Hostility to children's genitals and human sexuality has never been 'only a right-wing thing'. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay I remember wanting to hit puberty, to stop being a little girl. Breasts! Yes! A gorgeous body like I saw on The Love Boat! Boys falling all over themselves for me! And nothing, nothing said ‘I’m a woman now’ like that magical moment (which I was afraid would never come) of getting my first menstrual period. My best friend Vera and I, in eighth grade, read Judy Blume’s classic YA novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and laughed at the four friends in the book who cocked their elbows, pulling their arms back and forward again, all the while chanting We must! We must! We must increase our bust! While Vera and I never did that (she didn’t need to), we did, I confess, keep Boy Books, just like the four girls, with lists of Cute Boys we liked. Puberty turned out to be a bit of a letdown, although I spent less time waiting for my period than for cleavage. After a half-dozen or so grody time-of-the-months I spent the next forty years wishing menopause would hurry up and get on with it. Vera already had boobs when I met her, at thirteen, and my body wasn’t cooperating with the whole Love Boat love goddess thing (an affinity for sugary snacks and an aversion to exercise apart from bike riding might have played a considerable role). Also, there was acne, oily hair, dorky glasses, braces for a few years, a complete ignorance of makeup and a careless approach to fashion. But at least I had Become A Woman, finally. Okay, puberty ain’t actually fun. Maybe it is for the girls who turned into cheerleaders and future Love Boat goddesses, but I remember Rachel, unquestionably the most beautiful girl in our grade. She was a tall blonde ‘fox’ with blue eyes and the body and mature-looking face of a 21-year-old woman. At fourteen. I used to envy her, but years later, I wondered what her life was like as a young teen trapped in a beautiful woman’s body. Oh, the slavering old perverts! The unsolicited, embarrassing comments! The surreptitious feels by filthy old men with no filters in the late ‘70s when Second Wave feminism was adolescent itself and girls hadn’t yet learned that boys and men didn’t have unfettered right to their bodies. I knew puberty wasn’t a joy for boys either, as Judy Blume’s book, Then Again, Maybe I Won’t makes clear. It’s about a 13-year-old boy who falls in with a kid who shoplifts, drinks, makes prank phone calls and reads inappropriate adult fiction. He develops an attraction to his friend’s beautiful older sister and spies on her while she dresses and undresses, since she doesn’t close the blinds. The book alerted me to just what kind of stress boys are under as they never know when they’re going to pop a boner, even when they’re in a supremely sexually unstimulating environment, like math class—and just as they get called to do a math problem at the board in front of everyone— with a boner! Blume’s male character and many of her female characters deal with masturbation, probably the first YA novelist to do so. I remember my male counterparts in school who failed to mature into Love Boat -worthy male shuffleboard and pool gods, whose height didn’t meet exacting female standards, who were pudgy and dorky and probably wondered if they’d ever get laid. One teen was losing his hair at sixteen. By the ten-year reunion he was a billiard ball. Even a mega-dork like me wouldn’t have dated them, had they even asked. Puberty isn’t easy. I remember. But it’s still the first major life change we humans endure, with more to come, and who the hell wants to be a kid their entire life, right? We spend our childhoods wishing we were older so we could do things we weren’t currently allowed to do, and puberty is the first promise that you’re not going to be a kid forever , beholden to your parents’ dictates, that you won’t be ordered around for the rest of your life, that one day you’ll be able to eat nothing but desserts for lunch if you want, stay up late and watch Johnny Carson and Saturday Night Live , and this shitty school thing will eventually come to an end. No one trained us to believe puberty was a nightmare. Books, ABC After School Specials, TV sitcoms and movies depicted kids navigating a difficult phase of their lives, but no one questioned it. We read teen fiction to try and understand better what was happening to us and what to expect. No character seemed entitled to live a life they couldn’t. What we all hoped for, and not all of us achieved, was to be as ridiculously gorgeous as TV kids and Love Boat guest stars. No one committed suicide if they fell short. So why are kids and adults so terrified of puberty today, and so in denial of the reality of being human, that they’re joining a body modification cult to change their bodies into something they’re not, starting with puberty blockers because the cool kids on YouTube say it’s the best thing ever, and assure them they were born in the wrong body even though their parents are like no you’re fucking not, and their older brother thinks they’re a complete idiot? How have mostly ‘progressive’ adults managed to fuck up the most important job in the world—raising new human beings—so badly that they’re willing to let their kids self-mutilate? They share more concern when their daughters cut themselves. How have so many come to believe it’s okay to steal children from their parents if they don’t go along with gender insanity? At what point did so-called responsible educators, administrators, and teachers decide that it was more important for kids to ‘figure out’ whether they were really boys and girls or not instead of, say, learning about the founding of America? Or multiplying fractions? Or learning how to compose a coherent essay in their native language? Or teaching them the truth - that you’re assigned your immutable sex at conception? As Jonathan Haidt notes in the research he did for his new book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing An Epidemic of Mental Illness , the mental health of girls from progressive/liberal families sank quickly and much further than any other group of kids, including their brothers. His research makes it clear that liberal, progressive girls lead the whole Gen Z mental health crisis phenomenon. It’s they who have embraced the most the whole ‘born in the wrong body’ article of faith purporting to explain everything wrong with their lives. The Gen Z mental health crisis is horrifyingly evident. Today the number of young girls identifying as trans in the UK has increased 4,000% according to one British study. And that’s on an island with 20% the population of the United States. (Real) boys aren’t left out, either. The number of ‘transgender’ children overall has doubled since social media introduced it to a generation of mobile-addicted kids, and Pod Parents automatically do what their Pod People medical professionals urge them to, put their children on puberty blockers which may sterilize them among many other unpleasant and probably permanent side effects. Never mind the lack of evidence behind the alleged suicide rate for kids who are set parental boundaries. What is this incomprehensible fear of puberty we find on the progressive left? How come kids in previous generations didn’t off themselves every time their parents said no? In a recent interview with gender researcher Eliza Mondegreen, she notes that gender transitioning may be a way of avoiding growing up . “You come to a point in life where some kind of transformation is being asked of you and there's this diversion from whatever kind of growing up or changing that you need to do into trans. You see it with kids who are having trouble navigating puberty and moving into adulthood. You see it with college students who aren't sure what they want to do when they grow up and maybe it's really scary but if they're trans now they have this road map and also this excuse to not hit the other milestones that they might be afraid of because they're trans and how could you expect them to.” It’s Peter Pan and the Lost TransBoys. How badly have we fucked up growing up when kids feel the need to go on puberty blockers not because they’re actually ‘trans’, but because, to twist Socrates, the examined life isn’t worth living? What if they had to confront their genuine mental health challenges rather than the problem everyone has, if they’re lucky enough not to have died within the first thirteen years of their lives? Since when did adulthood become something to be ‘cured’? Maybe it’s just the seemingly universal human fear of our own sexuality, probably the only species that spends as much time obsessing about our genitals and everyone else’s. Hostility to children’s private parts is hardly anything new; Jews and Muslims have mutilated little boys’ genitals for centuries under the guise of religious practice; the Catholic Church famously castrated young boys to preserve their high voices, then demanded they not marry because it would be a ‘sin’; marriage was, they instructed, strictly for making babies, and since the castrati couldn’t, they shouldn’t avail themselves of female love and companionship. Tough shit, kids. Only human beings live in terror of children masturbating, even though ultrasound shows that even fetuses play with themselves. It didn’t stop the medievals and the Victorians from devising contraptions right out of a torture chamber to stop children and horny adults from, it was believed, driving themselves mad with ‘self-abuse’ and maybe even growing hairy palms. (Has that ever happened?) Public domain patent application illustration from Wikimedia Commons I began wondering about the liberal hostility to female sexuality (no, it’s not just a right-wing thing) and the mania to 'trans' willing young girls (just like the 19th-century oviarectomies performed on women to treat every neurosis they had, as detailed in a brief history section of flagrant medical profession patient abuse in the WPATH Files ). Any liberal still in control of their pre-frontal cortex recognizes the rise of misogyny on the left expressed through the trans movement. The TERF Is A Slur website catalogues the violent transmisogyny of heterosexual fetishists still battling the scourge of feminist opposition while Let Women Speak and other rallies are characterized by violent trans-identified male aggression and physical assault. It’s quite clear that the fuss about violence against so-called trans or queer people isn’t always as ‘transphobic’ as advertised, as emerging details in the Nex Benedict suicide demonstrate. Transactivists have engaged in far more violence against women than anyone has against them, which is not to say that anti-trans violence and murders don’t happen, because they do. But it points to a hidden agenda within the largely heterosexual trans movement to force women to bend, ultimately, to male desires. Especially sexual. Which is where most of this ‘trans’ stuff is coming from. The medical profession and parents aren’t the only ones hostile to human sexuality, nor are the major world religions. Certain parts of Africa have been viciously taking a knife to female genitals for thousands of years, completely excising any part that could deliver sexual pleasure and obsessively sewing up vaginas to keep girls ‘pure’ for their husbands. Human hostility to sexuality is nothing new, it’s non-partisan and universal. I see in the liberal progressive transgender denial of puberty—which they’ve been told also often denies a lifetime of sexual pleasure with butchered genitals—that exact same traditional, conservative hostility. Conservatives didn’t invent fear of sexuality, they’ve just historically hid it less. The so-called liberal ‘hippie generation’ wasn’t much different from their anti-sex ‘Establishment’ foes; a friend who used to be a Yippie told me of how ostensibly, everyone could practice ‘free love’ but it was much easier for men because women were already trained to be accepting and submissive; when a woman chose multiple partners she was ‘punished’ with passive-aggressive behavior by The Main Boyfriend designed to discourage her from relations with other men. It became easier to just let him do what he wanted and suffer silently. “We were ‘smashing monogamy!” she said. “Sounds to me like you were preserving the Establishment,” I replied. The UK government’s Cass Report is out now and adds further fuel to the growing transgender medicine dumpster fire. In particular it goes after puberty blockers, which we’re instructed by the trans movement and their medical professional lapdogs are absolutely necessary to keep kids from killing themselves. Never mind how much that’s been debunked; Thou Shalt Not Question Holy Sacred Writ. What’s certainly being taken more seriously is the emerging evidence that children and young adults are ‘transitioning’ for many different bad reasons, almost none of them actual ‘gender dysphoria’. What needs to be discussed more—in sealed vaults if necessary to keep out violent disruptive transactivists—is the ongoing adult obsession with children’s genitals and the willingness to allow them to agree to medical mutilation without any hard evidence that it relieves emotional distress. And why puberty became a ‘problem’ to be fixed rather than a perfectly normal life transition handled by humans for millions of years, which is now believed to cause suicide if it’s not immediately halted. Adults have seriously fucked up childhood, rendered their children permanent consumers for the medical profession, sterilized many of them (who needs Roe anymore?) and ruined their ability to enjoy sex. Not to mention establish unquestionably that hostility to inconvenient science is not only a ‘right-wing thing’. This is on us, the so-called ‘responsible adults’. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing!

