I challenge a privileged British Medical Journal essay that argues against what should be a Universal Human Right: Sexual pleasure. Universal rights vs moral relativism. Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh on Pexels Sometimes I swear no one hates women more than women. I came across an extended essay in British Medical Journal arguing against the cultural ‘insensitivity’ and ‘harms’ produced by anti-Female Genital Mutilation campaigns globally. Twenty-five contributors ‘critically examine’ the ‘harms’ they say emerge from the campaign to end the practice of physically altering, often without anesthesia or hygienic conditions, female genitals from infancy to adulthood. Twenty-three contributors are women. They claim the conversation is “driven by a heavily racialised and ethnocentric framework,” which they claim has contributed to “the erosion of trust in healthcare settings, the silencing of dissenting or nuanced community voices, racial profiling and disproportionate legal surveillance of migrant families.” They also conflate what is often done without consent to an adjacent but consensual practice in the West: Genital cosmetic surgery. The authors argue, somewhat correctly, that FGM doesn’t necessarily stem from ‘patriarchal control’, and correctly note that we can’t be sure how or why the at-least 3,000-year-old practice began in multiple times and places. It may have originated with a desire for males to control female sexuality by making relations unpleasant, and to ensure paternity. The Egyptians, as some scholars believe, may have originated the practice as a marker of the aristocracy. In sub-Saharan Africa it may have started as a puberty rite, similar to male circumcision. In some cultures, FGM is said to make the woman look ‘cleaner’; whether it came from male preference or a desire to one-up the competition is lost in the mists of time. Today, brains that haven’t been morally nuked by a female-driven obsession with ‘tolerance’ ask the glaringly obvious question the BMJ contributors didn’t. Why is FGM acceptable for largely powerless ‘racialized’ females but not for Western women? Western academics like the BMJ contributors hew to a santized language of ‘decolonization’, ‘anti-racism’ and ‘migrants’ rights’ to defend FGM, while accepting a system of healthy female sexuality granted to Western women and girls but not to those unfortunate enough to be born in places where FGM is considered decidedly groovy. How privileged. I believe Rob Henderson would call this a ‘luxury belief’. FGM has always been the rage in parts of the world with demonstrably fewer women’s rights: Somalia, Guinea, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Mali, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. To be fair, some of its greatest defenders are the women who live there who seek to conserve ancient practices and resent foreign interference. Here’s where it becomes easier to, in popular progressive parlance, accuse them of ‘internalized misogyny’. Everyone needs a scapegoat, and when you’re powerless in your own culture, you can at least oppress other women. Especially if you’ve already been oppressed yourself by the lady with the knife. The authors correctly note that not all FGM practices are extreme; in fact, some are relatively non-invasive, like symbolic nicking or cutting rather than mutilating flesh. One must wonder, though, whether the native defenders have ever questioned it, or whether women who were themselves subjected to FGM and have never known sexual pleasure can understand what they’re denying to their daughters. Or whether they do know—because they themselves were cut after discovering female pleasure, on their own or with friends, or because they’ve heard the stories, or others enjoying female sexual pleasure. The article never asks, “Are women in these cultures capable of making edified decisions about their daughters’ sexuality when they’ve never been allowed to experience it themselves?” Little girls in FGM-friendly countries have been known to badger their mothers to get the procedure, complaining of schoolyard bullying for not being ‘clean’. The pressure is intense to become a ‘woman’ rather than remain a ‘girl’, and with the procedure also comes elevated status, gifts, celebrations, and other public positive reinforcement. They’re in no way old enough to understand what they’re giving up; or the lifetime of pain and health problems that awaits if the procedure is performed to the extreme, or improperly. They can’t conceive of pushing a baby out of a mutilated passage. The article disingenuously compares cultural FGM to Western cosmetic surgery practices. But their argument is strongest when they compare it to what’s permitted, applauded even, in Western culture; when young people are permitted to engage in ‘bottom’ surgery for sex transition. It’s weakest by not asking another glaringly obvious question: Who’s forced to engage in genital alteration: Western children encouraged by the school system, social contagion and progressive parenting, or little girls pulled into a ‘purifying’ or ‘cleansing’ ritual without being told how they’ll be ‘cleansed’? Or who don’t understand what this entails as an adult? A similar hotly contested debate is happening within our own culture: Whether even Western children possess enough agency to make cosmetic decisions about their bodies. Loss of the human right to sexual pleasure is indeed a risk with sex transition bottom surgery, supported by damning admissions in the WPATH Files clarifying that the transactivist group acknowledged children might well lose the ability to achieve orgasm, or even enjoy sex at all; that they couldn’t truly comprehend potentially permanent decisions about their bodies that would change when they hit puberty, and adulthood, and wanted to start a family—and might not be able to. Never does the BMJ’s anti-anti-FGM article explore the ethics