Lynn O'Shaughnessy

Life-long journalist, speaker and author of The College Solution and The College Solution blog.

[Lady Laughingloudley @blah_blablather]

Let’s be clear:
If I’m not going to sleep with you, I don’t need to know anything about your sexuality.
And children—who are not going to sleep with anyone—certainly don’t.
Your sexuality is not sacred. It’s not a personality, it’s not a protected class of performance art, and it’s not the center of anyone’s moral universe but your own. Unless we are in a relationship, I am not obligated to acknowledge, affirm, or be exposed to your private desires—especially not in public, and especially not in front of children.
This used to be understood. Now it’s called hate.
No, We Don’t Owe You an Audience
Sexuality belongs in the private realm. It is intimate by definition. If you feel compelled to wear your kink on your sleeve—or on a float, or in a first-grade classroom—you are not inviting understanding, you are demanding submission. You are violating others’ right not to participate.
Consent doesn’t vanish because your fetish is “progressive.” If anything, the burden is higher.
No one consents to being flashed on the subway. No one consents to a stranger’s arousal. No one consents to a stranger telling their child about masturbation, kink, gender identity, or pornographic categories under the guise of “inclusive sex ed.” Yet all of this is happening now—in public parks, in classrooms, in televised programming.
It is not tolerance. It is invasion.
Children Are Not Here to Validate You
Children are not queer. Children are not sexual. Children do not need to “see themselves represented” in a spectrum of adult desire. This idea—that identity is only valid if sexualized and mirrored—is narcissism, not pedagogy.
There is no legitimate reason to initiate a child into the language of sexual preference, gender identity, or alternative lifestyles. The only people who benefit from that dynamic are those looking to normalize boundary violations.
Let me state it plainly:
Children who are not going to have sex do not need to be exposed to sexuality.
Period.
Any adult who insists otherwise is not confused. They are grooming.
Public Fetishism Is Not Liberation
There is a vast difference between being gay and demanding the right to simulate sex acts in front of children. Between being transgender and insisting on teaching kindergartners about breast removal. Between being proud of who you are and insisting the whole world observe your kink play in the street.
This is not diversity. This is decay.
Men in dog masks being walked on leashes by their lovers are not brave—they are forcing strangers into their psychodrama. This is exhibitionism, and when children are present, it becomes criminal exhibitionism.
We used to know this. Peeping, flashing, voyeurism—these were considered red flags. Dangerous behaviors. Early signs of escalation. Now they’re filmed, hashtagged, and funded by public grants.
Stop Calling It Love—It’s Entitlement
This is not about who you love. It’s about how you demand to be seen. If you need the entire public to witness, applaud, and adapt to your sexuality, you’re not a pioneer—you’re an emotional colonizer.
Love does not demand a captive audience. It does not parade past toddlers. It does not demand that schools teach four-year-olds about “preferred pronouns.” Love protects children. Love guards modesty. Love waits.
And if you can’t wait—if you need to be seen, affirmed, and obeyed—you’re not talking about love. You’re talking about power.
Consent Applies to Culture, Too
We teach children that consent is sacred—so why are we failing to apply that lesson to public life?
No child consents to drag queen story hour.
No parent consents to leather harnesses on city floats.
No woman consents to being exposed to male sexuality in the ladies’ room, or in the school library, or anywhere she cannot opt out.
Consent is not just for sex. It’s for everything.
Attention. Language. Presence. Ideology. Imagery.
And we are done pretending we don’t notice when it’s violated.
The boundary is back.
And we are drawing it in bold.

[Saritha Komatireddy @sarithaforny]

New Yorkers deserve an Attorney General who takes action against antisemitism.

Letitia James has had her chance and she’s failed.

It’s time for a new AG.

[Dr. Jebra Faushay @JebraFaushay]

This is the best thing I’ve seen all day. Well, the best within the last few hours because I just scrolled through my own posts.

But I digress. Comedian Ami Kozak did an excellent impression of Abdul El-Sayed and I had to share it. It’s perfection.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

Worth a watch

[Lynn O'Shaughnessy @CollegeBlogs]

@danwootton That's how the NYT characterized it!!!

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Chris Rock just nailed one of the biggest problems with wokeness.

Helping people who feel marginalized is good. He says so himself. The trouble starts when a good cause becomes an institution.