When I say, 'Don't LET anyone treat you like that,' or 'Don't BE the victim,' I speak from personal experience. As a temporary ex-abuser. Women with rage. Avoid them! Image by Ivana Tomášková from Pixabay This is a tough one to write. I’ve been nagging myself for years. Since I published Jim McCoy’s guest post about his abusive ex-wife recently, I remember my cringe. For decades I’ve encouraged women to assert themselves and not tolerate male abuse. I encourage them and others to reclaim their power, and how to avoid abusive people, but I’ve never admitted my own story as an abusive bitch. It was temporary, and only in short-term dating. Amber Heard I wasn’t, but I’m still responsible for a time when my mouth and poisoned soul were a real Love Canal . It’s time for me to own it. I always say don’t tolerate abuse (and if you do, you are ). Because I can state quite personally: Abusers know what they’re doing and give people whatever they’ll take. I would know. The label fit me for about twelve years. It’s time for admit what I was on the other side of abuse. Never the victim. Certain guys let me mistreat them. Listen up: The more of my shit they took the less respect I had for them. Remember that, always. I want you to understand, if you’ve ever been in a physically, emotionally, psychologically or verbally abusive relationship that abusers lose respect for you every time you come back for more. And coming back gives them permission. ‘Bitch’ is my two-part story of a time in my life when I mistreated men out of a sense of bitterness and romantic entitlement. I want people to know they should never put up with bad treatment from others, just as I encourage women not to tolerate it from men. Part I is how I got that way. Part II, about my abuse, will run on Saturday. The backstory In 2000, the man I was living with for years dumped me out of the blue. Jerry walked in one day and said, “We have to talk.” He punted me back into a dating scene that had changed while I’d been gone. People met online, (as in fact Jerry and I had, before it was cool), with early singles sites. Dating fatigue set in quite early when all you did was flip through photos, picking out the cute ones, then getting ignored. As opposed to, say, meeting with people at social events and talking to them. A great personality can make an average-looking person more attractive. What I also didn’t understand, tragically, was the new rise of easily-accessible Internet porn which was warping mostly male brains about human sexuality and keeping them at home rather than meeting real women. (Now it’s warping everyone’s brains.) Relentless rejection and rudeness spiralled me into a deep depression. I cried a lot. I raged at Jerry. After getting blown off, ignored, or treated insensitively by men online I wanted to meet (would it kill them to just message back, thanks, but no thanks?), my rage spread. After enough mannerless, insensitive treatment I thought, “Okay fine. If you don’t have to be nice, neither do I. If my feelings aren’t important, neither are yours.” I stopped treating men with consideration, and blamed it on them. I wonder who they learned it from. Chicken or egg, n’est-ce pas? My doctor put me on Prozac, then Zoloft. But drugs need to be augmented with therapy which I couldn’t afford. So I stopped taking them. I woke up in the morning not wanting to get out of bed. Or in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep—until shortly before I had to get up for work. In my black hole, I was obsessed with angry, self-abusive thoughts. You suck! You’re ugly! You’re fat! No one will ever love you again! You’re terrible! How can any man ever love you??? “Why is it okay for you to talk to yourself this way,” I’d ask, “when you’d bitch-slap anyone you heard saying these things to another human being?” During my more lucid moments, I realized: You’re digging your own goddamn hole. The farther you dig, the longer it will take to climb out of it. And you know you will. But right now, you’re making it worse. So I picked up my shovel and went back to work. CC0 2.0 Sharealike image by Pedro Caetano de Moura Pinheiro on Flickr One night I got blown off by some dork from an offline dating service I’d joined, Great Expectations, which I called Gray Expectorations . This guy was barely worth my time but I was desperate. I called him a few times and I got blown off by his mother. In a way my own mother had once blown off a high school suitor for me. Telling me he wasn’t there every time I called with her familiar ‘lying mom’ voice. I was humiliated that I’d sunk so low as to put all my expectations on a guy I would never have given a glance to three years prior. This exemplar of mediocrity snapped me. I became consumed by an uncontrollable black rage the last time I hung up. FINE, fuck it! Fuck you all! I hate men! I hate all of them! I’m going to get you all! I’m going to DESTROY you! I’m going to make you pay for what you’ve done to me! For what you’ve made me!” Sound familiar? Sound like the whiny-ass cry of every abusive male who blames a woman or all women for everything wrong with their lives? Incels? The manosphere? The Red Pillers? No, I don’t need to change, YOU need to change!!! Entitled much, girlfriend? Drunk off my ass, I called an English gamer friend who was up at all hours. “I think I’m about to do something bad, Gareth,” I told him. “Wot’s that?” I described a ludicrous plan to turn into this super-hot chick who would make men fall in love with me and then blow them off, because I would have no heart left. I wanted to hurt men, to destroy them, a mass-Miss Haversham. I didn’t care my future targets were innocent men who’d never done anything to me. They weren’t really innocent, I reasoned. They’d surely been assholes to other women, because that’s what men did. They had no souls, no real feelings, except in their dicks. They were penis-bots, life support systems for their dick. They couldn’t feel love. They only faked it to get dick service. Gee, I didn’t sound too much like the blanket-generalizing losers of what would later become the ‘manosphere’. Fortunately, Gareth was too sweet and kind and loved me too much to do what any reasonable man would have done, hung up on my loathsome, self-pitying misandry. Before he could even respond I took another breath and pointed out all the ridiculous holes in my own silly-ass plan. I wasn’t a super-hot chick. I didn’t have the self-discipline to lose weight. If I believed I could turn myself into a super-hot chick I would have done it by now, but I didn’t because I didn’t believe I could. (Twenty years later: I wish I’d tried harder.) I was too old to be one anyway, at 39. Also, I grudgingly acknowledged men could love and did have feelings. “Gareth,” I blubbered, “I feel like I’m about to make a conscious choice to give myself to evil. I almost did this a half hour ago. Then I wavered. I felt really close, like I was at the edge of a very narrow chasm and that all I had to do was take one small step to give men what they deserve. But then I stopped. I had this very weird strong feeling that if I did, there was no going back. And that I would render myself permanently unlovable. Somewhere, I feel like there’s always hope.” It wasn’t the alcohol talking. I had a strong fear I still recall that I was about to make a huge mistake from which there was no turning back. Maybe I’d revile evil one day but my soul would be irrevocably damaged by having given myself to it. Tainted. Ruined. The way we imagined raped or seduced Victorian women were forever ruined, except I really would be. That a part of my sick soul would wither and die, like an irrecoverable wasted limb. We talked for hours. About the evil in all of us. Of the white people in old photographs I’d been Googling gathering around for a ‘party’ - a lynching of a black man. The celebrations. The people who looked just like me, albeit historically dressed. About finding the pictures of Emmett Till’s corpse in a coffin in an old magazine story and wondering how adult men could torture a child like that. I talked about the ‘good little Germans’ who followed Hitler. The camp guards who told themselves Jews were sub-human, but not so much that they minded pulling the pretty ones out of the death queues to be their sexual servants. The civilians who smelled something cooking if they lived near certain camps and pretended it was, uh, neighbors making dinner. How I didn’t want to be like that. Like them. Gareth talked me back from the chasm. When I sobered up I didn’t want to give myself to evil. I still think I dodged a real bullet that night. Shattered self-image. I remember dreaming once of looking into a broken mirror. Image free for use from Pxfuel In retrospect, while men really had been inconsiderate clods, I came to understand that I myself suffered from a crippling sense of romantic entitlement, as became clear several years later when George Sodini, an angry incel who hadn’t had sex in years, shot up a women’s fitness center in Los Angeles. His online manifesto detailed all his grievances against the women who’d remained immune to what he thought were his many charms. Weirdly, it wasn’t just wanting sex; he wanted connection, to be loved, to have a girlfriend. Underneath many incels’ obsessive focus on sex with a Stacy lies a genuine extremely human desire to be loved. My fascination with his story was a weird sort of kinship. He was, in a certain sense, a brother-in-arms. I didn’t condone Sodini, but I understood him. I sympathized with him. I still do. Love really is all there is. He was a scumbag, for sure, but he forced me to acknowledge I had become a scumbag too. When I analyzed Sodini’s sexual entitlement, I found myself—but entitled to the easy access to men I’d had when I was younger. Sex is harder for men to come by; romantic love harder for women. Men had fallen into my lap, without my effort. When I was young, I was a pretty belly dancer, which definitely gave me cachet, like being the head cheerleader. But now I was no longer a dumb kid, and it turned out, guys my age really were more interested in younger women, especially ones who wanted children, which I didn’t. Here’s another incel-style mistake I made: Blaming men for wanting something that didn’t align with my own desires. It takes awhile to find a man who’s willing to cut himself off from this normal human desire for children, and I got a tubal ligation at thirty-nine. Many men say they don’t want children, or they don’t care, but they can change their minds, in their forties, fifties, even their senior years. Never say never when you’re a man. Men and women think and plan their lives in different ways, because we are different, physically and psychologically. We don’t always synchronize with what the other sex wants. We have a biological clock; they don’t. There are fewer real-world consequences for male tomcatting. It’s not always humanity’s artificially created ‘patriarchy’, it’s God’s or evolution’s plan to perpetuate life. It’s not fair, but it’s humanity’s reality. I had moved to Canada, where I was less isolated and had made many new friends. Getting older had calmed me down a bit, and as I moved through menopause I wondered whether hormonal changes were responsible. I still was in a bad place, but I suffered fewer dark depressive episodes and the type of cycling thoughts that trouble angry, depressed people: Men are stupid. Men are awful. I really hate men. They only think of themselves. I hate them! I really hate them! I can’t imagine how I could ever love one! A few years later I found Buddhist psychology via Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With The Heart Of A Buddha. The first time I read it, it pissed me off. Compassion talk really pissed me off. Why the hell should I have compassion for a sex that felt no compassion for me, or women, period? The second time I read it I was simply nonplussed. Meh. I should get rid of this thing, eh? I didn’t know it yet, but that reaction demonstrated progress. Then one day I cleaned out my bookshelves and put Radical Acceptance on the pile bound for the thrift store. Then I picked it up. I was depressed again, but over unemployment, not men. I didn’t even think about them much anymore, or write about how much I hated them in my journal. I only hated myself. “Once more with feelin’,” I told myself. “And if it sucks I’ll put it back on the pile.” I laid down on the couch and started reading. Then I got up to grab a Kleenex. Then I got up to grab a pen. And I started underlining. Half an hour later, my Kleenex was soaked, and Radical Acceptance was lying on my coffee table . Don’t Be The Victim - My past articles on avoiding and not tolerating abuse Part II will publish on Tuesday, and will detail how I emotionally abused men that passed briefly through my life. I knew what I was doing and I have only myself to blame. Just because some people are assholes didn’t mean I had the right to become one. Don’t be like I was. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing!

How dare  woke liberals ask me to vote against my own interests to keep Washington Trump-free. I am Woman, hear me tell them all to go to hell! Donald Trump speaking into a mic and holding a clenched fist up with a flag in the background Nikki Haley nailed it in January.  It remains to be seen whether either party will have the balls and labia to follow through on her observation. "Most Americans do not want a rematch between Biden and Trump," Haley told a crowd of supporters before she dropped out of the presidential race. "The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to be the one who wins this election." I agree. Except I don’t think either party will. Last year I wrote about how I won’t vote for Biden  this time. I’m voting independent. Or something. I don’t know who will ultimately be on the ballot from my home state of Connecticut, but if it’s just Trump or Biden I won’t vote in the presidential race. I want to encourage other liberals—true liberals, not ‘woke’ anti-progressives—to do the same. Of course, the Kool-Aid drinkers and those liberals who don’t think as much about politics as they used to are mad at me. I get the same tired petulant reply: “If you don’t vote for Biden it’s a vote for Trump!” I recently mixed it up with an old friend who said this, then he cut the phone conversation short. He said he had things to do. He never  has ‘things to do’. He’s retired, so he has even less things to do than he did a year ago, when he always had time to talk because all I ever interrupted was book-reading or movie-watching. I tell my fellow liberals what I’m going to do in order to make them think. Thinking is as out of fashion in some circles on the left as it is for some on the right. “Women are half the country, Dennis,” I said. “Joe Biden’s pro-trans positions are extremely anti-feminist, and being pro-Roe isn’t good enough anymore. Women need more than just a return to abortion access. We need our remaining rights and safety preserved and defended, and the Democrats are no longer willing to do that. Even the female Congresswomen are anti-feminist, despite ‘identifying’ as feminists.” This is a word we need to use more with ideologues who claim to be something they’re not. ‘Identify’. I’ve begun to use it in relation to the Religious Right. There’s no way to be a Christian and a Trump supporter. I mean seriously, who would Jesus vote for? That guy? ‘Identifying,’ used with the right inflection, communicates to the other person their talk is cheap. “I understand, you identify  as a Christian,” I say. Walk the walk, baby. That goes for everyone. Especially so-called ‘liberal’ ‘progressive’ ‘feminists’. My friend isn’t super-‘woke’, but he’s begun showing the political fatigue I find sets in as we approach our golden years. I couldn’t understand why, when Mom was my age, she grew less interested in politics. She just stopped caring. I get it now. Mostly I’m tired of being expected to save the world from Donald Trump by people on the left  who expect women to take one for the team, once again, and throw each other under the bus by electing the guy who supports men who claim to be women and work to hurt us every bit as much as the right and its handmaids. You want me to vote Democrat? Give me a candidate with the balls or labia to stand up to the woke-mad authoritarians in The Squad, and other illiberals that have commandeered the soul of the party via the misogynist, homophobic, deeply traditionalist trans movement. I’ll vote for the brainworm-addled conspiracy-loving cheap Bobby Kennedy knockoff or whatever other dimwit is on my ballot before I’ll vote for Trump or Grandpa ‘I Do Everything My Woke Staff Members Tell Me To Do’ Biden. I am Woman, hear me tell ‘libs’ to go to hell I’ve had quite enough of the left’s misogyny. Biden’s latest blow against women’s rights makes me want to bitch-slap any liberal who dutifully mouths, “If you don’t vote for Biden it’s a vote for Trump!” Biden’s new rules around Title IX mandate that it’s okay to discriminate against women and girls, who should just STFU about their ‘rights’ and ‘safety’. Title IX bans sex discrimination at all federally-funded institutions, which wasn’t much of a problem until Idiot America swallowed the notion that humans can magically change into the opposite sex pretty much by verbal fiat. (Please note: I now identify as an 18-year-old 85-lb drop-dead gorgeous supermodel. My pronouns are ‘Hot Stuff’, ‘Venus’ and ‘O Babelicious One’. Please send all panting, desperate marriage proposals to superbabegrowsomelabia@gmail.com !) As customary for the Woke Brigade, Title IX, as of August 1st, will prioritize the ‘rights’ of trans-identified men’s over women’s. When it says you can’t discriminate against someone on the basis of ‘gender identity’, it means you can’t stop fully male-equipped cross-dressing men from using sex-segregated facilities. Suck it, bitches! Several Republican states are suing. Guess what Donald Trump promises to do if he’s re-elected? Roll back Biden’s Title IX protections for ‘transgender’ students. I approve. There’s nothing Trump can say or do to induce me to vote for him, but I’ll cheer for him when he deserves it. And if he rolls back ‘gender-affirming’ care for children and teens, all the better. Children shouldn’t be ‘transitioning’. They should be learning language skills, geography, social studies, math, and above all , history and SCIENCE. Not CRT oppressor-oppression nonsense and genderwoo fetishism. Suck it, Democrats! I’m fed up with ‘progressive’ obsession with ‘trans rights’. I’m all for everyone’s rights insofar as they don’t put anyone’s lives and safety in danger. Transwomen are men. Trans rights are men’s rights.  We’ve historically not allowed men in women’s bathrooms and changing rooms because women are exceedingly vulnerable when they’ve got their pants down or their clothes off and men have historically attacked women in such circumstances. Just ask Third World women who have to relieve themselves  in the bushes at night. It increases their risk of getting raped, because guess who’s waiting for them. Stall walls aren’t enough  to keep women and girls safe , either. No, boys. Males need to stay out of women’s private areas. If gay men can use the men’s facilities, so can trans-identified men. Telling women who’ve suffered sexual trauma by men to simply put their concerns aside because sexual predation in such places ‘almost never happens’, even though it does, more than they admit, is the very height of traditional male arrogance, and any female fauxminist who supports him should be shamed from one end of X to the other. Here’s A Running List Why ‘Transwomen’ Don’t Belong In Women’s Spaces Howzabout ‘transwomen’ ‘reframe’ their self-conception to think about the rights, needs, and feelings of others before themselves? Which is a consummately female way to think. Take notes, boyz. You’ve got a lot to learn. Why is it always women  who are expected to accommodate men? According to The Free Press, the breastfeeding support group La Leche League now accepts any male  who identifies as ‘female’ or ‘non-binary’ whether they’re breastfeeding or not. (And yes, men can now , with a lot of medical help.) Women are now forced to pull out a breast in front of strange men at meetings. This is on you , Democrats, progressives, and wokies. This is why women like me, not to mention many liberal men, aren’t going to vote for your Alpha Male this November. You’ve allowed the trans movement, primarily sexual fetishist men, to erode women’s right to say no to men. That’s why we don’t trust ‘progressives’ to keep the pedophiles away. We know pervs will eventually get the progs to offer up their own kid in service to what will one day be defined as a ‘sexual identity’ and that children have the ‘right’ to be violated by primarily teenage or adult human males. Claims that sexual predation incidents in women’s private spaces are ‘right-wing propaganda’ are actually left-wing propaganda. The far-left ‘progressives’ simply won’t acknowledge, and probably never will, how grievously wrong they are about ‘sex changing’ and how easily manipulated they are by clever men. Title IX doesn’t address male participation on female sports teams, but the Biden administration has made it very clear it supports it. You have to be blindingly stupid to not see how this is an attempt to destroy women’s sports. What girl or woman will even bother trying to compete if she’s guaranteed a loss against some cross-dresser on her team? Or worse, risks serious injury by some big galoot in a wig? These aren’t trivial, silly-ass ‘culture war’ concerns. Prioritizing ‘trans rights’ that men haven’t had since pre-Second Wave feminism is a huge step toward further eroding women’s personal autonomy and bodily integrity, in lockstep with progressives’ new allies on the far right. The right has near-eradicated women’s access to safe abortions. Even if she’s raped. What certain men want is more important than what women want, and deep in some male brains is the ancient notion, encoded in the Bible, that a fetus is the father’s property. As it turns out, the left’s misogynists aren’t much different and have now been empowered by the trans movement to join forces to further erase female agency. In the end, many men will band together non-politically in service to male sexual pleasure—the importance of which they can all agree on. Which is that women should service penises, however men want. Period. Just like it was in the ‘good ol’ days’ the right longs for. And is simply more vocal about. I’m done, kids. I’m sixty years old and I stopped feeling compassion for Americans two Presidents ago. And these are my people.  My birth country. But goddammit, people, women are the most marginalized people ever: Enslaved, dominated, and used at sexual will for 12,000 years. Those of us who aren’t ‘woke’ are tired of it. We’re exhausted. And in the twentieth century we made some real advances. We were always resisted by conservatives but now so-called ‘liberal’, ‘feminist’ men and their dizzy female allies have joined them. Thou shalt worship the Holy Phallus as thou didst in the good old centuries. Public domain image I’m not voting for Trump, but I’m not voting for Biden, and if Trump wins, BLAME YOURSELVES FIRST. YOU did this. Suck it, bitches. And c’mere. Hold your face still for just a moment. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing!