of making children wait until the age of majority to make the FGM decision for themselves. Nor do they ask the most important question. Is sexual pleasure a universal human right? Would any of those BMJ authors support their five-year-old daughter’s ‘right’ to be ‘cleansed’ of her most sensitive vulva if she said she wanted it? What if their government passed a law making it legal? What if she said, “I want to be a boy,” versus “I don’t like the way my wee-wee looks”? Her body, her choice, right? No. Not until she’s eighteen, at least. The age of majority. ‘Health’ and ‘hygiene’ excuses offered for female cutting are complete bollocks according to the United Nations Population Fund. Babies can never give consent at all. (I’m against even piercing babies’ ears.) The BMJ article’s strongest point is actually that, apart from Jewish and Muslim practice, how little public outcry we hear anywhere over male circumcision, which is performed, in the West, on babies, mostly in the United States. In Canada it’s described as ‘rare’ (to which I will merely add, “not in my experience”). I’m against male circumcision for the same reasons as female: I don’t care about hoary religious practices. It’s barbaric, at least until the age of majority, and the ‘health’ reasons given for male cutting are also debunked. The female enforcers of patriarchal power Are human rights universal, or only granted on the basis of birth privilege? What’s particularly troublesome about the desanitizing, uncritical female academics (and two sycophantic males) of the BMJ essay is the moral cultural relativism focused on ‘racism’ and ‘ethnocentrism’. It demarcates anti-FGM campaigns as targeting the ‘Global South’, which they define as ‘African’, ‘South Asian’, and ‘non-Western’. They compare it to the more consensual cosmetic practices in the less-defined ‘Global North’, vaguely referenced as where the ‘diaspora’ communities go. That would be to the West, mostly located north of the equator. The language maintains the two-tiered system of West vs East: One set of rules for thee, another for me. Western academics vocalize what they accuse The Patriarchy of doing: Enforcing control over other women’s bodies and denying them sexual pleasure. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the Aunts and Wives were willing to exercise, even enjoy, brutal control over their lower-hierarchy sisters because they themselves were brutally controlled and punished by the patriarchal Commanders of the Faithful. Which makes one wonder just how ‘enlightened’ women from those parts of the world are when they insist on ‘cleansing’ their daughters, who are brought up in a culture that teaches them they’re ‘dirty’ until someone ‘liberates’ them from their ‘ugly’ ladyparts. No, the BMJ article never raises that question. The weaponization of ‘progressive’ language by female, and allegedly feminist, academics belies the privileged moral disability beneath. ‘Surveillance,’ ‘racial profiling’, ‘harm,’ ‘decolonization’, ‘ethnocentric’ and other activist terms shield their internalized misogyny—their Orwellian subsconscious belief that some women are more equal than others. They wield cultural ‘genocide’ accusations as dangerously as a two-year-old with a loaded gun, with results as devastating for non-Western women as for the child’s hapless family. The ugliest euphemism is ‘cultural sensitivity,’ a term used to defend abhorrent practices entrenched in cultures that aren’t primarily white, ergo ‘oppressed’. Because a long-established practice is part of a ‘culture’, we should be ‘sensitive’ and not engage in a form of ‘cultural genocide’ by forcing them to change. These sound horribly like excuses to not do anything. “Not my country; not my problem.” If we applied the feminist ‘cultural history’ to issues closer to home, ‘sensitivity’ looks a lot more—insensitive. There’s a long cultural history of preventing abortion in the US; of wife- and child-beating; and a no-longer passive tolerance of incest, until the twentieth century. Culture-rejecting feminists drove change on all these fronts. They never considered the ‘cultural practices’ that stretched back farther than the first European footsteps on the Massachusetts coastline. Like the Catholic Church’s teaching from the beginning that abortion was a mortal sin; the Biblical right to physically ‘chastise’ your wife and children; the tacit, if non-Biblical practice of sexual abuse within families. Who were they to criticize the wife-beaters and kid-diddlers when it was a long, established, cultural practice? True liberals and conservatives, fighting for genuine social justice, recognize the rights of all humans: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Including orgasms. ‘Cultural relativism’ is a First World privilege for those holding fashionable authoritarian luxury beliefs they don’t believe will ever affect themselves. They permit FGM for one set of girls—notably, black and brown girls, but not for white girls (or children of color fortunate enough to have been born in the ‘Global North’). It’s irredeemably racist. Misogynist. Vulvaphobic. If women in less-developed, less-educated parts of the world have no right to bodily autonomy before they’re eighteen, then who’s to say any woman does? It becomes easy for autocrats, whether progressive or conservative, to dismantle Western women’s hard-won rights to their body autonomy. Because you know, culture. You might not be able to easily procure an abortion where you live, but at least your mom can’t drag you to a cutter because she thinks you’ve had too many boyfriends. You whore. Reclaiming Universal Humanism We’ve allowed ‘Global North’ feminists, especially cloistered academics, to get away with their fauxminism long enough. Real feminists, female or male, can stand up for their faraway sisters (and brothers) who need their support far more than North American women who should be able to fight