The first few witches were real. Then you open a witch office. Now there are salaries, budgets and pensions to justify, and the office needs a steady supply of witches to keep existing.

That’s the trap. Once a cause becomes a career, solving the problem means losing your job. So the problem never gets solved. It just keeps getting redefined.

A system built to find wrongdoing will keep finding it, whether it’s there or not.

[A Midwestern Doctor @MidwesternDoc]

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[Mary Katharine Ham @mkhammer]

I have many thoughts on the Nikole Hannah-Jones story, especially having attended the kind of schools she sent her daughter to, but if we're looking for takeaways, here's a simple one. When an expert in education so thoroughly demonstrates a jarring and near complete lack of expertise in the act of getting an education for her own daughter, we should stop taking advice from her on curriculum, instruction, and all other fads disguised as wisdom she offers. That seems like the least we could do. Her daughter's personal struggle, which is indeed sympathetic, wasn't much of a teachable moment for her, as she doesn't seem to have updated any of her priors (and actually fudges funding facts, so as not to disrupt the narrative of under-resourced schools). But it should be a teachable moment for us, about the outsized influence of a scholar who claims to know better than anyone what her daughter would be up against in the school to which she chose to send her, but was inexplicably surprised and left her daughter completely unprepared for it.

[Coleman Hughes @coldxman]

Because it's a ridiculous question. Why should my daughter eat healthier food than the average person? Why should she breath cleaner air than people living in Beijing & Mumbai? The answer to all such questions is "because I love her & can provide her something better". Period.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams @thomaschattwill]

Arrogance and obliviousness verging on hubris. What a tragic overestimation of her own expertise, importance and moral goodness compounded by a totally unjustified confidence in her chosen profession's power to influence events and circumstances in the real world.

[Irami Osei-Frimpong @IramiOF]

Don't let the self-pitying fool you. NHJ was a bad parent, not because she sent her kids to underperforming schools.

NHJ was a bad parent because her kid didn't know how to write and do math, and NJH didn't know that her kid didn't know how to do math because NJH never sat down and watched her kid write and do math, like a good parent would.

https://t.co/GSH9hDGTWd

[Maud Maron @MaudMaron]

I have some thoughts!

Nikole Hannah-Jones interviewed me at the height of woke-1 to champion and virtue signal her “fight for every black child” and disparage and dismiss my fight for all NYC public school students to enjoy the rising tide that lifts all boats of academic rigor and meritocracy.

She thought my support of the Specialized High School Admission Exam, the SHSAT, was racist. I thought her school politics were deeply misguided, and well, quite racist.

Unlike Hannah-Jones I have nothing to walk back.

I knew then what she has just figured out that her identitarian race-based grievance project would not fix anything. And in fact, it has hurt all public school students. Not just in NYC—her Magnum Opus of racial grievance, The 1619 Project, is taught in schools across the country and its reasoning is used to dismantle and stop the creation of the kind of high school that her daughter ultimately chose—the one that finally taught her algebra.

NYC Public School students score lower on all academic metrics now than they did when her daughter started school—and we tax payers pay more for it. Enrollment continues to plummet while those in charge dumb down standards and hide results. So much of that is because any solution that challenged Hannah-Jones' race-baiting—endorsed by The Times and Democratic leaders alike—was verboten.

Like Hannah-Jones I have a HS junior. My two older kids have graduated from NYCPS and are in college and my youngest is in NYCPS elementary school. I have qualms with parts of their education but also many success stories. Can you get a great education in NYCPS? Yes. But you have to fight for it. And insisting on the schools that grade math homework is a start.

Knowing what your child is learning and mastering is a non-negotiable. Standardized tests help with that, but are a starting point only. Blaming phantom racists instead of understanding the role parents play was and is a lazy cop out.

There is still an effort–alive and well right now-to dismantle great schools like NYC’s specialized high schools because they use standardized admissions tests. The effort still relies on the same failed logic that Hannah-Jones has peddled for years. She insisted that kids like her daughter who did not score high enough on a test to gain admission were the victims of racism. But she refused to acknowledge that poor Asian kids whose parents had NONE of the resources that her daughter enjoyed (or should have enjoyed) (English speaking parents, resources to pay for prep classes, knowledge of how the system works, etc) were not racist oppressors—but kids willing to work hard and apply their smarts with parents that prioritized subject mastery and took the time to make sure their kids were actually learning.