A viral TikTok meme demonstrates how skewed female beliefs about strange men have become. What's really worse? Rape or getting eaten alive? I would be especially afraid of a bear who reminded me a little of Harvey Weinstein. Public domain image by LadyofHats on Wikimedia Commons A friend pointed me toward a viral TikTok meme in which someone asked seven women which they’d rather encounter in the woods: A bear or a strange man. “Six out of seven picked the bear,” she said. I pondered the question myself. “What kind of a bear?” I asked. She shrugged. “Just a bear.” “Well, I think it depends on the bear,” I replied. “If it’s a brown or black one, I’ll take the bear, I guess. But if it’s a grizzly or a polar bear, I’ll take the man. Even if he’s a Hell’s Angel!” On further pondering I found even more personal nuance. If I’m in Canada I’ll take the strange man over even a black or brown bear, but if the man is a Hell’s Angel I’ll take the bear. If I’m in the United States, where strange men number over 150 million, I’ll take these relatively non-aggressive bears. Grizzlies or polar bears, though? I’ll take the man, every single time. Even if he’s wearing a hockey mask, with a tuft of brown hair flapping over the top, and carrying a bloody head. I don’t know if the TikToker spoke to any Canadian women, and whether they were more afraid of Canadian men than bears. I’m definitely more afraid of bears. When I took car trips with a photographer friend to Algonquin Park, north of Toronto, while he gassed up I’d flip through a book he had in the inside door pocket about how to avoid bear attacks. Algonquin Park is likely the only place I might ever encounter a bear, nice black or brown ones, and believe me, I’m no bleeding-heart woke guilt-ridden white liberal reverse bear racist. It’s because blacks and browns are relatively non-aggressive. They don’t like noise, so if you encounter one and yell a lot or bang pots together, they’ll go away. Black and brown bears don’t want any shit. Just don’t run away; then you’re prey. Grizzlies, on the other hand? You don’t want to mess with them! We don’t have them in eastern Canada. They’re found primarily in the western and far northern parts. Grizzlies are aggressive, powerful and up to 10 feet tall standing on their hind legs. They prefer a solitary life including other animals, and they do not appreciate surprise visits by humans, however accidental. And therein lies the essential element of why I will always pick the strange man over the bear. Unless I’m in 1976’s Eaten Alive!, the man isn’t going to eat me alive. On the other hand, a bear isn’t going to rape me, nor are they heavily armed. Which is why I’d choose the black or brown bear in the U.S., but the man over the grizzly. Call me crazy, but rape is survivable, and getting shot to death is an easier, quicker death than screaming off this mortal coil as someone’s lunch. In Canada, if it’s a polar bear, and I make it a point never to go anywhere near the North Pole, I’ll take the man, including the Hell’s Angel or Michael Myers (the serial killer, not the comedian, although I’d choose the comedian over any bear every single time, and then invite him to my campsite for a beer or three, eh, to thank him for not being a polar bear!) For me, it’s nuanced. For other women, not so much. The original TikTok inspired copycats, with women all over the world weighing in and sounding more afraid of their own species than the one that has yet to put one of their own kind on the moon. One woman was triggered by a man asking the question, saying with a bear you know what you’re getting. “But not all men are like that,” he points out which upsets her a little. Um, and you know what you’re getting with a generic bear, sister? I do. I vote her More Likely To Get Eaten By A Bear Than Raped. I suppose a woman who’s had a few, or a lot, of bad experiences with Those Kind Of Men will be warier of men than bears. I, on the other hand, have had no truly bad experiences with men, and zero bad experiences with wild bears. That’s because I’ve never encountered one. In Ontario, I know what to do if I don’t have bear spray or pots and pans: Stand still, head down a bit like you would with a strange, threatening dog (“I’m no danger to you, I’m submissive!”), and then sloooooowwwwwwlllly walk backwards. I know if a bear stands on his hind legs but isn’t growling or otherwise acting threatening, he’s just curious, and walking backward slowly will likely result in no blood shed. What would I do if I was really in that situation? I’d like to think I wouldn’t panic and do something stupid, but you never know until you’re eyeballing a bear who’s eyeballing you back with no cage between you. At least I know our Ontario bears aren’t out to kill me, if I loudly signal, “I DON’T WANT ANY SHIT FROM YOU AND IF YOU GET THE EFF AWAY FROM ME I’LL STOP BANGING THESE POTS!” So what would I do if I encountered a strange man? Freak out, scream, threaten to call 911 if he doesn’t immediately exit my time zone, threaten to #MeToo him on X? I’d do what I’d do if a strange bear were to encounter me : Scan him for signs of danger. Does he look like a big threatening sort? Does he look like he lives here in the woods and smells like he hasn’t bathed since the 1960s? Or is he carrying a camera, a rifle, a bow and arrow, or holding out a birdseed-laden hand to feed the Canada grey jays? I honestly think I’d be more concerned if I was in the U.S., where men are better-armed and—crazier. But all things considered, I don’t regard strange men nearly as threatening as wild animals, and I wonder about women who do. Obviously, they’ve never been toe to paw with a live, wild bear. Here’s why I mostly fear bears rather than men: I can reason with a man. I can try and make friends with a man. Even if he’s a scary, dangerous man, I learned a lesson a long, long time ago: People have a harder time killing someone they know and like. When I was a teenager, hijacking planes for political purposes was a very common threat for traveling Americans. Sometimes it was terrorists, or prisoners on the lam, who wanted the plane to divert to Cuba for asylum. I remember reading about a Middle Eastern terrorist who’d taken control of a plane and, I forget the details as it was over forty years ago, but I think he was on the tarmac and had released everyone except one guy he used for negotiation. If the negotiations failed, he would kill the guy. The hostage began talking to the terrorist during the long stretches of nothing happening. The hostage got him talking about things like his family and his home and what he wanted in life. And the hostage talked about the same: His own family, how much he loved them, what he did for a living, what he liked to do for fun. They shared stories. They had laughs together. The terrorist released the hostage and, as I recall, capitulated to the authorities. He didn’t want to kill someone he’d come to know as a fellow human being much like himself and who had become likeable: Not just some stranger whose life meant nothing to him and whatever noble cause he thought he was fighting. If it’s possible to negotiate your relationship with a terrorist, you can do it with others too. There’s no guarantee it will work. But it’s worth a try. It’s harder to hurt or kill people we’ve come to like. How are you going to make friends with a bear? Also, some encounters with scary-seeming men aren’t so scary if you don’t act scared. (Hmmmm….just like many bears!) Once at a bus stop a large, muscular, scary-looking black man approached to wait too. And he was scary-looking. Mean-looking. Tough. I’d call it ‘the face that sank a thousand ships’. He started a conversation and I remembered the guy with the terrorist. I went into Canadian mode: I showed no fear, I engaged back and we had a really nice conversation. He offered me some of his sandwich and I declined, having just had lunch. He was such a nice man! Until we got on the bus and he started a fight with others, which I feared might get physical, but it didn’t and he left me alone. My first impression was correct, but so was my first response. I showed no fear, and one on one, we had a very nice interaction. By the way, I don’t remember others provoking this loud, threatening multi-dispute. I was like, What the fuck??? What just happened here??? The man was a grizzly bear, someone who thought others wanted trouble even when they didn’t. Hyper-aggressive and God only knows what he’ll do next. What if encountered a Hell’s Angel in the woods? I’d pray to Goddess none of his compatriots were around, and, knowing a little about biker gangs from my reading—one on gangs in Canada, and Hunter S. Thompson’s book about the Hell’s Angels—I’d do what I did with the bus stop grizzly bear: Do my best to show no fear, engage him in conversation, treat him like a normal human being, and do my best not to trigger him. I don’t know if it would work or not, but an ex-biker I used to know said if you treat bikers like equals they’ll most likely respond better. If a Hell’s Angel and I encountered a grizzly bear in the wilds of British Columbia, I’ll bet we’d band together in an instant for the literal fight of our lives. The only thing that binds humans together faster than humor is survival. And geez, ladies. If you’ve never encountered a wild bear, you have no idea what you’re up against. Or not. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing!

What part of Diddy's, rap and hip hop artists' disrespect and hatred for women as objects and 'hos' lead them not to *expect* partner abuse? Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs By Shamsuddin Muhammad from Fort Hood, TX, USA - Diddy 13, CC BY 2.0 Oh my, will you look at that. Rapper Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs assaulted his girlfriend in a motel hall back in 2016. Warning: It’s graphic! Combs assaults and kicks then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura and proceeds to drag her out of view caveman-style. Way to go perpetuating ugly stereotypes about Neanderthal black men, Diddster! Ventura sued him in 2023, alleging years of abuse. Her story is as stock as everyone else’s by a popular celebrity: Young, dumb and full of—naivete. Inexperience allows the man to control her. Marilyn Manson thrived on clueless young women. “She Is Willing To Do Whatever It Takes To Be With Me” Naivete doesn’t explain everything. There’s a cost benefit analysis factoring into a woman’s decision to tolerate abuse by anyone, and especially the status that accompanies being the ‘bitch’ of a glamorous celebrity. Given popular music’s bloody, black-and-blue history, it’s clearly the price you pay to be with him. As noted by Manson. Kat Rosenfield  has penned an interesting analysis defending violent rap lyric s and other misogynist content against charges that it allegedly promotes and encourages real-world violence. She correctly argues that many artists write about violence without ever murdering anyone, unlike the female author who murdered her husband  after writing an essay on how to murder your husband. Not everyone who raps, sings, writes, or creates violent content is necessarily an abuser or killer in progress, as Rosenfield notes, but what she doesn’t address is that which amounts to red flags. In other words, are the violent, abusive words coming from the heart or as commentary? I support Rosenfield’s contention that violent content shouldn’t be censored. Wannabe authoritarians invariably use it to justify censorship, including against non-violent expression, as exemplified by the woke left who claim alleged group harm as an excuse to ban critical content and pushback it doesn’t like . What bothers me far more about Sean Combs, other rappers and hip hop artists accused or convicted of domestic violence, is why, as I’ve wondered so many times before, women, and particularly black women, are so willing to enter relationships with these guys. Do they not listen to their albums? Watch their videos? Do they not grasp the misogyny and gross disrespect for women that saturates  gangster rap and hip-hop? Do they not notice how much black women are mistreated, hypersexualized, and objectified by these artists in their videos? Most especially, the criminal records of so many popular artists, the rap sheets longer than their discographies, the bodies piled in cemeteries from real-life rap battles and rival eliminations? Mom Dukes cryin', baby moms full of grief How she gonna tell her son his daddy is deceased? Now she got beef with them bitches up the street All because I used to creep with her girlfriend Sharese She knows, I keep the hoes, from nation, to nation On every radio station, Goodfellas in rotation, uh -Diddy, What Ya Gonna Do Red flags, red flags, red flags, ladies! What part of ‘Don’t get involved with men who hate women’ don’t you understand? “See, we date 'em like we hate 'em, See 'em like we don't need 'em Treat 'em like we beat 'em, And never give up freedom” The World Is Filled - Diddy & the Notorious B.I.G. And what about Diddy himself? Or Puffball Daddy, P Diddley, or whatever the hell he calls himself now? Did he offer any kind of clue that he might be the kind of guy who would beat and kick a woman in a hallway? Could anyone have possibly seen this coming? I mean apart from his loooooong history of violence against women stretching back to his college days? Combs has quite a checkered history. Since Cassie Ventura’s lawsuit, three other women have come forward similarly alleging abuse and revenge porn. His home was raided by Homeland Security in March investigating for alleged sex trafficking. He’s been charged with assaulting a record label manager and several others over the decades; he was implicated in a gunfire incident in Manhattan in 1999; a 2024 lawsuit alleges Combs drugged and sexually assaulted a music producer and forced him to have sex with sex workers; and that he paid to cover up a story of his son Christian allegedly assaulting a woman on his yacht. And ex- classmates at Howard University  allege then-student Combs publicly beat his girlfriend with a belt. If only his victims had had some sort of clue. Violent content is a massive flapping red flag The difference is in how the artist ultimately treats the violent acts they depict. How serious do we think they are? The Dixie Chicks song Goodbye Earl  is a funny, clever video I simply can’t take seriously as a violent call to action against abusive husbands. It’s obviously a silly revenge fantasy that clearly would not likely go down so successfully in real-life. Like it didn’t for the essayist who actually murdered her husband. Also, I have no reason to believe the Dixie Chicks ever supported actual violence against men. Just as I don’t suspect Anthony Hopkins or Christian Bale of being serial killers. The red flag is whether the content subtly expresses suggestion such behavior is okay. Or that the artist supports it. And therein lies the problem for Combs, R Kelly, and others who sing or rap boastfully about violence against women and others without any sort of moral signal that this isn’t poetic license, but what they believe and have internalized. Especially when one is dragging a woman through a hallway like Alley Oop. Beat yo ho Where does this misogynoir come from? Black women suffer a higher domestic violence rate than other women. The National Center for Domestic Violence reports that 45% of black women  experience intimate partner violence, sexual violence, or stalking in their lifetimes. IPV is also responsible for over half of domestic homicides for black women. Hispanic and white women follow , in that order. Other research shows that black women under 30 are three times more likely to experience IPV than those between 30-40. And those living in poverty are three times more likely to experience it. (45%? Seriously, black sisters? 45%???) Power imbalance marks one of the primary elements of an abusive relationship, and it’s never so stark as when one is a rich celebrity and the other is not. Evolutionarily, women are hypergamous, attracted to men with power and wealth. The survival strategy evolved for ensuring a man with sufficient resources to care for the woman and her children. The trade-off was he could do whatever he wanted, with whoever he wanted, and in some cultures keep multiple wives and mistresses to spread his seed (and the use of his resources to the detriment of the children of his other wives). It was a workable strategy for thousands of years, however lopsided and unfair, but we live in the 21st century now where women have more resources and opportunities than ever, as exemplified, for better or for worse, by single women getting pregnant in a clinic and raising the child by herself. I keep warning women that the traditional “I want to marry a rich man,” strategy comes as a matched set with a very steep price, potentially having to tolerate abuse and infidelity just as in days of yore. Not all rich men are abusive, nor may they have begun their journey to fame by being abusive, but money, celebrity, and entourages unwilling to tell them no can turn a nice guy into a narcissistic asshole. Wanting to marry a wealthy man was Nicole Brown Simpson’s biggest mistake. It’s the same mistake Cassie Ventura and so many other naive young black girls make, starstruck by a powerful, popular, rich man like Sean Diddy Combs, or his fellow IPV thugs NBA Youngboy, Dr. Dre, G Herbo, Bow Wow, Tekashi 6ix9ine, XXXTentacion, Flavor Flav, The Game, Chris Brown, Bobby Brown, Tone Loc, and countless other rap and hip hop artists who plainly treat violence against women as socially acceptable, and prove it by beating and kicking their own. Hip hop has a very long and firmly entrenched history  of normalized violence against women, and any woman who gets involved with one of these artists, whether he’s got an IPV rap sheet yet or not, is absolutely forewarned.  