for and advocate for themselves by now. This isn’t as hard a battle as you think. We have accomplished much of what we aspired to here in the Global North. We can remind Western feminists, and especially activism-blinded academics, that women’s rights are all women’s rights, including sexual pleasure, as granted to them by nature. We can speak up for our sisters in the Global South who need our fierceness and protection more than overprivileged, often white, elitists. I’m calling out the servile minions of this ridiculous BMJ article as human moral failures guilty of the filthiest sort of racist hypocrisy. Not one of them still uncut would be willing to prove their FGM solidarity with their manicure scissors, in the bathroom, by clipping off their clitoris. If Sudanese women don’t need one, neither do pretty privileged-class academics in their Park Slope or Santa Monica homes with kids in private Montessori schools. Never say never, ladies. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. 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Examining black privilege, DEI absurdity, and the illogic of transracialism Hangin’ with mah homey. We sistahs have got to stick together. Black power! Stick it to the Man! Black is beautiful! Right on, baby!!! Free use photo by Darina Belonogova on Pexels I am as Black as you are! Why? Because I say I am. That’s all you need to know as a Good Progressive. Good Progressives are good people. They accept others for what they claim to be, not what they actually are. Reality doesn’t matter to Good Progressives; reality is racist, imperialist, colonialist, supremacist, cabalist, hedonist, herbalist, fetishist, thaumaturgist, horticulturalist and sacerdotalist. You don’t want to be any of those things! Then you’d be a right-winger! Some Black people have told me I can’t be Black because I’m White. I told them they were racist bigots and that identity is the most important thing ever. That my brother is a Chinese Mithraist transwoman and has been since last week when we got drunk over a pitcher of martinis while watching Pose. I told these internalized racist bitches off! That if it was okay to declare one’s self a woman or a man or a non-binary meta-ethnic pantodemisexual stegosaurus, that it was okay to be Black if one wanted. They said that’s not how it works and I said you’re oppressing me, and that we must decenter normative racial positionality through intersectional praxis of racial accountability.* And they said, "To unpack this assumptive racist boundary construct you’ve pulled out of your ass, one must interrogate the discursive mechanics of your underlying oppressive race fascism, you culturally appropriating blackface Karen cracker!” Which was totally unfair because I do NOT wear blackface. I tan my skin and rat my hair like my sistah, Rachel Dolezal. And man, they couldn’t tolerate me putting them in their place like I did, so it ended after the paramedics scraped me off the sidewalk and shoved me in the ambulance. The transracial double standard I kid about ‘going black’, but the progressive fight against ‘transracialism’ exemplifies one of the last great woke hypocrisy holdouts. Why is self-identity the unquestionable ruler for how you should treat others, but transracialists are somehow crossing some intersectional Rubicon? Critics can’t argue that white people mustn’t ever appropriate the color line because they’re oppressors. They’ve already accepted transgenderism. Men are still unquestionably more powerful than women, but all a man has to do is declare his womanhood, and the social justice set falls into line like good little second-graders. Therefore, it’s hypocritical for critics to argue that white people can’t be black but men can be women and vice versa. We Accept Transgenderism. Are We Ready For Transracialism? Black privilege is unearned special rights granted to one by virtue of one’s birth, developed primarily by progressive ideologues to provide cultural immunity. Sixty to seventy years ago, no one except white men needed to apply for better-paying jobs. Beginning around fifty years ago, white women began making more headway in the boardroom. It wasn’t fair to those not granted their skin privilege, which is why we’ve tried to rectify that in more recent decades. White privilege is with us still, but, like its brother ‘oppressor’ Da Patriarchy, it’s ceded much power since the dawn of the 21st century. Liberal politics brought white awareness to the ‘black experience’ and the acknowledgement of systemic racism and racial harassment. A sense of privilege arose among black activists who argued they could never be racist because they’d suffered oppression, or at least their ancestors had, ergo they were above reproach. But the grievances have began to wear thin, especially viral racial incidents later revealed as false. Political scientist and academic Wilfred Reilly wrote a whole book about fraudulent racial attacks: Hate Crime Hoax: How The Left Is Selling A Fake Race War. The height of black privilege may have reached its peak with Ibram X. Kendi’s expression that nothing will fix the history of black oppression except 400 years of white oppression, a position he has since backed off on. Support Local Bookstores: You can find the titles mentioned in this post on my Grow Some Labia page at Bookshop.org. Every purchase supports independent booksellers (and this newsletter!). From Equal Opportunity to Institutional Engineering Affirmative action intended to give women and racial minorities a better chance at being hired on the basis of their qualifications beginning with the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964. Modern DEI evolved around the 2010s to address alleged systemic inequalities and replace affirmative action programs and policies. With the rise of woke ideology around the same time, black activists were still complaining that ‘almost nothing has changed,’ while by 2012, the black vote had achieved a historic high in U.S. elections, 83.2% of blacks were attaining a high school diploma or more, black test scores had continued rising, poverty rates had fallen to 27.2%, and the average black annual household median income was at $33,321, as compared to 1968’s $5,400 in unadjusted dollars according to the U.S. Census Bureau. What got me thinking about it is the Journal of Free Black Thought’s Substack piece, There’s Little Or No Anti-Black Discrimination Today by social psychologist Lee Jussim, a white man. Jussim has written other articles challenging the narrative of racial discrimination and implicit bias. “This is not 1954,” he notes, and I am reminded once again of Barack Obama’s last speech as President. After my election, there was talk of a post-racial America. And such a vision, however well-intended, was never realistic. Race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society. Now, I've lived long enough to know that race relations are better than they were 10, or 20, or 30 years ago, no matter what some folks say. Jussim executes a nerdly dive into the heart of past studies and finds that in the past ten years, ‘the most relevant social science’ “does not show any clear pattern of racial discrimination”. Not that it’s non-existent, but when we’re talking about who gets hired, or doesn’t (applicant outcome disparity), according to Jussim, hiring discrimination or bias in the last decade occurs around 3.6% of the time. Which means there’s no evidence of bias 96.4% of the time. He has his critics, as comments below the article show. His findings have been challenged by academics at the National Institute of Health, at Rutgers University, and of course, those esteemed pundits at Reddit. The Bigotry of Low Expectations Some research, he notes, shows some bias in favor of black people. His evidence for pro-black bias includes the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions U.S. Supreme Court case which found significant pro-black admission bias at two universities, Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Black applicants at Harvard, data showed, scored over 60 points lower than Asian applicants and 40 points lower than white ones. It brings up a highly uncomfortable question: Were these DEI admissions the best of the black applicants to Harvard? Research has shown a combination of factors responsible for test score disparities. Differences in student studying time, for example, show lower rates in black families, even when compared with similar parental education and the same level of family income as whites and Asians. Here, the black study gap grows wider. Black kids in higher social classes have the same opportunities as others, including expensive tutors and coaches, yet still punch in less study time. It’s also been noted that first- and second-generation immigrant families tend to value education. A National Institute of Health study found that black students from immigrant families, including African and West Indian, were ‘twice as likely’ as third-plus generation African-Americans to attend highly-elite institutions. And they outperformed African-American students with significantly better grades and higher persistence. This contradicts what DEI hiring subtly suggests: That black people can’t compete on merit. Or African Americans, anyway. ‘Blatantly discriminatory’ is the only way to describe the DEI framework in many institutions that explicitly state which identity boxes receive special priority for the job, which has sometimes led even to black people being discriminated against because the hiring process wanted an Indigenous or trans person, or perhaps a different human recipe for cross-woke-AF-ness. One of several examples of job postings at a Canadian university that as much as says, “No white men need apply.” From the Quillette article Measuring the Academic Cost of Affirmative Action in Academia," on X. The Human Rights Act verbiage underscores this isn’t just an HR preference; it’s state-sanctioned institutionalized racial discrimination. Cambridge University’s DEI accepted Jason Arday, who claimed autism (unproven), certain alleged unsupported racist attacks, and is accused of fictionalizing some of his history to get the professorship. It suggests he already understood on some level that being black wasn’t enough of a qualification anymore. There was too much competition. It’s gotten better—for some It’s much more difficult for a white man to get a job today than a black man, and harder for a black man than a black woman, thanks to arbitrary post-modern illogical discourses hierarchizing ‘marginalization’ (a human construct). One must wonder if some white men are ‘going trans’ because it’s easier to get hired. I’m serious. The world will never be free of human tribalistic impulses, but it’s a lot less imperfect than the one I was born into, ninety-eight years after the Civil War ended. I’ve packed over sixty years of living with eyes wide open and attention paid. Blacks and many others are earning more, accomplishing more, and getting elected more, which research and observation bear out. But the DEI anti-meritocracy has been leaning into the bigotry of low expectations set by decades of liberal activism and kowtowing to one specific domination history, while domination is The Story of Humanity Everywhere. It makes it doubly difficult for women, Indigenous, blacks, and others, who truly are superlatively qualified for their jobs, to be taken seriously. Leveling the identity field What social justice activists never want to admit, strangely, is victory. Outraged activists rail against the pale-faced babadook which dares to step outside its assigned role and challenge the rise of black privilege. Or worse, appropriate the mantle of victimhood as Rachel Dolezal and so many other white, almost exclusively female, black wannabes have done. White women