It's a dense read to be sure, but no more dense than any of the hard-to-read continental philosophers such as Hegel[1] or Ricœur[2]. My gist is that the author

It's a dense read to be sure, but no more dense than any of the hard-to-read continental philosophers such as Hegel[1] or Ricœur[2]. My gist is that the author is basically saying that the category of girl is experiencing a cataphatic expansion - that is to say it's expanding in positive definite terms. It's also saying that this is a good thing and that it should be accelerated[3][4]. It's clear the author is well read enough to hint at ideas which such velocity that it overwhelms the reader. For example, I'm quite certain that the author would feel right at home talking about the category of girl in terms of reterritorialization a la Deleuze and Guattari[5]. But, the author never explicitly makes this connection. Like nearly all philosophical works, it draws from, reapplies, or is a response to existing works. It doesn't go out of its way to tell you what they are - it expects you to be familiar enough with the topic that you can discern that from content and context. I think it's easy to criticize the piece as being not accessible, but also, maybe the target audience (which the author assumes familiarity with) doesn't overlap with the population of HN readers. I don't think it's a stretch to say that author would see programming concepts as equally incomprehensible and requiring a foundation found elsewhere. Back to summarizing the piece, the author write after a series of specific points "Living as “male” is to live in horror of ever being a girl." Going back to the point of the "category of girl is experiencing a cataphatic expansion," you can see how "male" is being defined apophatically[6] - that is to say, by negation. The author combines this positive definition of girlness with the question "What is being rewarded by online platforms?" and arrives at the intermediate conclusion that the manipulation of desire(my words) is rewarded. The piece then goes on to question, are the girls subject to the influence of platforms or can they wield this power to achieve goals? Finally, I'm reserving the right to be completely wrong about my interpretation of this. I'm not exactly holding this interpretative view very strongly. 1. See The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) https://archive.org/details/phenomenologyofs0000hege_n6q1/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/phenomenologyofs0000hege_n6q1/mo... (translation) 2. Or see Time and Narrative (1984) https://archive.org/details/timenarrative0001ricu/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/timenarrative0001ricu/mode/2up 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism 4. Some form of Girl/Acc? (50% /gen, 50% tongue in cheek) 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reterritorialization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reterritorialization 6. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Apophatic https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Apophatic