Proceed at your own risk! Sure, there’s the long, equally misogynist genre of rock and roll and even non-rock music. Remember Tom Jones’s Delilah?  It’s a paean to partner homicide when a woman rejects someone for another man, cruelly. (Pro tip for women keen on avoiding getting murdered: Don’t laugh in the man’s face when he confronts you with your infidelity.) The song is also a sad commentary on a man caught in a toxic relationship with a woman he knows ‘is no good for me,’ and is unfaithful, yet he feels trapped by his love for her. (He allowed her to mistreat him.) Delilah didn’t deserve to die the way she did but she was no tragic victim. And it’s right that the man is led off in handcuffs, when he could have resolved to simply find a better woman for him than, well, frankly, a heartless ho. Black women often don’t report IPV crimes for many of the same reasons other women don’t, and for a few of their own: Like that there are already plenty of black men in a racist prison system, not always justifiably, and they don’t want to exacerbate the problem. Okay but—until black men are held responsible for their crimes against women, just like in any other demographic group—they will continue to hit, stalk, rape, and abuse with impunity until 45% of black women decide to force them to stop. Fairly or unfairly, it’s always the victims who must drive change. The Misogynoir That Dares Not Speak Its Name One mostly-overlooked factor in the misogynist crimes black men commit against black women is historical African pre-transatlantic slave trade IPV. Domestic abuse advocates and woke social just-us warriors like to emphasize the breakup of African families during the slave days, but that argument is holding less water with each passing day. As it turns out, post-Civil War, American black families stayed together more, were fairly conservative, and many mens had only one baby mama—his wife. What changed for the worse for the American black family was, ironically, the 1960s and the civil rights era, which denigrated traditional ‘square, Establishment’ married life and set up a world of ‘free love’ where men of all races could tomcat around as much as they wanted. While it also released female sexuality, sleeping around was more frowned upon for women and the traditional, historical, Establishment slut-shaming ensued, nor was it what many really wanted anyway. Africa’s no picnic for wives today; studies on modern African IPV are sparse as they only began in the mid-’90s but so far they indicate a helluva lot more domestic violence than we’ve got in North America, complicated by the fact that many African women live in rural parts of their country where they’re subject to traditional African law which accepts the ‘natural’ subordination of women. This is the part of the world that, so far, holds the distinction of having invented female genital mutilation first. And several African countries can’t seem to shake the human slave trade lucre. Ancient pre-slave trade tribal customs and treatment of women snap at modern-day African women’s heels like hungry dogs. Traditional (and hardly uniquely African) practices include the idea that women are property and subject to her husband’s rule. Bride price—dowries—are paid, often with cows. Anything that issues from her womb after the marriage is his personal property. And when he dies, in some areas the widow is passed on to the brother to join his  harem. The idea of ‘respect’ for a wife is unknown in some places. All these uber-patriarchal ideas and practices have been part of the African female experience for thousands of years, and even though they were ‘invented’ or adopted elsewhere, many parts of Africa have yet to prohibit them as most of the West and some of the East has. Top Ten best African countries   for women in 2024  (Business Insider Africa) While the transatlantic slave trade negatively impacted black lives and families, it’s harder to treat it as the sole legacy with the knowledge that African-American families were much stronger between the liberation of slaves and the start of the mid-century civil rights movement. (If you think I’m wrong please feel free to state why in the comments!) Statista  reports that, “In 2022, there were about 4.15 million Black families in the United States with a single mother. This is an increase from 1990 levels, when there were about 3.4 million Black families with a single mother.” Here are some little-known facts about black families during the violent Jim Crow years: Black America had the highest marriage rate of any racial group and, as Thomas Sowell has pointed out, the largest decline of black poverty. It came to a halt, he says, and ironically, with the War On Poverty. ( Source : Hoover Institution, Not Buying It: Glenn Loury, Ian Rowe, And Robert Woodson Debunk Myths About The Black Experience In America). Since then, black marriage and commitment to family has declined considerably, and not only for black families. Marriage and fertility rates have dropped overall for decades in North America. We Westerners are neither marrying nor breeding. So I don’t intend to paint African-Americans as uniquely uncommitted to historical, traditional families, but where does misogynist, misogynoir rap and hip hop artists get it from? It doesn’t negate the fact that black women as much as any other vagina-bearing human (or whatever the hell they’re calling us this week over at Trans Central) have to decide for themselves whether they will allow  their man to hit them and also maybe kind of sort of pay attention to the kind of content he consumes or produces? I’ve already counseled women to avoid what should be the glaringly obvious: Publicly misogynist men like Andrew Tate . Just imagine how judgemental the world would be if white supremacists had black female groupies who were just dying to have sex with men who hate them! So why did Cassie Ventura endure years of abuse from Diddy? Why do any black women tolerate this shit? Taking charge of your personal safety is women’s—is everyone’s —responsibility, and they must now share the active collaboration it takes to return again and again for more abuse. This ain’t 1965. This ain’t 1865. This ain’t 1619, nor any era before that. It’s 2024, ladies, and we can’t achieve true equality until we take responsibility for ourselves, our lives, and our families, by Just Saying No to abusive men. Let someone else agree to take his shit. Yeah, even guys with amazing lives like Sean Combs. Especially guys like Sean Combs! It takes two to tango, as my mother was fond of saying: One person to abuse, and the other to agree to it. She said that back in the 1960s, folks, and she never  identified as a feminist. She hated  ‘women’s libbers’ even as she was the most influential feminist I’ve ever known. She’s the reason why Grow Some Labia exists today. So yeah, black ladies, you can Just Say No to abuse too. If you don’t want to listen to an old white Karen like me, how about Oprah Winfrey ? Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing!

Max Wolf Valerio digs into male behavior, values and disconnects with women, with a lot of help from 'T' (Testosterone) Public domain image from Pikist There aren’t many sex transition stories I trust. Today’s switchers lack honesty, possessing zero understanding or self-awareness as to why they did it . I favor stories from folks who transitioned before trans-fashionability. Dana Bevan’s The Transsexual Scientist convincingly writes she never felt right in her boy’s body, although she was romantically attracted to girls. She was born in 1948. I read Max Wolf Valerio’s ( née Anita) book The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Transformation from FEMALE to MALE. Valerio, who appears to have been genuinely gender dysphoric as a child and did not outgrow it, offers a poetic twist and sense of humour about himself lacking in today’s woketrans. Max began in the ‘80s, when sex change was less common, and F2M quite rare. Apart from his weird lesbian politics as a gay woman, there’s no kill-the-TERFs hate since America hadn’t yet gone idiocratic over immutable sex differences. I’m always curious what it’s like on The Other Side. What can he teach me and other women—and men!—about experiencing manhood as a biological woman? I spent a lot of time underlining text on the subway and trying not to laugh out loud sometimes, especially learning that men can’t smell their own strongly-scented pee very well because of testosterone. ‘T’ is the focus, as you might guess, and Valerio describes an awful lot of time in front of mirrors scrutinizing his face and body for T-induced changes. What a diff’rence a male makes! Valerio hails from a time when biological science wasn’t a social just-us clusterfuck. He writes extensively about T’s biological and hormonal changes, and its impact on his behavior. “I feel more confident, expansive, cocky. It’s a pounding-on-the-chest kind of feeling, a swagger, a strut. Testosterone is an androgen, an up, pure raucous power.” He begins to grok risk-taking, boys turning wild tricks on skateboards, weaving in and out of traffic, jumping curbs. Testosterone is energy, something he says non-trans men never understand because they’ve never lived under the influence of estrogen. They have nothing to compare it to. Hey, there’s a reason why women’s health and car insurance is lower in those states that don’t prohibit gender-based insurance discrimination. James Dean stares into his immediate future. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 photo from John Irving on Flickr And what about estrogen for wannabe women? Valerio cites transwomen who say they cry now more than once or twice a year. How they weren’t prepared for the influx of emotions, their greater concern for others. Estrogen, one transwoman reported, made her feel more ‘relaxed’ and likened it to a ‘tranquilizer’. Hey dyke, you’re hot! Valerio notes how his perception of women seem ‘softer’, ‘rounder’, ‘prettier’ after T. Their facial ‘edges’ become ‘smooth, sweet surfaces’. Even women with skin issues look more glow-y. Their voices are higher and more melodic, and, “I never realized how musical women’s voices are! Notes are sprinkled inside the words. I listen in wonder. Entranced.” Wow. I’m clearly missing the music in my girlfriends’ voices. I will listen more. Even butch lesbians become more ‘womanly’ than when he was Anita. Their feminine qualities become ‘painfully apparent’ and he wonders, Can it be I’m beginning to perceive women as men do? As even plain or average-looking women become more feminine to Valerio, it becomes more difficult to communicate. “These women speak in another language, although they are moving their lips in a familiar way. I recognize the words, yet can’t quite grasp the meaning. An essential dimension has become hidden.” He doesn’t understand female conversation the way he used to. Which leads me to wonder whether men aren’t as unconcernedly clueless as women think, or whether hormonally, they honestly can’t understand us the way we’d like them to. Which leads to another obvious question: If testosterone truly ‘clouds’ men’s minds in certain ways to understanding women, what is estrogen doing to blind us to them? I don’t know that T is necessarily the culprit; this is Valerio’s individual experience. I question whether all these changes are T-induced, or whether he subconsciously conforms to culture (“This is how men act”). I’ve noticed over the decades that some men are better at understanding the female perspective than others; an old boyfriend from nearly forty years ago was particularly good at it, and asked questions no other man asked like, “What is it like to have a period? What is it like for a woman to have sex?” Try explaining colors to a blind person! Which I’ve done. It led me to ask what it was like to have a penis, and what it felt like to have sex. Men and women will never understand much about the other sex’s sexual experience, but it’s a beneficial exercise to try. Valerio lost his dyke detection, which he says men lack overall, even when she’s dressed very dykily and looks quite masculine. Men, he feels, perceive the femaleness in women regardless of how they identify or present themselves. His F2M friend Will reported the same: He had a harder time recognizing dykes, and they both felt like they’re losing their gaydar. Before transition, reports Will, “…20% of the women looked attractive, and now 80% of them do.” So. Guys chase skirts because they’re attracted to nearly everybody! Including dykes. Oi! While Valerio discovers a new-found love of heavy metal, thrash rock, hardcore metal and rap, he finds relief from his female mood swings, with emotions ‘not as close to the surface.’ (I have to admit: That must be nice!) The “little-known secret of female to male sex change,” he explains, is that the default human condition in the womb is everyone starts out female. It’s why, he explains, “..it’s so much easier to pick things up from there.” I’ve noticed (mostly from YouTube) that F2Ms seem much more convincing and ‘passable’ than many M2Fs. A thin man with delicate bone structure (a ‘prettyboy’), can often ‘pass’, but otherwise, most ‘transwomen’ look like chicks in drag. Chaz Bono, née Chastity Bono. By Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons Valerio identifies, indirectly, one of women’s most damaging psychological weaknesses: Caring so much what other people think. Valerio sought validation more for his maleness before he transitioned. He loved when people commented that his voice sounded deep, but once it deepened further with T, he no longer cared what people thought of his female voice. Oh, if only we could care (a little) less what others think! Consider how women censor themselves around their friends, don’t assert themselves, stress out about something said either by herself or someone else. Guys don’t worry about this stuff, and they get over it. One doesn’t need to shoot T for that, it’s something you can work on, but it may be more hormonally based than we think. What’s for dinner? Valerio’s sex drive kicks in big-time with T. He understands the need for just ‘getting off’ without having a relationship. He understands when Tom Snyder interviews Camille Paglia and says “Women didn’t understand what sex was to men.” He called it “food”. Maybe I should ask that aforementioned ex-boyfriend about this, since we’re still friends and in fact were texting the other day. ‘Food’? Like, you have to have it to survive? Valerio doesn’t explain why it makes sense to him so I Googled it. The best explanation I found was a Reddit thread in which it was put in the context of a relationship. Sex feeds the relationship the way food feeds the body. But, I’m not really sure that’s what Snyder meant. The fraught homophobia of the men’s room The public restroom chapter was why I had such a hard time not laughing on the subway. It’s so much easier to take a pee in the ladies’! We lack that ‘nervous homophobia’, “a nearly palpable tension that precludes more than a minimum amount of socializing.” So I guess guys aren’t shooting the breeze while they’re shoulder-to-shoulder aiming for the urinal cakes. Valerio says men also take a lot of time in the bathroom sometimes, they just spend it alone. In the stall. Okay, no news here if you’ve ever lived with a male but in public restrooms too? Whatever they’re doing, he says—Reading? Jerking off?