might be arguably ‘oppressed’ by black social justice activists because even white men are permitted to step outside their ‘oppressor’ class when they appropriate womanhood. I jest, but only somewhat. The fact that white women are far more likely to appropriate other racial ethnicities (consider the plethora of ‘pretendians’ like Buffy Ste. Marie), certainly suggests the existence of ‘black privilege’, given that it’s easier to get a job that way, and because you receive the elevated status of now being ‘oppressed’, and the concomitant sympathy and attention that follows, while snatching cushy jobs away from actual black women. That’s bad, somehow, in the same world where womanfacers become Woman of the Year, easily ‘win’ trophies in female athletic competitions, and get Vanity Fair covers. I challenge black privilege when I state that if ‘some women have penises,’ then ‘some black people have white skin’. It’s otherwise discriminatory, racist and misogynist. So I argue, tongue poking through my cheek, that if women are forced to accept people they don’t regard as women (males), then black people should be forced to accept the self-pigmenting into their own communities. By federal fiat, if necessary. We must be allowed to change our racial identity on passports and other government documents, just as the self-womanized do. We must be allowed into all black-exclusionary social groups and committees, and if they resist we’ll file lawsuits and accuse them of being TERDs (Transracial Exclusionary Radical Discriminators). It’s not, at this time, possible for black people to turn White Like I Used To Be. That remains the only real objection ‘antiracist’ activists have for white people joining the woke Come As You Aren’t party. But self-identity rules, and I’m quite certain cosmetic medical science (or maybe just Revlon) is working on a ‘cure’ right now for black skin. Just as transgenderism ‘cures’ males of oppressorism. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a damn thing! 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How a portable religion survived the ancient world, baffled its neighbors, and inadvertently contributed to the blueprint for global prejudice. “Waters of Babylon,” 1920, By Gebhard Fugel - Own work (fotografiert in der Ausstellung “Gebhard Fugel 1863-1939. Von Ravensburg nach Jerusalem”. Galerie Fähre, Altes Kloster, Bad Saulgau, 2014), Jews remember Jerusalem on the Tigris banks in Babylon. Public Domain. From the perspective of the Jews ancient and modern, they were simply following the orders of their One True God. From their neighbors’ perspective, to whom Yahweh had not reached out personally, and about whom He had trash-talked to his so-called ‘chosen people’ according to their prophets, it sounded understandably a little dotty and hey, maybe just made up? In my last article I explored the origins of antisemitism beginning with the hiving off of a certain group of Canaanites who became the Hebrews, later the Israelites, and finally, the Jews. I explored practices, self-isolation, self-elevation and a partially mythologized Old Testament military history. Here, we continue the journey through ancient antisemitism. Imperial overlords: Babylon and Persia The stories of the twice-destroyed Temple of Jerusalem start with King Nebuchadnezzar who destroyed the First Temple when Judah’s king stopped paying a rather hefty tribute. ‘Tribute’ was akin to either a bribe or a tax to ensure protection and that the powerful kingdom would not invade. We pay taxes today, partly to support a national defense, but ‘tribute’ was perhaps more akin to a Mafia practice known as a ‘protection racket’. Nice little kingdom ya got heah, Judah. Would be a real shame if someone destroyed it. Why don’t you pay us to make shooah no one gives you any trouble, unnahstan? Predictably, Nebuchadnezzar kicked the Judeans’ asses, destroyed the temple (the First Destruction), and sent them away into the Babylonian Exile. Many returned several decades later, eventually rebuilding the Second Temple after Persia’s King Cyrus the Great conquered the hell out of Babylon and it fell. He wisely returned some control to Jewish lives and—this is important—recognized that this was their ancestral land and specifically decreed that they could rebuild their Temple, and restored many of their previous rights. Cyrus’s reasoning was that happy subjects were less inclined to rebel. He also returned what had been looted by Nebuchadnezzar’s army. The ‘ancestral land’ piece is important because it recognized even back then that Israel was where Jews had ancient ties. Read Part 1: The Origins of Antisemitism The Hellenistic period (3rd-2nd centuries BCE) The ancestors of the Jews may have laid the foundations of friction with their neighbors, but they assimilated somewhat during the Hellenistic period and experienced greater acceptance from the kings. The Hellenes demonstrated less hostility to Jews, who were themselves better-accommodating subjects to the empire. Jews served in the military and were given land rights in the third-to-second century BCE. But the same grievances against them remained, and contributed to real hatred, oppression, and discrimination. Refusing to respect and honor local polytheistic gods grated on a society where religion and civic life were inseparable. Some of the earliest diatribes against Jews labeling them as ‘seclusive’, ‘alien’ and ‘misanthropic’ came from Hellenic writers. The Macedonian Seleucid empire was formed by one of Alexander the Great’s top generals after he died, spanning what’s now Turkey and Syria through Persia and northern India. The Hanukkah story originated in this period after the Seleucid conquest of Jerusalem, and Jews were permitted to govern themselves in accordance with Torah law. Some Jews had petitioned to form their own polis, Antiocheia, next to Jerusalem. Then the tensions between Hellenized traditionalist