allowed him to circumvent his parents’ safety filters, he watched a video of a woman defecating into a hotdog bun.
She poured condiments on the result and handed it to a second woman, who ate it.
I asked Mason if he found that arousing. “It was, kind of,” he admitted.
“Outside of that specific context, I would find this obviously disgusting act to be repulsive. I do find it repulsive.
But it was being portrayed as extremely sexual. That’s what porn does. Just media in general.
Sexualizes anything. Sexualizes people eating poop. And it boggles my mind how easy it was to be drawn in by it all." (…)
The girl herself, who was a year younger than him, also seemed to have taken her cues from porn.
She would writhe and moan when Daniel jackhammered a finger into her vagina.
When he told her he wanted to “take a break” from their relationship, she offered up anal sex to change his mind (although that idea could equally have been inspired by mainstream films such as Kingsman, in which the hero’s incentive for saving a Scandinavian princess is her promise that “we can do it in the asshole”).
He accepted, but the experience was nothing like what he’d seen on-screen.
“It was really difficult,” he recalled, “and it hurt her intensely. She was in pain. That was nothing I wanted to see. It was fucked up. And I felt like shit afterward.”
The two did eventually split up, briefly; they reunited after a round of rough sex in an elementary school parking lot, during which he choked her, pulled her hair, and, at her request, slapped her across the breasts.
That was the first time Daniel climaxed without using his hand. “It was the best sex we ever had,” he recalled.
Certainly, people have predilections, but it’s troubling that both instances of aggressive sex Daniel recounted happened when his girlfriend believed their relationship was in jeopardy.
Daniel himself considers his behavior to be contrary to the intimacy he claims to crave.
He doesn’t know whether that disconnect is natural, part of his wiring as a sexual person, or shaped by his repeated consumption of prepackaged fantasies."
"I listen to lots of these geopolitics podcasts. They're always decrying the fact that every US President says they want to pivot to Asia.
They see the principal rival to the United States as China. So they want to pivot their military resources, their economic might, to that region.
But they keep getting drawn back into the Middle East, which is not as strategic as it used to be, partly because America has shale gas, they don't rely on Middle Eastern oil in the same way that they used to.
So they want to stay out of the Middle East, but they keep getting drawn back into it because stuff keeps happening.
Trita Parsi said to me that this is not an accident. Israel's biggest fear is the fear of abandonment.
That America basically says: "look, you're kind of on your own, we don't have the military resources to expand here, we are going and focusing on East Asia".
And the way Israel says: "remember us, come back!", is to constantly create problems.
If you're constantly creating tensions with Lebanon, with Iran, and making completely unrealistic situations like this plan for Gaza, then you are telling America to come back.
So it's almost this sort of somewhat abusive relationship, where you're constantly causing problems so that they can't leave.
And that seems to be what's happening here.
Every time I see a long-term plan by Israel, it seems in a way that chaos is part of the plan."
Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity (Peggy Ornstein, 2020)
"When caught out, boys typically claim that they thought they were being “funny,” just joking around.
And in a way that makes sense—if, that is, you have been denied full emotional expression, been trained to suppress empathy, and consider cruelty, “ribbing,” or making demeaning sexual comments about women to be forms of bonding.
Such “humor” may even, when left unexamined, seem like an extension of the gross-out comedy of childhood: little boys are famous for their fart jokes, booger jokes, poop jokes, barf jokes.
It’s how they test boundaries, understand the human body, gain a little social cred with other guys.
But, as with sports, their glee in that can both enable and camouflage sexism. (…)
In order for gross, crude, sexual, or even slapstick humor to be funny to its audience, researchers have found, it has to succeed in two contradictory things: violating morals (that is, it has to be disgusting) while seeming harmless, detached from any true reality; certainly you can’t feel concern or identification with its subject.
That a dead baby joke would be a whole lot less funny if you first described in detail how the baby suffered, the grief of the parents, the horror of the funeral.
So, in order for boys to believe any of these antics were amusing, they had to systematically ignore the humanity of the girls involved—and that is not harmless at all. (…)
“Hilarious” is another way, under pretext of horseplay or group bonding, that boys learn to disregard others’ feelings as well as their own.
“Hilarious” is a safe haven, a default position when something is inappropriate, confusing, upsetting, depressing, unnerving, or horrifying; when something is simultaneously sexually explicit and dehumanizing; when it defies their ethics; when it evokes any of the emotions meant to stay safely behind that wall.
“Hilarious” offers distance, allowing them to subvert a more compassionate response that could be read as weak, overly sensitive, or otherwise unmasculine.
“Hilarious” is particularly troubling as a defense among bystanders—if assault is “hilarious,” they don’t have to take it seriously, they don’t have to respond: there is no problem."