—they’re “…taking their own sweet time with their pants down below their knees.” He wonders if the guy is dead from an overdose or a heart attack, or still hasn’t come. Even the graffiti is different. Women might scrawl helpful advice for each other—’ARNOLD IS A GREAT FUCK, KURT’S DICK IS HUGE’ (I’ve only ever seen warnings on who’s allegedly an asshole) but he notes that women’s bathroom graffiti is mostly political (yes)—dialogues between squatters on twelve-stepping, battered women and lesbianism. What do guys write about while they’re Bombing The Bowl? “COME HERE SATURDAY NIGHT, GET HARD, GET SUCKED. TOM LOVES BIG DICKS UP THE ASSHOLE. I LIKE TO SUCK OFF STRAIGHT MARRIED MEN, ESPECIALLY THOSE WITH BIG FEET AND TIGHT BUNS” [Are they really that specific?] with a phone number. Next to the mirror, there’s a dick drawing spurting droplets. Geez, no wonder there’s an aura of homophobia in the men’s, and that’s before you even get to the gay club. If that sounds like an inner sanctum to the way men really behave in a female-free environment, just wait til you get to the gropefest chapter on the Church of Saint Priapus, which ain’t yer granddaddy’s church (or maybe it was and you never knew!) It’s a strictly no-women-allowed space to get groped and sucked off through a ‘glory hole’ in absolute anonymity. Men touch each other, squeeze together, grab, yank, twist, whatever they can. Two strangers approach each other, stop, look into each other’s eyes and jack off together. Some are just there to watch. Not a lot of talking, not a lot of noise. Just men standing around with their family jewels exposed, waiting to see what happens. Most women have no clue how this works and most would not like to be in a room with other women masturbating together or eating a random, anonymous vagina through a hole in the wall, although I’m sure there are exceptions. By and large, it’s just not what turns women on. Saint Priapus, Valerio reports, is raw, tense male sexuality unchained. It’s the most extreme male realm. They don’t have to tone themselves down or act a certain way to get jacked off, blown or laid. They objectify each other (objectification, Valerio reports, comes with the T) and are ‘cruising with an abandonment that borders on cruelty—a lustful, cruel rooting out of desired body parts.” The differences between male and female sexuality are no starker than at The Church. There’s no equivalent ‘glory hole’ at even the craziest lesbian sex clubs for anonymous licking, although there’s talk of safe sex techniques. At Saint Priapus, the only safe sex is a prohibition against anal at the height of the AIDS crisis. There’s more talk and sharing at lesbian sex clubs. Emphasis on ‘fairness, safety, and civility’. Other themes Valerio explores over-judgemental feminism and the fact that some women ‘do seem to be trying to spoil the party sometimes’ with too much analysis, too many rules, over-exaggerated accusations of sexual harassment and abuse, and demands for male accountability. I don’t agree with him on his inclusion of feminine emphasis on the ‘c-word’, commitment—after all, we want what we want and should hold out for it, but I can certainly appreciate his point of view on crazy-ass feminism. I don’t like those chicks either! He notes how much more authority he’s automatically gifted for being male. He’s offered managerial positions without any experience which never happened as a woman. He notes the affection in male kidding around, which to women looks more insulting or abusive than it is. More uncomfortably, he writes with understanding, if not condoning, of rape and why some men might be prone to committing it. He describes a female coworker he’s attracted to, explores the aggression with which he wants to just take her. “I want to fuck her so bad, grab her and throw her down on the floor and fuck her so hard so strong…I have to stop and take stock. This feeling is different in intensity from anything I’d known before in its pleading for release.” He doesn’t justify rape, but expresses understanding in why some guys ‘lose it’ sometimes. And wonders why men don’t more often. “Rape and plunder. Take.” It’s uncomfortable to read, to think that perhaps some men really do feel sexual urges that strong. I’m more inclined to listen to an ex-female like Valerio than a biological man here; you never know when men are justifying it to themselves. After all, doesn’t that define the history of rape as a criminal act? Men blaming the woman, how’s she’s dressed, knowing she ‘really wants it,’ is playing hard to get, and hey, don’t all women have rape fantasies? Lesbian Anita was immersed enough in misandrist lesbian politics to know that rape is a violent sex act that can never be condoned. But it’s a bit frightening to believe that the urge to fuck another human being is so strong that some are willing to act upon it, especially with the tacit understanding that feminist culture collaborates to protect rapists from accountability. One more interesting tidbit about being a man we don’t understand: As we complain about having to move through life constantly aware of the potential for male violence against us, the weaker sex, we are mostly unaware that men live the same way too. Man-on-man violence is just as quotidian as casual male-on-female violence. Men threaten to kick Valerio’s ass if he gives them the finger or bumps into the wrong guy at the wrong time. He had zero awareness of this before he became a man. He says he’s been “mugged, punched in the face, and threatened on more than a few occasions. I’ve had to learn a new code of conduct,” but also describes chasing a guy for blocks for impatiently hanging up a pay phone Valerio was on since, apparently, the other guy needed to use it. I will never fully understand what makes men tick but I feel a little less ignorant, and more empathetic. I’ve always known they don’t have it as easy as misandrist feminists imagine; the haters on both sides don’t understand we’re all just struggling to wake up alive the next morning. I want to be less judgemental and more sympathetic to my counterpart humans; I wish and hope men will do the same for us. My perception, especially from online dating, is that men never seem to learn or desire to understand women better; please feel free to debunk me in the comments! I would love to be proven wrong about this. The Testosterone Files is a wicked good read without the politics, female-hate or the incessant narcissism one finds in modern transfolk. Loved it. Recommend it! 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! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

Matt Walsh, the right-wing guy who took down fake women in his mockumentary 'What Is A Woman?", now goes after the DEI grifters DEI ‘consultants’. They see themselves as warriors in an ongoing epic battle against racism, while wallowing in it themselves. And generating more of it. Image by Frank Davis from Pixabay It’s weird how terrified DEI fangirls are (they’re almost always women) of the dreaded M-word. A DEI (black, natch) consultant lamented on LinkedIn that corporate DEI initiatives were disappearing. I commented, wondering What if businesses hired on the basis of merit, or whether DEI’s embrace of ‘diversity’ could include opinion, ideology and political opinions, and stopped discriminating against others on these bases? Only people she was connected with could reply to her directly, typical of a ‘profession’ that famously runs from critical challenge like scared little girls from spiders. Therefore, I responded to another part of the commentary thread. I wasn’t the only one challenging her. She didn’t respond directly to me but she did, however, lament the number of people ‘smearing’ people o’ color by suggesting they can’t make it on merit. What do these DEI brainiacs expect people will wonder when businesses are forced by not-so-majority fiat to ‘commit’ to ‘diversifying’ their workforce? If it was a little on the white or male or heterosexual side, why do these people automatically assume it’s because of prejudice, rather than that some people may not be trying—or be required to try—as hard as others? Their whole profession is predicated on their belief that blacks are perennially deemed by white racists (white = racist) as ‘not good enough’. Black intellectual Shelby Steele, on the other hand, argues that white America can only do so much for black people; at some point, they need to take charge of their own personal development and stop blaming ‘systemic racism’ for their failure to succeed or even launch. De-colonize your own brains, in other words, to cadge a fave expression from the wokenati, and wake up to who’s actually holding you back the most. When Harvard University dropped race-based admissions in response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year, it didn’t ‘harm’ black people as much as one might think: Black admission dropped only from 18% to 14%. Asian-American admissions for the Class of 2028 remained the same. (Is anyone surprised?) White enrollment increased from 20% to 32%. (Thank you, black slackers! Less Instagram, more studying!) Yale and Princeton saw slight declines in Asian-American enrollment. (Maybe Harvard is where you settle if you’re not good enough to get into either of these!) Bottom line is, non-white academic success won’t suffer just because a few black students didn’t get into hoity-toity universities. So, they’ll go somewhere else. Maybe to another Ivy League school, or another university. And the ones who failed to get in probably aren’t slackers; other students were just better; maybe had higher grades. To be fair, Harvard made an effort to reach out more to rural communities they might not otherwise after the ruling. They also prohibited administration from accessing demographic information. This is actually fairly affirmative—people from rural communities don’t attend Ivy League schools much. I hope they were still required to have the high grades expected of others to get in. And here’s a fun new twist in affirmative action reduction: White people may have to try harder too! California’s Governor Gavin Newsom just signed into law a bill that prohibits legacy and donor university admission preferences. A modern wealthy but average-average student like George W. Bush might not, anymore, get into a good school merely on the basis of his daddy. At least in California. “In California,” Newsom says, “everyone should be able to get ahead through merit, skill, and hard work. The California Dream shouldn’t be accessible to just a lucky few, which is why we’re opening the door to higher education wide enough for everyone, fairly.” Even rich white kids now will need to compete on the basis of merit rather than their real core advantage. Monica Harris, the executive director at FAIR (Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism), observes—and she’s hardly alone—that class is the primary privilege problem , not race, sex or gender/sexual orientation. And this is coming from a gay black woman. But anyway, let’s get to the damn movie already, shall we? Am I Racist? A friend and I recently saw the new Matt Walsh movie. The public loves it and the critics have been struck with selective blindness. They haven’t seen it, so they can’t review it. Am I Racist? grossed $9M by its second weekend in September, 2024’s highest-grossing documentary. Walsh notes it’s now made three times its production budget. Great White DEI Goddess Robin DiAngelo gets pwned by Walsh, claiming she was ‘tricked’ into appearing and complained his film was “designed to humiliate and discredit anti-racist educators and activists.” She accomplished that pretty effectively herself as she was induced to give some money from her purse to Walsh’s black assistant as ‘reparations’ after Walsh made a virtue-signalling similar move. That scene is priceless! The movie gets a 73% out of 11 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes’s Tomatometer, which measures a movie’s critical reception, but it scores a 97% on the Popcornmeter, which measures public reception. That’s you and me. On Metacritic, it gets 84% positive ratings and 15% negative. Meanwhile, mainstream media companies aren’t touching it with a ten-foot Black Lives Matter I Stand With Palestine flag. Maybe that’s why public reception far outstrips the critical reception, the latter of which may be better described as mainstream media op-ed pieces criticizing the movie rather reviewing it. Or even seeing it. Matt Walsh, a conservative columnist at the Daily Wire, a right-wing-biased news site with a mixed factualism record according to Media Bias Fact Check, goes undercover with tight jeans and a man bun to become a certified DEI consultant. He annoys workshoppers by, for example, punking one irritated DEI leader by pushing her on why she claims to feel ‘unsafe’ in a circle of pretty harmless-looking white people who otherwise hope to learn something from her, rather than, I don’t know, beat her up? The Martyr explains that even though these workshops make her feel ‘unsafe’, she does them because ‘there’s a need for it’. Also, not that she mentions this, she gets paid five figures for each. Guessing what she’s mostly feeling ‘unsafe’ about today is the threat of a Great De-Awokening to her bank account. You hear a lot about ‘de-centering whiteness’ in this movie. If you’re not sure what that means, and especially if you’re white and don’t feel like you’re at the center of anything, it refers to making a conscious effort to expend less time and energy on prioritizing white people and their feelings, rather than on those of the so-called ‘marginalized’, especially the ones who can afford a way fancier car than you. White people’s feelings are 100% irrelevant. It’s a racial grievance monologue for what desperately needs to be a talking circle with a stick. It’s the emblematic rampant group narcissism in which everyone is concerned only about us us us us us . Here’s the expensive truth for employers and others forcing their hapless employees into these toxic racial rejection factories: Their positive effects don’t last more than a day or two for attendees, and push away many more. (You don’t say.) And guess for whom it’s the least effective? Hang on to your butts, kids, yer gonna be blown away by this! White people and males! In the olden days - say, a decade ago—‘diversity’ or ‘sensitivity’ training looked a lot different. It was actually relevant. I took mandatory online training for one employer, and not only was it pleasant, but I learned a few things I remember and apply to this day. Its focus was more on dealing with people with physical challenges rather than race, sex or sexual preference. But a similar program for helping employees navigate relations with people of other races, cultures, sexual and gender orientations might work far more beneficially, if presented with universal educational intent. It can address discomfort some might feel when presented with someone who ‘looks’ a certain way. How might we all challenge our biases? White people do need to understand how certain actions, words or jokes might be perceived as racist, but black people and others also need to question and analyze themselves. The sort of people who are drawn to DEI consulting are the very people who themselves need honest anti-racism training. No black person is literally more ignorant of white people’s lives, inner and outer, as DEI consultants. No one knows what it’s like to walk in another’s shoes, and many POC make unjustified assumptions about whites based on numerous erroneous views about oppression hierarchies, power dynamics, and a denial of how class demonstrably trumps race privilege. They’re not much interested in learning, either, as it will contradict their racial prejudice and make them think in a more nuanced way than will be popular with their friends. Millions of working class, middle class, disadvantaged, clearly un-privileged and now ex-Democrat white voters may well demonstrate that in a few more weeks. Am I Racist? threatens the livelihoods of the DEI industry with its dawning recognition that it’s actually harmful and counterproductive. They’re paid insane sums of money to create racism rather than reduce it. What will they do if they have to go back to offering workplace sensitivity training, and can’t charge nearly as much as they do now? Or even worse, employers realize this can all be done online. How does ‘de-centering’ whiteness even help me be a better salesperson? Talkin’ to the rednecks Walsh ventures into ‘redneck’ country to talk to the kind of folks we imagine represent the very worst of America’s racists. They seem confused by his DEI line of questioning and claim to be accepting of black people. Another interviewee, a black man, claims he doesn’t encounter racism and never reads anti-racism books. Is he just an ‘Uncle Tom’, or is he being honest? How honest is anyone when the cameras are rolling? Including virtue-signalling white progressives? I wonder how more effective DEI consultants would be if they ‘did the work’ of ‘decolonizing’ their own brains? What if they came to realize that ‘We’re all Americans (or Canadians)”, rather than disparate groups of warring tribes? Interestingly, most DEI workshops and programs fail to address the most pressing racial bigotry problem: Antisemitism, especially in, big surprise, academia. Silence of the libs from the DEI Brigade. Or worse, it actively colludes to create a more hostile environment for Jews. The law of supply and demand The greatest takeaway I received from Am I Racist? was seeing black political scientist Wilfred Reilly, author of Hate Crime Hoax: How The Left Is Selling A Fake Race War note just how political—and false—so many of the media ‘hate crime’ narratives are. There’s a demand for racism in America, and it comes from the far left and its desperate need to believe the country is far more racist than it is. The demand for racism, as the movie notes, far exceeds the supply. Am I Racist? is klutzy in some places, cringey in others, and fails to address the omission of antisemitism as well as how poorly these efforts work, but it does a fantastic job of exposing the left’s racism suppliers as the grifters and fake progressives they are. You may not like self-described ‘theocratic fascist’ Matt Walsh much, but he gets a lot of things right in this movie. And if you like this one, you’ll love his earlier film, What Is A Woman? 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! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