Jews broke out into an internal war, leading Antiochus IV to suppress it in view of what he regarded as a treasonous rebellion. He stripped the remaining Jews of their rights, their self-governance, and their Temple, which became one honoring the Greek gods. King Antiochus did what Greek kings were wont to do back then, command worship or at least honoring of the local gods, and executing anyone who objected. This led to the Maccabean revolt and the Jews’ famous victory over their persecutors. They reclaimed their Temple, and the Seleucids gave up trying to control them. If only Antiochus had left well enough alone, right? To our modern eyes, and especially Americans with a fractious history of defying authority, it’s hard not to applaud the scrappy Jews for their chutzpah. Still, it didn’t make them any more popular with their pagan neighbors, and the polemics against them continued. It didn’t help that the victors formed the Hasmonean Kingdom in the aftermath and then embarked upon real conquests of their neighbors, forcing them to convert to Judaism which, surprisingly, did not win them any popularity contests and made them no different from those who had once oppressed them. The Jews weren’t a people in a position to rule over others historically, nor were they proselytizers for most of their existence, but their actions shocked even the Jewish scribe Josephus. The Jews’ actual conquests, coupled with their mythologized victories in the Bible, have less to do with religion than just bog-standard political desires of conquest and enforced assimilation of others. Plus, compelled religious conversion enabled them to expand their numbers. Funny how power works that way. Le plus ça change. Roman rule & destruction of the Second Temple, (70 CE) What happened next explains why the Babylonian empire gets such a bad rap in the Bible and may well be what St. John the Divine was writing about in Revelation. So, here we are now in the Roman period, where another Great Jewish Revolt, a rebellion against excessive taxation and oppressive domination ended with utter defeat at the hands of General Titus during the Roman period. The remaining rebels took sanctuary in the Temple, where the Romans murdered them and then torched it. To our modern normie anti-antisemitic eyes, it reads as another story of resistant Jews who just wanted to be left alone to live their lives in accordance with their God. St. John didn’t dare criticize Rome, the Second Temple destroyers, so he used Babylon as a metaphor, imagining/fantasizing God’s wrath against Jewish persecutors. A new connection to the evolution of antisemitism stemming from this period occurred later when early Christian fathers argued that the two Destructions were a sign that God had rejected the Jews, the first stirrings of Christian antisemitism. The Anatomy of a Holy Rebellion The religion that would one day become Judaism began as a calculated strategy to remain strong and defend against imperial kingdoms: The Assyrians and Babylonians. It was based on commonly-understood suzerainty covenants demanding absolute allegiance to leaders which included neither foreign alliances nor foreign gods. In its earliest iteration, the Hebrews-cum-Israelites were henotheists, acknowledging there were other gods, but that their own was the One True One. Yahweh himself admitted it in the First Commandment: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; - Exodus 20:5 Gee, not too over-the-top… But, it’s what held the Israelites together. Later, cultural fences were erected by the priests to further insulate the Jews from ‘corrupting’ practices around them (like, you know polytheism!); and in fact, the semi-assimilated Hellenic Jews were criticized for associating and socializing with the Greeks; there were also economic irritants as the Hellenes, with their property rights and military careers, had more money than the backwards-seeming traditionalists stuck in the past. The early priests did what so many marginalized communities have always done: Used their persecution by others to claim divine validation, a useful explanation to keep a hated people together when it might be more tempting to give in and assimilate. Christians later turned persecution into a near-religious fetish, based in the terrible treatment they received from the Romans, but then, like the Jews and so many others, they turned around and oppressed everyone within reach. Instead of throwing heretics and pagans to the lions, Christians burnt them at the stake. ‘God’s chosen people’ began as a strict moral burden of accountability, but over the centuries began to sound too much like “Father loves us best!” The covenant of protection by Yahweh was specifically granted to the Israelites out of love and to keep the promise he’d made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Furthermore, the Jews were small in number and demonstrably weak; Yahweh apparently favored the underdog, as so many of us do today. Also, and here’s where it gets a little fictiony again, it was offered later as thanks for their ‘liberation’ from Egypt, a story for which archaeologists and historians agree there is no evidence of slavery, liberation or wandering around in the desert for forty years. I posed this evidence-deficient question to an Orthodox Jew I used to speak with online thirty years ago who also had no real answer. His theory: ‘The shifting sands may have covered it up?” Not for today’s sophisticated archaeological discovery techniques. But, to be fair, the Iliad and the Odyssey are also a mixture of ancient history and mythology. The monotheistic tradition and desire for sovereignty was an early effort in self-government and egalitarianism. Rejecting foreign kings was a response to the relentless conquest and subjugation of others at the time, and a rejection of royal tyranny. Ironically, the Babylonian Exile seems to have been the catalyst that transformed the