Her daughter is right. She deserved much better. But it is not the cauldron of racist grievances that Hannah-Jones still cannot let go of that failed her daughter. It’s her daughter’s parents that did not figure out for NINE YEARS that their daughter was not learning enough.

New York City Public Schools should be among the best in the world because we have so many incredibly talented, smart and hard-working students that could and should learn more by being challenged more–and that means sorting kids into cohorts where they can rise to the level of their abilities and willingness to work. In other words “screening”—the exact project Hannah-Jones fought against for so long and which she has now relied on to rescue her daughter’s education.

You’re welcome Nikole. Your daughter’s chosen high school would not exist but for parents like me who fought so hard to keep screened schools.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Every glib, arrogant, virtue-signalling celebrity who’s broadcast the lie that kids will kill themselves if not allowed to transition deserves to have this read aloud to them non-stop through a megaphone for a year.

[Justine Bateman @JustineBateman]

The reason is a paranoid commitment to a elect-Democrats-down-the-line voting record purity.
I know people now who complain about current CA leadership, while acknowledging they themselves voted for them, and would again because there is a (D) next to their name.
If you have a bunch of politicians, of whatever party, who know they don’t have to maintain the city and yet you’ll still vote for them, then you have a bunch of politicians who will siphon off all that tax money meant for city maintenance to enrich themselves and their friends.
And those terrified of an “impure voting record” will elect them once again.
And PS, this upcoming LA Mayoral election isn’t an election. We all saw the vote manipulation during the primary where Nithya Raman was “placed” in the race with Karen Bass, so we’d have no choice but to elect one or the other person ironically responsible for the current poor state of LA.

[Clifford Asness @CliffordAsness]

Right now you couldn’t get a majority of Americans under 40 to agree that we were the victims of 9/11, let alone a majority of NYT reporters. So not surprising they found this a point worth making.

You can’t hate the NYT enough.

[Lynn O'Shaughnessy @CollegeBlogs]

@philipaklein I've been a professional journalist for 48 years and I wholeheartedly agree. Just disgusting.

[Lynn O'Shaughnessy @CollegeBlogs]

@DaniWex Please come back Dani! You were beyond fantastic this year. You made your hometown proud!

[Mor Edge Insight @MorEdge_Insight]

They told her it was freedom.

She stood in the square and said it on camera. The crowd had come night after night. The dictator was finished. Then the battery died, the lights on the crew went dark, and the men who had been cheering close enough to touch her said, in Arabic: “take her pants off.”

@laralogan did not understand the words. The Egyptian with her did. By the time she felt the first hands she was already inside it.

Not one man. A line of them. Breasts, crotch, behind. She screamed because she thought a scream still meant something. It made them worse. Someone yelled that she was an Israeli, a Jew. She is neither. But it did not matter. The word was enough.

They tore the sweater off. They tore the shirt to her neck. They ripped the metal off the bra. They shredded the pants and took the last of the cloth and they took pictures while they did it. Her cameraman had a sleeve left in his fist. She held his arm and thought she would die if she let go. They were beating her with sticks and flagpoles. She could not feel the wood. She could only feel the hands.

That was Tahrir on the night the West called a revolution. February 11, 2011. The same square. The same hour. The same men who had been sold to America as the face of a new birth. The match that turned a sexual assault into a killing frenzy was not a rumor about a government. It was the accusation that a woman might be a Jew.

They will tell you this was chaos, or war, or a few criminals in a crowd. It was a crowd that knew what it wanted the moment the camera stopped. Freedom, for them, included the right to strip a foreign woman in public and put their hands in her body while they photographed it. And the lie that made it holy was the oldest one in that part of the world.

Tahrir showed you the appetite. October 7 showed you the same appetite with the fence cut open and a plan.

In Cairo they tore the clothes off a reporter and filmed it because someone said Jew. In Israel they raped women in their homes and at a festival and filmed that too. Hamas led it. Civilians came through the breach behind the gunmen and joined the killing, the burning, the looting, the dragging of people back into Gaza. Some of them joined the sexual violence. Enough of them filmed it, cheered it, and treated Jewish women’s bodies as spoils.

One was a mob in a square the West called freedom. The other was a massacre the same West spent weeks struggling to say out loud.

She lived because one man did not let go. The ideology did not apologize. It waited for the next square, the next campus, the next morning when the word Jew is shouted and the hands come out again.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

Agreed.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

True