Liberals need to ask some hard questions about why conservative kids are happier--and a lot less 'trans' CC BY-SA 4.0 photo by Ted Eytan, WikiCommons Conservative children have higher levels of happiness, joy in life, and enjoy greater mental health than kids in liberal families, according to moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. It wasn’t always so, his research found; prior to 2012 there were minimal political differences. After 2012, depression and anxiety digressed politically; liberal kids’ mental health sank, most markedly for teenage girls and young women, with boys not far behind. While many theorized they were depressed about the state of the world, Haidt notes that Barack Obama was President and had enacted liberal-friendly laws like gay marriage. The author of the bestselling book The Collapse of Parenting, Dr. Leonard Sax, notes the role political leanings play in the ‘gentle parenting’ style that many left-of-center parents have adopted. In the last ten years, he says, permissive parents are almost always on the left and they push back against advice regarding children’s needs for structure and boundaries. The best form of parenting, Sax argues, backed by many other researchers, is that which is both strict and loving and denies that’s a particularly conservative slant. It’s a practice that works on both sides of the political spectrum; only strict, or only loving, isn’t good for children. He encourages moving away from the ‘Children Rule’ model. He quotes a NY Times writer who predicts the next generation can “anticipate blaming their high rates of depression and anxiety on the over validation and under correction native to gentle parenting.” Haidt has drawn a direct line between the decline in liberal kids’ mental health issues and the rise of social media which began around 2012. His book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness extrapolates on this. What it barely mentions, though, is perhaps the most mystifying phenomenon to arise from the Social Media Revolution: The rise of ‘trans kids’, in which a generation of children became convinced of a seemingly ludicrous idea no prior generation had entertained before: That they were ‘born in the wrong body’. The desire to be the opposite sex has manifested itself in many ways over the course of human history, but never before had anyone thought that children could ‘know’ who they really were at a very early age and need to medically transition. It seems a uniquely progressive position; conservatives largely don’t support this and you don’t find too many ‘trans children’ in conservative families. I’ve covered what I call the progressive ‘Project 2012’ , the already-underway and highly successful effort to remake America ideologically in a ‘woke’, social justice image, in contrast to the far right’s outlined ‘Project 2025’, downloadable for free . What has been overlooked is a subset contribution to this bizarre ‘trans kid’ phenomenon that’s received little attention so far: The role of permissive, progressive parenting. It’s in progressive families where young girls and women suffer the highest rates of mental distress, with liberal males not far behind, and both notably higher than conservative kids of either sex. Although females have always suffered especially from depression and anxiety, more so than males, and that’s regardless of political persuasion. The The Mental Health Of Liberal Girls Sank First And Fastest - Jonathan Haidt , After Babel Liberalism is not a mental disease as some allege, and life isn’t necessarily hunky-dory for kids in conservative families, either. Every parent brings their own quirky craziness and emotional issues to the family, not to mention biases and prejudices. Try growing up gay and conservative Christian. But it’s arguable that some liberal families, in an effort to raise tolerant, inclusive, independent kids, have allowed their unformed children too much freedom, and are afraid to exercise any sort of authority. Nor to think critically about what they hear at school, particularly after the rise of the gender-switching hucksters. The result is a growing number of of young people detransitioning, and parents grappling with the lifelong problems their formerly healthy children now face. A hard look at progressive parenting Children are treated by many progressive parents as mini-adults even as they’re sheltered and coddled and denied freedom . Haidt points to, as a major contributor to current Gen Z mental distress, the end of childhood filled with mostly unsupervised play, which is how the rest of us grew up before the rise of helicopter parents. ‘Mini-adults’, whose opinions must always be addressed and respected, in which children are asked to do things rather than told with no backtalk, is in contrast to the way my brother and I, and most kids we knew, were raised—regardless of familial political affiliation—little people with feelings, wants, desires, and certain rights, but not adults with the ability to make all our own decisions . We were, after all, still children. Not a single one of us grew up in families which would have taken seriously, “I’d rather be a boy/girl.” Likely the most liberal parents would have said, “Fine, you can get a sex change when you’re an adult.” For progressive parents today who aren’t at all happy about the kiddie transgender craze, and don’t believe their child was born in the wrong body, but dare not speak up, they’re often powerless against the authoritarian indoctrination of children in public education. Some self- and group-analysis is in order for these parents, along with—and some are not going to like hearing this—maybe examining how conservative parents raise their own kids, particularly those who are concerned their kids might go 'trans'. The genderwoo claptrap starts in school. So questions progressive parents need to ask are: How are conservative parents counteracting it? Are they sending their kids to private and charter schools? What do they say when their kid comes home and says they want to go on puberty blockers, or their pronouns are some weird collection of phonemes? Conservative parents won’t have all the answers--having come from the United States, I can testify how many people raised in political and religious conservative families created distance upon adulthood, if not necessarily estrangement. If progressive parents may be dunned for over-permissiveness, plenty of conservative families lean towards authoritarianism, which isn’t easy to grow up with, either. But not all conservative families are as authoritarian as some might imagine. Just as not all liberal families are ultra, well, anarchic. Neither type is perfect, but conservatives have a helluva lot fewer trans kids, who concomitantly report higher levels of happiness. It’s possible, as one essay points out, that liberals simply tend more toward depression than conservatives. It may not be easy to be gay, atheist, or insufficiently patriotic in a conservative family, but at least parents aren't ruining their children’s bodies with puberty prevention and cross-sex hormones, with zero knowledge as to how it will affect their fertility, sexual pleasure or lifetime happiness. Progressive parents must think more critically than many are. Sex transitioning offers children a temporary and false fix for their perfectly normal adolescent turmoil, which they’ve not been taught adequately to handle. Cheerfully counseled by garish social media influencers, children are led to believe that whatever fears, anxieties, and concerns they have, the answer is quite simple: You were born in the wrong body! Transition now, and all will be well! Except it’s not. As The Anxious Generation notes, social media is one of the primary, perhaps the primary reason liberal young people are experiencing a steep rise in mental distress. Liberal girls, he notes, spent more time in person with friends than conservative girls until the early 2000s, but after social media, that dropped below conservative children’s time. Liberal kids spend more time than conservative kids on social media, the negative mental health detriments of which are described quite thoroughly in Haidt’s book. Haidt advocates parents limit their children’s phone time to maybe an hour or two a day, but not on how to give them the backbone to do it. That would be a whole ‘nother book! Disempowering messages Social media, he notes, teaches a loss of locus of control— which describes a ‘malleable personality trait’ in which those with the locus “feel as if they have the power to choose a course of action and make it happen, while other people have an external locus of control—they have little sense of agency and they believe that strong forces or agents outside of themselves will determine what happens to them.” Sixty years of research, Haidt notes, shows that those with internal locus of control are happier and achieve more. The lie kids receive from influencer purveyors of ‘woke’ ideology, which pervades social media, is that the world is divided between good and bad people, the ‘marginalized’ are helpless and can’t do anything about it, white supremacy and patriarchy and transphobic TERFs and blah blah blah. It removes, in other words, the locus of control from children (and adults) who consume such messages. Haidt notes Tumblr’s pioneering work in disempowering a generation of kids, described in the powerful Free Press podcast series, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling , which I highly recommend. Megan Phelps-Roper interviews Rowling over the course of six podcasts. Rowling watched from the beginning as her superfan base evolved with ‘streaks of cruelty’ and ‘exclusion’ present from the beginning, and how, as other experts pointed out, exploded with Tumblr’s popularity in the early 2010s. It’s within Tumblr where the nascent ‘woke’ ideas of fragility, victimhood, language, and harm ‘evolved and mixed’. It’s where the youth trans movement was essentially born, with endlessly-generated labels applied to permutations of feelings and mere personality quirks, and a growing self-invented notion that its adherents were endlessly persecuted. And here we are today, because progressive parents seemingly don’t pay as much attention to where their kids are spending their time online. The ‘trans kids’ phenomenon is a direct result of the explosion of social media, not some weird modern evolutionary aberration. I will elaborate on that one glaring gap in Haidt’s book—the near-complete omission of the youth trans movement. It gets, literally, a brief mention on page 165 of the hardcover edition. Haidt is mystifyingly uncritical, noting, in an entire book on the impacts of social media on youth life, that social media trends ‘may’ be related in part to kiddie sex changes. He faintly parrots the woke party line, noting that ‘gender dysphoria’ has ‘long existed’ around the world, and that estimates of it may be lower because they were based on people who sought gender-reassignment surgery, which he calls ‘a vast understatement of the underlying population,’ harkening to the early movement responses to the question of where all the gender-confused kids suddenly came from: “Maybe many people always felt this way but they didn’t know what to do about it!” I have an urge to feed him a cracker. Haidt pays lip service to the idea that kids might just be ‘coming out’ in an era where the social stigma was less, and doesn’t address the political angle at all. I commented on one of his articles recently pointing his blindness out, seemingly ignorant of the horrendously toxic effects the social media-driven trans movement has had on clearly emotionally disturbed children and their families. I don’t know if he saw it but I’m fairly certain his assistant did. Family as the enemy The trans cult is every bit as powerful as the religious cults of the olden days—their heyday in the ‘60s and ‘70s. There are forces at work today greater than the parental ability to resist, and children are taught to cut off their ‘toxic’ parents for daring to challenge or question in the slightest, however respectfully. In fact, ‘estranging’ from one’s parents has become the new ‘cool’ thing to do for many children and young people of privilege, who seek the slightest excuse to blow off their parents, go off on their own, and whine about how bad they think they had it. As a writer at The Distance magazine notes, “Gender ideology treats the family as the enemy and enlists the state to enforce its edicts over families.” Liberals, far more than conservatives, have brought this on themselves by clasping the mental health-destroying disempowerment messages to their bosom. Perhaps what progressive parents face with a kid with alternative pronouns, dodgy new friends and a cheerleader teacher, is not an overhaul of their parenting skills, but a course correction , with help from right of center, non-overly-authoritarian conservative parents, rebuking the false notion that children are ‘little adults’ or that putting your foot down and uttering the forbidden word ‘No’ makes one Mommy or Daddy Dearest. Conservative parents who believe more in strictness than loving could learn a few things too. Remember: It’s a balance, strictness and living, and it’s not a woke-style either-or choice. 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! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

Some males set themselves up for failure by linking their sense of manhood to how much they're not like half the human race Public domain image from Pexels Several years ago I read a book about female aviators and their campaigns to fly otherwise male-dominated planes and later, into space. I can’t remember the title, but the stickiest lesson came from a NASA official who admitted that, after endless obstacles, obfuscations, hurdles, and silly excuses to keep space capsules Kotex-free, the resistance boiled down to this: Astronauts were American heroes who had brought pride to the United States and were everyone’s idea of brave, strong, capable men. The best of the best of the best. While several aviatrixes had clearly demonstrated they could handle space travel, well, frankly… ….If we let women into space, how hard had it been, really, if even a girl could do it? Boys and men, for millennia, have defined their manhood with a pink floral ruler: I am more masculine if I am less feminine. The core tenet is that girls are stupider and weaker than boys, so if a girl can do it, it’s not that hard. To prove you’re a man, do something they can’t do. Girls will be boys American chickie-boos had to wait until 1983 to be permitted a rocket ride more fulfilling than that offered by KISS ’s Gene Simmons. Sally Ride’s came courtesy of Second Wave feminism. Women had redefined themselves as capable and competent, and were proving that females had always had the capacity to be so, it was only until now that they had the freedom. Feminists distanced themselves from fragile flowerdom with the only role models they had: Men. Really, where else could they look? We live on a sexually dimorphic planet. Before Second Wave feminism, women defined themselves by traditional feminine characteristics, but its purpose was to not threaten men, whose reaction to emerging women’s suffrage went about as well as telling the Incredible Hulk No. They were forever reassuring men, who still hadn’t gotten over having to give coloreds!!! voting rights, that they weren’t a bunch of man-hating lesbians. Decades later, women mirrored power in the workplace by dressing like men, not carrying purses, and adopting male sports and military metaphors. Another few decades later, with growing power and a greater presence everywhere, women feel more comfortable redefining themselves and lightening up on the dude-y stuff. Women aren’t using men as their single competency and comportment gauge as much anymore. Especially in the wake of countless financial scandals, pointless wars, and a never-ending stream of sexual imbroglios, all male-dominated. But however much women emulated the accoutrements of male power, women’s conception of themselves was never, and has never been, based in some inherent The less like a man I am, the more of a Real Woman I am. ‘Feminization’ The angry ‘manosphere’ and the rank hatred of transactivists against women who dare to defy them are rooted in a widespread sentiment that the world has become too ‘feminized’. When women invade a formerly male dominion, the males flee. It’s like ‘70s ‘white flight’ when a black family moved into your ‘hood— There goes the neighborhood! Better sell the house before its worth drops to the price of a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken! Teaching and nursing used to be all-male professions. So was insurance sales. And advertising sales (Good morning, Dawn Draper 2024!). Compliance officers too, ironically—I guess women are now better at forcing compliance than being compliant. Who else better to crack the whip over conniving hedge fund managers and sleazy CEOs than Yo Mama? Higher education was all-male until forced otherwise by the U.S. Supreme Court. In the ‘60s and ‘70s males dominated college campuses and manfully led the protests. Today women comprise 60% of college students, and lead the ongoing protests against—the continued existence of Jews. (Uh….yay Catherine Elizabeth Benson Brewer ?) Males are fleeing academia. Celeste Davis notes in her article, Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? , the ratio of males to females has dropped from 2:1 in the 1950s, 1:1 by the ‘90s, and now it’s at 4:6. If even a girl can design a tower or splice a gene, how hard can it be? There are other good reasons males may not be seeking college diplomas, like daunting decades-long post-grad student debt, the ridiculous degree requirements for jobs that really shouldn’t require even one, not to mention the danger of graduating without knowing the difference between boys and girls, or where Israel is on a map, or even how to spell Palestine . But then there’s that old deep-seated fear outed by Davis’s article: Men continuing the long tradition of moving away from formerly male preserves. Davis’s research found that the one variable it boiled down to to explain why men were increasingly staying away from college was the enrollment of women. She wrote, “For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.” How’s this going to work for men as we move into a highly technological, AI-driven, scientific future where knowledge skills and college degrees matter more than ever? Are they going to leave it all to us? Warning, guys, the robots won’t have boobs! I’ve read that one reason men love football is because it’s the one certain male domain from which women can only