uppity rebels into a global, portable religion. Defeat and exile meant that your god was defeated and about as dead as your political aspirations. But rather than calling the end to a great, centuries-long effort and simply assimilating, the remnants of the Jews instead turned their culture and religion into a portable text-based one and removed the ties to the land, and embraced monotheism completely. They turned to textualizing (and occasionally fictionalizing, as we have seen) everything about their religion. They laid down the early groundwork for the synagogue system by gathering in small groups to pray and study. Animal sacrifice, with no Temple anymore, fell out of practice and they stuck with the rituals that didn’t require it, and scattered to found other communities (“The Diaspora”). This resulted in a massive psychological shift for the Jews: They realized they no longer had to defend one piece of land, that they could go forth and be Jewish outside of Israel. This is what’s so remarkable about the relentless survival of the people today: Their culture and religion are one of two that survived from ancient times. All major pagan religions died out, and newer ones emerged. Zoroastrianism is the other BCE religion to survive modern times, but with a much smaller population of less than 150,000. Judaism today isn’t what was practiced before the Exile, but circumcision, dietary laws and many other core practices remain unchanged since the priests first decreed them in the boonies of Canaan. From Ancient Frictions to Modern Scapegoats This has been a very thumbnail-sketch exploration of the earliest origins of antisemitism and how it emerged from the earliest pastoralists. None of it excuses the loathsome display of antisemitism today, which differentiates those who have learned the lessons of European antisemitism and the Holocaust, and those who haven’t. Modern antisemites have only themselves to blame for the re-creation of Israel; had it not been for the genuinely genocidal Final Solution, twentieth-century Jews wouldn’t have needed a country of their own in which they could feel safe, however much one can feel safe when surrounded by antisemitic enemies of a younger religion in desperate need of a Reformation. Jews today aren’t making the same mistakes their ancestors did (mostly; the ultra-Orthodox are somewhat up for debate), and they shouldn’t be held accountable for it, just as Christians justifiably get tired of hearing about the Inquisitions, the witch hunts, the persecution of Jews, Muslims, ‘heretical’ Christian sects and offshoots, and others. Those deplorable actions happened hundreds of years ago (thousands for Israelite abuses of neighbors, real or imagined) and today Jews number globally around 15.8 million, according to the Berman Jewish DataBank. The numbers would be higher but for the Holocaust. Jews have ties as ancient to the former Land of Canaan as those who call themselves ‘Palestinians’. In fact, Jews and Palestinians are closely related to each other: They share the same Levantine genetic pool. The long-running Middle East conflict is essentially the world’s oldest civil war; as science shows that over 70% of Jewish men and half of Arab men studied inherited the Y chromosomes of the same paternal ancestors who lived there for the past few thousand years. They possess, as geneticist Michael Hammer found, a Y chromosome ‘almost indistinguishable’ from that of Jews. The Infidel: A hilarious movie about a Muslim man who finds out he was adopted—and Jewish. Israel was formed for the Ashkenazi Jews fleeing Europe, but shortly after populated further with all the unwanted Mizrahi (Arab) Jews pushed out by the surrounding nations once the Islamic governments and leaders now had a place to send them. The Holocaust, and Islamic antisemitism, created the State of Israel. And never in its creation did it state that the existing ‘Palestinians’ had no right to stay there, and the 1948 Declaration of Independence explicitly asked the Arab residents to stay and help rebuild the nation as equal citizens. Although, to be fair, there were plenty of examples of Israeli abuses against them over the decades they are justifiably still angry about, especially as these human rights abuses and land acquisition occurred less than a century ago, and not in 1000 BCE. Why does everyone hate the Jews so persistently? Why Jews have remained the relentless victims of a particularly pernicious and millennia-long hate campaign has continued to mystify me. Something was missing. When I couldn’t figure it out, I presented the question to Google Gemini: Why have the Jews persisted as the ‘buttmonkeys’ of the world? To which the AI response was redemptive antisemitism and punching-up scapegoating. Regular racism ‘punches down’, but when you portray your enemy as shifty, greedy, usurious, and a secret cabal controlling the world with puppet strings, well, now you’re righteous! Now it’s David against Goliath: Except Goliath is said to be the tiny state and their massive enemies the David. The 2,000 years after the Jewish Diaspora saw both Christians and Muslims baking antisemitism into their religions, codifying it for the world. The Evil Jew has become a cultural metaphor even for people who have never met a single Jew; Poland lost most of them during the Holocaust but today remains highly antisemitic. With today’s obsession with billionaires and their alleged control of the world (Jewish or not), when people want explanations for why their lives aren’t the way they want them to be, they reach for explanations, and the Evil Controlling Jew is always at the top of the hatesack. Jews have long been the ultimate scapegoat. The white supremacist right views them as seeking to destroy white culture through ‘The Great Replacement Theory’. The far left views historically highly successful Jews (themselves created by antisemites who barred them from holding normal jobs) as evil capitalists, colonialists, and privileged Westerners, ignoring the history of imperialist, colonialist Christianity and Islam. The Christian extremist today regards them as heretics and ‘Christ killers’, who need Jews to die in the apocalyptic war if you interpret the Bible the way fundamentalist Millennialists do. I hope this has enlightened folks a little. There’s much more than can be said but I focused on pre-Christian antisemitism as we’re all familiar with Christian and Islamic antisemitism. If you managed to make it this far, thanks for sticking with this long-ass essay! Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. 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"GROW A PAIR" That's what we say to men when we think they're acting weak. "Grow some balls!" So what do we say when women are acting weak? We can't very well tell them to grow some balls. Women can't, of course! Women need to 'grow some labia'! They're the parts of the vagina that would have become the scrotum for the balls had she been born a male instead (and since she didn't, what would have been her balls are her ovaries). But I doubt you came here for a female anatomy lesson. It's time for us to grow some labia and woman up, show more strength, challenge ourselves more. Time to take more charge and responsibility for our lives, and spend less time blaming 'The Patriarchy' or systemic sexism. Those things exist, for sure, but at some point we've got to recognize the buck stops with the woman in the mirror and we need to claim our power (or reclaim it if we gave it away somehow!) So it's time for women everywhere to GROW SOME LABIA! I've written a few blog posts about how we can do exactly that and reclaim our power! Feminism The differences between victim feminism, which sees women as chronically aggrieved and victimized by men and 'The Patriarchy', and power feminism, which is more focused on one's self, achieving and claiming personal power and using it for the betterment of others. Dec 21, 2024 The Transfolk Who Really Do Need Our Support The experience of 'The Bearded Lesbian' reminds us some folks really do need to transition; and how LGBTQ can fail them I began following... Dec 5, 2024 American Feminists Don't Need A 4B Movement The South Korean feminism project will be dead in the water. Like it or not, we need men, and they need us. Maybe we just need to reform... Nov 24, 2024 Emma Watson, Emma Watson, Wherefore Art Thou, Emma Watson? The foxy fauxminist has gone missing in recent years. No movies. No fauxminist outbursts. Not even any trans love tweeted. I... Nov 17, 2024 Progressive Democrats Hate Women More Than The Right. Especially Feminists. Right-wing misogyny isn't How The Left Was Lost. It was women's, the primary administrators and executors of patriarchy and misogyny. The... Oct 12, 2024 A Frenchwoman Is Dead Serious About Holding ALL Her Rapists Accountable The Gisele Pelicot case highlights just how frighteningly high is the number of 'normal' men who have a penchant for, and might be... Sep 14, 2024 Let's Have A Grownup Talk About Privilege - With Curiosity Rather Than Outrage It's real. It's worth exploring even for the UnWoke. Its purpose is to open our own eyes rather than beat up others (and ourselves) over... Feminism Substack Subscribe to my FREE SUBSTACK NEWSLETTER for all my latest on power feminism, reclaiming your power, and the ongoing culture wars. Visit Substack >> Subscribe to my FREE SUBSTACK NEWSLETTER

WELCOME TO MY WEBSITE ABOUT POWER Big Girls Don't Blame The Patriarchy Explore The Blog LABIA POWER! About Me Grow Some Labia! is written by a liberal, feminist writer and social justice critic who teaches women and others how to reclaim their power and avoid partner abuse. She also candidly critiques far-left, progressive/woke/ social justice extremism. It's a place for people who lean left or right, but not so far their brains fall out. GSL's work can be found here and on Substack, Quora. And maybe a few other places. About Me The Latest From My Labia Power! Blog 5 days ago Daniel Penny: The Hero That Wasn't "He scared the living daylights out of everybody." The woke left damns Daniel Penny for trying to save others from a clearly disturbed... Jan 4 We Have To Think About Moderating X, Bluesky And Other Social Media The anoymous psychos who call for others' assassinations are a direct threat to democracy and public safety. Threats are NOT free speech.... Jan 1 Here Comes The 'Woke Right' And It Looks A Helluva Lot Like The Woke Left Brand-new management, same as the last! But the bipartisan UnWoke have the recent accumulated observation to help call out the... Dec 25, 2024 Roman Holiday - A Christmas Story Oh no! Not another Messiah! CC0 public domain Just what we need. Another bloody Messiah. The name’s Flatulous. I’m a Roman soldier in... Dec 21, 2024 The Transfolk Who Really Do Need Our Support The experience of 'The Bearded Lesbian' reminds us some folks really do need to transition; and how LGBTQ can fail them I began following... Dec 14, 2024 Is There Any Real Joy In Learning Anymore? Can students even experience learning something intriguing or unexpected? Or are they only told what to think? "Just kill me now!"... Explore The Blog DON'T BE THE VICTIM Take back your power. NOW. It started with abused women who didn't know they could say No to abuse. It morphed into taking back your power from political bullies and haters, including 'social justice warriors'. Don't Be The Victim GROW SOME LABIA "Grow a pair!" That's what we say to men when we think they're acting weak. "Grow some balls!" So what do we say when women are acting weak? We can't very well tell them to grow some balls. Women can't, of course! Women need to 'grow some labia'! Grow Some Labia I also take on the crazies from the right and the left. Subscribe to my FREE SUBSTACK NEWSLETTER

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