watch and cheer from the sidelines: Women aren’t physically capable of invading football teams, and you’ll notice that biological women identifying as men aren’t exactly beating down the locker room doors with their muscly hairy arms to bring diversity, equity and inclusion to the manliest of sports. Perhaps the goal of the female-by-identification crowd is to discourage women from bothering with competitive sports at all. If Title IX withers away from a feminine famine, because there’s no longer any point, sports becomes a manly domain again! And the federal money returns, too. Maybe, in a female-dominated world, every little boy will aspire to be a professional football player rather than a girly astronaut. The Russians sent a woman into space twenty years before the Americans. If it weren’t for the Russkies we would never have accomplished anything! By Post of the Soviet Union (“Lesegri”). - Public Domain from Wikimedia Commons. The only men that out-enroll women at this point, says Davis, is gay men. Fifty-two percent hold college educations, while only 36% of American adults do. Maybe the robots will be boob-less and have a massive, uh, ‘secret attachment’. A matriarchal world? Really? If men aren’t careful—and I say this observationally—the more they drop out, the more feminized the world will continue to become. Speaking as a confident, assertive, innovative female—I’m not down with that. Now, I can envision a world in which women can bring fresher values and priorities to female-dominated business, entertainment, and high finance. We already dominate academia. Male flight has partially enabled the unfortunate takeover of educational institutions by overly-liberal females with values and priorities almost no one is happy with. A female-dominated corporate world may well offer better parental leave and perhaps subsidized or in-office child care. Perhaps less insane working hours. Like, you know, less than thirty-five a day. Women directing more Hollywood-financed movies may introduce a little reality, like heroines who don’t wear ridiculous outfits for physical activity. That silly-ass strapless Wonder Woman teddy and chunky high heels have got to go. C’mon, man, she’s fighting Nazis! How about a little chest protection, dollface? Also kaput will be tight dresses and high heels when you’re on the run engaged in some madcap highly-contrived adventure with your equally-hot gal pals. But—a female-dominant society would also bring unintended consequences. Like reduced productivity from a desire to achieve consensus rather than making executive decisions others have to accept. Failed DEI initiatives will continue, and probably become even more discriminatory. I believe with all my heart that if dudes allow us to take over, we will completely screw it all up just as they have. I already detailed how here . When any one tribal group dominates, others, including the dominant group, suffer. Patriarchy harms men, too How’s life at the top treating men? Men today, particularly white men said to be at apex privilege, are committing suicide at four times the rate of women, and account for 79% of suicides (and women are the more depressed sex!) White men kill themselves at higher rates than black men. They’re less likely to seek mental health treatment. Um, maybe because it’s something women are more prone to do? Because women aren’t afraid to ask for help which shows you just how weak they really are? In 2022, white men accounted for nearly 16 suicides out of a population of 100,000, whereas black men only accounted for 8.6. One theory is that women and black men are better at handling stress because they lack white men’s easier way in the world. I damn not white men, or even men. I accuse ‘patriarchy’. It’s not good for men, either. It’s literally killing them. No one’s getting laid, and Elon Musk is freaking out about a birth dearth while J.D. Vance worries cats are replacing babies for childless women. (Hey, someone’s got to protect the beastie s from those ravenous immigrants!) Patriarchy encourages men to disconnect from their emotions, although I’ve recently learned they don’t actually experience emotions as strongly as women, and don’t cry as much, partly due to biological reasons. It’s not that they’re cold, unemotional robots; it’s ate least somwhat evolutionary. Consider how counterproductive it might have been for a Neolithic tribe’s survival if men felt the death of a friend or kin as keenly as women do. What if no one wanted to go on a mammoth hunt because it was ‘too dangerous’? Male aggression and unemotionalism likely evolved as a survival strategy. And it didn’t in women because it would be counterproductive to not care if your baby died, nor is much aggression required to hunt for roots, herbs, and other crucial plants for survival. Men today experience a shorter life span than women, by about 3-4 years. It might help if they had trusted friends they can talk to, but many men can’t experience deep friendships with other men when the patriarchal spectre of homosexuality looms over them. Homophobia is based in misogyny. A man who acts like a woman isn’t a ‘real man’. Gay men act like women by having sex with other men, and the worst are those who allow themselves to be penetrated. Passively accept, not actively rise to the occasion, so to speak, and pound away—like a man. Obviously, none of this pertains to all men, although if you dig deep enough, you may well find the seeds of The less I am like a woman, the more of a man I am. What I’ve observed, after forty years of active feminist living, is that women today are more free to grow in ways that are more like men, in the right ways. We don’t consider ourselves ‘less feminine’ for adopting certain aspects of masculinity. We don’t worry we might be gay if we prefer to be less girly. Women are learning to take more risks, assert themselves, start their own businesses, enter politics, and join (or ‘invade’ as the manosphere would put it) formerly male professions, held back only by one’s own lack of will, resilience, or ability to compete. I wish for men to be able to do the same. To adopt the best qualities of being a woman, feel a little bit more, even if they never cry much. Recognize, as some already have, that there’s deep emotional satisfaction in bonding with one’s children, taking care of them, and helping to raise them. That allowing themselves to feel more emotion doesn’t make them girly, but human. Have we not just learned that women are fuller human beings when they don’t restrict themselves to passive gender-based conduct and personal goals? Emulating the best things about being a man has made us richer, fuller human beings. Those men who eschew women, who hide, cringing in the ‘manosphere’ from the other half of the human race, will never grow or achieve their full potentiality. What men have got to work on is this insane notion that half the human race is less than themselves. That anything a girl can do isn’t worth doing, even after men have claimed the initial laurels. Maybe there will never be ‘equity’ in STEM if males tend to be overall better suited to those professions, but if more girls with the aptitude like foremother science chicks Hedy Lamarr, Marie Curie, the ‘Hidden Figures’ ladies, Elizabeth Blackwell and Jane Goodall are encouraged to enter where their talents are best suited, that’s best for everyone. If men can work besides the men of color their fathers and grandfathers despised, they can make the jump to recognizing that females have turned out to be every bit as capable as these men who were once considered ‘inferiors’ and too stupid to educate. Those men who still cling desperately to their pink floral yardstick marginalize themselves. Andrew Tate looks like a winner only to those fellow losers who haven’t managed to amass, legally and illegally, as much money as he. Thirty-plus Bugazis for a man who can only drive one at a time looks impressive only to those who measure manhood by penis size, whether by nature or credit card. If there’s one thing that hasn’t changed over millennia, it’s that many men don’t like women no matter how competent and capable they are, or how compliant and non-threatening. They hate us for being weak, but they hate our strength, too. We can’t win for losing. Patriarchy harms everyone, and I hope men will soon return to the halls of higher education. Fifty years ago male-led campus unrest protested an unjust war getting American men and innocent foreign citizens killed. Today female-led protests support filthy terrorist groups and chant for the obliteration of another group of people. Matriarchy sucks too. Trust me on this, guys. I’m a woman. I know. Masculinism 2.0: What Would A Positive, Healthy New Men’s Movement Look Like? What Greta Thunberg Teaches Us About How To Handle Small Dick Energy How Can Men Tell Their Stories And Challenge Toxic Feminism? 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! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

"He scared the living daylights out of everybody." The woke left damns Daniel Penny for trying to save others from a clearly disturbed black man. Would they laud him if the colors were reversed? Image by George Hodan on PublicDomainImages ‘The system’ unquestionably failed Jordan Neely. The clearly mentally disturbed Michael Jackson impersonator with a lengthy rap sheet shouldn’t have been on the New York City subway that fateful May afternoon. Or anywhere else. He needed to be off the streets. He had the right to live, but others have the right to ride the subway without fear for their lives. A black man went crazy on the F Train, a white man intervened, and America instantaneously transformed into a nation of mind-readers who knew exactly what the white man, Daniel Penny, was thinking as he brought Jordan Neely down in a chokehold reminiscent of George Floyd nearly five years ago. Except Penny used his arm rather than his knee. And it was all, like, white supremacy. Thus spoke social media and later, the prosecution. I don’t know if anyone on site took a poll of the political views of the people who were in the subway car at the time, but the ones who spoke to the media were 100% clearly afraid of Neely, regardless of their race. Maybe you have to have been in a situation like that to understand how non-partisan people can become when some lunatic is threatening them. Due process is for wussies I’ve been riding the Toronto subway for twenty years and the scary encounters I’ve had—none directed at me—compel me to empathize with the commuters on that hellish day, in a city with many times more mentally unbalanced people. The Toronto Transit Commission system has become a more perilous journey than when I first moved here. I only remember a handful of crazies terrifying the passengers. Like, four racist (non-white) ranters, none of which resulted in violence, thankfully. Just some intimidation, aggressive language about ‘white POS’s’, and man-spreading displays. I remember a couple of wild-eyed young people, clearly strung out, huddled together against the subway doors, uttering random, unfocused threats. I got off at the next stop and ran to the next car. They were white, in case you were wondering. When someone acts up I don’t make eye contact. I pretend to read the book I was reading a moment ago. I plan how I’ll react and what I’ll say if he directs his anger at me. I remember a Buddhist story I read about an observed violent man neutralized by a kindly older man who responded to his aggression with kindness and friendliness. I guess Daniel Penny didn’t read that book. I’m not sure he’d have remembered it if he had. Marines are trained to handle trouble their own way and their job is to neutralize the threat by reacting first and thinking later, unlike us civvies pondering what we’ll say and do if the miscreant turns on us. Military recruits are trained to perform many different threat situations over and over until their body reacts before their brain stops them. My scariest encounter was a few years ago on the bus when a man directed his aggression at a woman sitting behind me and higher up. I don’t know why he picked her out but he got right in her face and directly threatened her. The terrified, high-pitched answers she gave clearly indicated she was scared. Fortunately, he didn’t hurt anyone. Toronto, like most large cities, has gone a bit mad since the pandemic. I’m always aware. I keep a small can of hair spray in my purse, and my Mighty Keychain O’ Death close at hand. TTC passengers and drivers have been shot, assaulted, and slashed. A woman was set on fire by some out-of-it dude rather a lot like that poor homeless soul brutally burnt alive in, you guessed it, NYC just before Christmas. Consider all the preposterous action movies Americans consume, where we cheer on caricature heroes taking down the bad guys on their own and never suffering the consequences of their egregiously criminal behavior. No need to involve the law; the bleeding hearts will just let Serial Pedo-Ax Rapist go because he was diaper-trained too soon, and Stallone or Schwartzy or Van Dammit will ride off into the bright morning with his new lady love on the back of his motorcycle, because the law absolutely won’t arrest him for hanging a bad guy suspected of several murders , but never given due process, who the renegade hangs on a giant iron hook in a factory and then pushes into a furnace. Due process is for liberal wussies, yet the American moral compass spins like it’s atop a magnetite quarry when confronted with real life ‘good guy/bad guy’ scenarios. Armchair critics Penny was found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide and absolutely needed to go to trial. It’s what happens when you kill someone, however accidentally. Of course, for the armchair critics whose critical theory has already taught them everything they need to know about life, L’Affaire Neely/Penny was a cinch to parse. Penny is white. Neely was black. So of course it was Strange Fruit. I wonder how many of those riders celebrated Christmas last month thanks to Penny. His chokehold was ruled the cause of Neely’s death, the prosecution portraying it as a racial killing, and the defense as protection of others. Social media, of course, didn’t bother waiting for actual facts. As the trial progressed, one Black Lives Matter activist threatened riots if Penny was acquitted, which he was. The riots never materialized, but Americans do believe if they don’t like the way democracy or justice works, they can throw destructive collective world-class tantrums. The left did it during the Burning of Minneapolis and the right did it several months later when their boy lost the election. Yet it’s clear from the videos of Penny’s six-minute hold on Neely that the passengers held hostage believed Neely was a threat. He was on a NYC Top 50 list of homeless people in most desperate need of help. He’d been been arrested forty-two times, and had attacked other subway riders before, including a 67-year-old woman. He was depressed and schizophrenic. He needed serious help, and I understand the left’s sympathy for him. But only lounge-chair liberals can afford to damn Penny when, if any of them had been on that Subway Ride From Hell, might have sat back clutching their chests with relief at the sight of Penny holding down the threat. "He scared the living daylights out of everybody,” is how one woman described Neely. Privileged white and Black Lives Matter social critics, both programmed to arbitrate guilt by virtue of skin color the way an extra finger or third nipple once evidenced witchcraft, took to social media to jump on Penny for ‘murdering’ a black man, while pretending he wasn’t a threat. Or that he’d have been just as terrifying if he was white. Damning Daniel Penny is a luxury belief that will never impact those who never ride public transit. Americans endlessly carp about skyrocketing crime, and police and justice officials who do nothing, but then hyperventilate when someone steps forward to defend others. I’ve mentally rehearsed what I’d do if someone on the TTC was in real danger. I’d like to think I would try and do something. Maybe jump the guy or whack him with my keychain. Maybe I’d just sit there pissing my pants. Unless he was in my face. I might try Buddhism. I might try kindness and compassion. Or I might shoot hair spray into his face, which won’t permanently harm his eyes or choke him to death. It will likely get me arrested. But I won’t be dead. What his childhood was like or what bad breaks he got will be irrelevant when it’s life vs death, me vs the saber-toothed tiger or the hostile tribesman from a neighboring cave. If you possess a basic understanding of human survival, the Daniel Penny case, with no evidence of membership in a white supremacist organization or angry screeds against black people somewhere on a blog, was pretty clear-cut. Whatever his story, no one present disagreed with the narrative that Neely was terrifying. The jury agreed. Contrast it, then, to the social media treatment of Luigi Mangione, a more photogenic hero than the curly-haired, angular-looking, thin-lipped Daniel Penny, who does look like an extra in Black Klansman . Mangione, whose darker Mediterranean looks play more into the social justice image of the dusky-skinned Hero taking down The Man, especially those then-terrorist eyebrows that must make Columbia University hearts skip a beat, is worshipped and lusted after for murdering a rich, privileged white man in an industry highly unpopular with most Americans, who neither attacked nor threatened others, but simply walked to an investors meeting. Oh, Brian Thompson was evil because of denied coverage and ionospheric healthcare costs and little babies dying of leukemia? Well then, Jordan Neely deserved what he got because he had spent his life committing crimes, assaulting old ladies and threatened to kill someone on his last day. Right? The woke left luv Luigi, also, because he killed someone they can’t stand. They hate Daniel Penny because he killed a black man, infallibly an angel because, black. The woke right hates both victims. Jordan Neely deserves our compassion. He shouldn’t have died the way he did, and the failure is shared by us all. The problem of the mentally unwell and homeless goes far beyond anything we can comprehend. Maybe the City of New York should have invested more in mental health care, but how do you get people who can’t be forced to avail themselves of it? How about the parents who raise children they never wanted, who fail to provide love and support they may themselves not understand? If Americans had the collective moral understanding of a five-year-old, they wouldn’t damn Daniel Penny, average-looking white guy, but instead a full-of-himself self-important kid who looks like he belongs on Survivor. Penny said something on Fox News that really resonated, something I might think about if I’m in Penny’s position some day. Would he, Jeanine Piro asked him, do the same thing if faced with a similar situation one day? To which Penny replied, emotionally, “Yah. Totally. I would not be able to live with myself if I didn’t do anything in that situation and someone got hurt. I would feel guilty for the rest of my life.” The few times I’ve come close to death I’ve thought, “This will kill Mom if I die!” But both my parents are gone now. Knowing what I know—how violent some people are on the TTC, or on the street, where a homeless guy here was murdered by eight teenage girls a few years ago, that few if any people will try and help. I’m 61 and I want to think I would help. If I died, I might save a probably younger person attacked, and I’d feel like the world’s biggest chickens—t if I didn’t do anything when maybe I could have (although, not taking on a six-foot-four dude with a knife). It might be worth it knowing I could face my Maker saying, “I failed, but I really tried.” Then again, I might go down cringing and mewling like a dying kitten drowning in my own blood. You never know what you will do in a fight for your life until and unless you’re there. I hope I never find out. I hope you don’t either. But I hope there’s a Daniel Penny there to help. Because I will fight for him in court, and damn the next media hottie Death Wish wannabe action hero. 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! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

A DEI reboot could more consciously train women to be proactive and assertive, and handle conflicts like powerful adults, not just focus on male behavior With Girl Power comes personal responsibility. From Rawpixel Criminy, I didn’t even scratch the surface of what DEI could accomplish with my recent article, Why DEI Is Still A Good Idea. I almost want to take it down after brainstorming with my new creative partner, Radical Radha at Radically Pragmatic. I wasn’t thinking outside the box when I wrote it. When you’ve been locked in a ‘social justice’ prison for what, like twelve years?—you can’t see the sunlit field beyond the trees. But, I did suggest diversity of thought, at least, which DEI sorely needs. But what Radha and I uncovered is that it’s about the people and the workplace exclusion problems that DEI has thus far not identified, or flat-out ignored because of too much, rather than the right amount of focus on biology—skin color, sex, ethnicity, etc. Radha and I are collaborating on a couple of articles exploring in meatier detail how DEI can become a real force for good. This article focuses more on improved DEI for males and females, and Radha is handling racial and ethnic challenges. I haven’t yet been organizationally worked over like a Mafia snitch for being white, but I haven’t worked in an office in nearly six years. To misquote jazz vocalist Dinah Washington, What a diff’rence a second perspective makes! Cleanse DEI of harmful assumptions about lack of female agency DEI is hailed as the ‘fix’ for ‘systemic’ bigotry and the unfortunate natural human tendency toward ‘othering’, but in a stunning revelation last November, the New York Times and Bloomberg News shelved a groundbreaking study that shed a very negative light on DEI, to which more than half of Americans have been subjected. The study found that the psychological impacts of DEI training were overwhelmingly negative—that certain practices “could induce hostility, increase authoritarian tendencies, and foster agreement with extreme rhetoric.” It also found that ‘anti-oppressive’ rhetoric actually increased it in participants, finding “consistently amplified perceptions of bias where none existed. Participants were more likely to see prejudice in neutral scenarios and to support punitive actions against imagined offenders.” It increased ‘hostility’ and ‘punitive tendencies’ by double digits across several measures. The study addressed antiracism DEI, but it sounds exactly like what’s been happening with male/female work relations, too. DEI encourages ‘authoritarian attitudes’ and ‘coercion and control’. Racial and sex discrimination and prejudice share many similarities. DEI’s sex focus has historically targeted male power—tunnel-visioned on men’s responsibility toward women, whether managerial or not. Its obsession with ‘white male privilege’, the COVID-19 of the social justice world, demonizes them for a birth circumstance while consistently ignoring the clear benefits for those with far more relevant ‘wealth privilege’, and its symbiotic twin ‘education privilege’. Both are greater predictors of success in life than skin color or genitals. You don’t need wealth to acquire a college education, including an elite one, but it certainly helps, and the better your education, the more wealth opportunities become available. DEI initiatives single-mindedly counsel (still mostly) male executives to help women get ahead, succeed, and get promoted, assuming women aren’t because of ‘systemic sexism’ and ‘misogyny’. It tacitly ignores female agency and the responsibility women have for themselves. It encourages female self-infantilization, applying the social justice principle that ‘oppressed’, ‘marginalized’ people are helpless in the face of overwhelming ‘oppressor’ power, so it’s the job of DEI to cajole those at the top to be magnanimous and give someone ‘marginalized’ a leg up. It’s a laudable goal, and we don’t argue people in power shouldn’t pay more attention to making sure people aren’t overlooked because of unconscious bias. But it’s not the only restraint. Better DEI would address or at least recognize other reasons why women fall behind—like prioritizing family over career, or being unable to keep up with job demands. Or, and this is a big one, Imposter Syndrome. A researcher at Harvard Business School found that women are far less likely to apply for their dream job if they don’t have 100% of the job skills listed, whereas men will jump at it even if they only have 60% of them. Women also shy away from positions more stereotypically held by men, such as managerial or analytical roles. Someone needs to survey HR and hiring managers about the difficulty of recruiting women into levels and departments that need that diversity. It’s quite possible DEI needs to teach more female empowerment—to females. Or that many women may be forgoing the career success men customarily pursue because they’ve learned they can’t, in fact, ‘have it all’. At least not to the extent Hollywood depicts. That’s a work/life balance policy that may have to change. Social justice-ridden DEI discourages asking questions outside the narrative, which centers around what men need to do for women, much like race-focused DEI demands from white managers. There’s a suggested passivity for women drawn from the social justice school of feminism that regards all women as victims of ‘patriarchy’ and all men as misogynists to one degree or another. Misogyny and sexism persistently exist, of course, as exemplified by the public CEO or business executive du jour forced to resign ‘to spend more time with his family’ because of some allegation of subpar dick control. Unconscious bias is real too, but so are the aforementioned female values and sometimes self-limiting beliefs. It’s not that women are necessarily being passed over because on some level of the male brain—‘ giiiiiiirlllll!’— but because they’re simply not applying. Women possess an enduring confidence problem, clearly. This is where DEI can focus more effectively. When women fail to pepper the C-suite, male executives are blamed for not doing enough. Countless articles detail male frustration with DEI initiatives focused on what a lousy job they’re supposedly doing, how it’s their responsibility to hire more qualified women, when they’re trying but they can’t always cajole them on board. Others feel, or receive in employee feedback, the widespread feeling among male employees that DEI sex equity is a zero-sum game, in which a woman who wins means a man loses (as opposed to, say, a man who doesn’t get the job because another man did?). Or that the people being hired aren’t the most skilled, and it shows. DEI, some critics claim, stands for Didn’t Earn It. That’s not always accurate. Women’s workplace responsibility Every woman in an office raises male fears—and the real possibility—that a male employee may get accused of something he didn’t know he was doing—sexual harassment, or a ‘microaggression’. Greater female inclusiveness can mean a litany of complaints to the HR manager about alleged male predations, transgressions, and ‘microaggressions’. Operating on the non-social-justice assumption that women are full adults with their own agency and responsibilities, DEI can smooth workplace relations by teaching women, as well as men, how to handle workplace conflicts, assuming equal responsibility for both. Many workplaces hold sexual harassment training workshops, to teach men how not to act with women, and women to respond a certain way if they do. Not so much, the woman’s responsibility for her own behavior, words and actions, and whether minor issues can be resolved between the two disputants. Where a new and improved DEI could serve to clear the path for a smoother workplace experience is to teach women to be politely assertive and to consider whether she needs to subject the alleged offender to potential embarrassment in front of an HR manager, or something that could wind up in a report on his record. It’s terrifying to confront a male colleague about a comment or behavior you found inappropriate, not knowing how he might react. But men have good reason to fear female overreactions too. Years ago I worked in an office where a male colleague conducted live seminars for businesspeople, in conjunction with a facilities-providing business partner. During one seminar, one of the business partner’s female colleagues was assisting in the presentation, and Bob said, intending it as a joke, “Can you please change the next slide, Vanna ?” The colleague didn’t appreciate his comment or find it funny. She felt professionally diminished. Whether we agree with her assessment is beside the point; I took issue with how she handled the problem, rather than whether she was right to feel that way. Everyone’s experience is different, and we are all individuals. I wouldn’t have felt diminished, but that’s just me. This woman raised a holy fuss. She went back to the office and screamed to the boss about Bob’s comment. The boss then called our office and screamed at Bob’s boss about what happened. Our managers now had to repair a relationship with our business partner because our male employee had been accused of offending a female employee. It didn’t have to go that far. It was an offhand comment, meant in humor that landed the wrong way with the female colleague and perhaps with seminar attendees as well. In retrospect, he clearly shouldn’t have said it. But it was a comment, not even an overtly sexual one. It wasn’t a rape at an office Christmas party. On the scale of male workplace offenses against females, this one rates pretty low. Image by Gerd Altman from Pixabay What if she’d been trained to handle minor problems on her own? What if she’d called Bob, explained she wasn’t happy about his embarrassing comment but she wanted to address it with him personally, because she didn’t believe in creating unnecessary drama for him because she doesn’t want to hurt his career? This approach would have first offered him a reason to not get mad and also to listen to her, hopefully more openly, because she’d shown him professional respect by stating up front she didn’t want to create problems for him at the office? If Bob had handled it poorly from there, then it might have been necessary to escalate. But even still, she could have kept it in perspective, with less emotional drama, like, you know, a stereotypical woman, and not damaged the business relationship so much. And you know what? I had my own separate problem with Bob, and I went to our manager first, and guess what: He told me to attempt to work it out with Bob. And I did. And we did. It’s time for DEI to address how male and female colleagues can address grievances with each other first, in a prescribed manner, with guidelines on how to address the complaint, and how to react to criticism. Related: The ‘Sheila Agreement’ - How To Handle Conflict Like Big Girls (And Boys) This would apply both ways; women can be klutzy and inappropriate too, and sexually harass; men have a right to expect professional behavior and communication too. The purpose would be to impress upon both parties that it’s best for them to resolve their grievance with the other like adults rather than running to HR. The alleged offender can agree or disagree with how the other party took the comment or action, but should then be on personal notice that it’s best not to repeat that action or comment again, because continuing harassment or offense is a better reason to escalate. A fairer, more professional workplace requires everyone to accommodate a little more, not just men. For women who aren’t very assertive, it will push them more, perhaps make them more inclined, eventually, to apply for jobs and promotions they can handle, whether they tick off every skill on the hiring manager’s fantasy list or not. Improved DEI can equalize women’s responsibility toward their behavior and treatment of their male associates and encourage both to attempt to resolve their differences personally. And men will feel less threatened by the potential for female theatrics. How to fix this Get rid of harmful, toxic, social justice ideology—the simplistic view of biology-based oppression dynamics that don’t apply in First World democracies or the notion that only ‘oppressors’ need to ‘do the work’ and challenge their biases. All humans are biased, and everyone needs to ‘do the work’. Assume that all workshop participants are adults who need to understand issues from another’s perspective and attempt to be less judgemental and quick to jump to the wrong conclusion. That both sexes bear personal responsibility for themselves and to address grievances with the opposite sex first with professional respect and then with a calm explanation of the grievance. The grievance receiver needs to listen, and whether s/he agrees with the offense or not, agrees at least not to repeat it. Cover bias for both sexes. Emphasize not making assumptions; not letting minor aggravations build up toward a big emotional blowup. Ditching social justice ideology and embracing a more mature, more inclusive view that everyone is a grownup who perhaps needs to better understand how the opposite sex views them and their behavior would create a more comfortable work environment, teach employees more effective conflict management skills, and assume equal responsibility for both sexes, even in a power hierarchy. And maybe women will apply for leadership positions more. The Mixed Messages Of The Sexy Workplace Women And Power: Would We Be As Good At Running The World As We Think? I Confronted My Sexually Harassing Boss And I Won 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! There are also Substack and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

Putting men first has failed for women over and over again, and tradwifery remakes those same mistakes. But so has feminism. Where's the happy medium? The tradwives of 1975’s The Stepford Wives. That’s Ginger Grant (Tina Louise) from Gilligan’s Island over Katherine Ross’s right shoulder, and Mason Reese’s face (remember him?) on the shopping cart. And oh yes, the gloves! A throwback to the fashion of the Sixties. I never went to church without my gloves! And my mother had a ton of those Church Hats. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 photo by James Vaughan on Flickr Modern-day feminism is still such an adolescent girl, forever trying on new roles and identities, seeking the one that works. She tries on her mom’s clothes. Then her sister’s. Then maybe her brother’s. She twists in the mirror, dissatisfied today with a look she’s adored for months. But it doesn’t work now and she’s looking for something new. What do boys think? Does it matter what boys think? Of course it matters what boys think! But it doesn’t! It matters more what girls think! It’s— What no one tells you when you’re young—because even your parents aren’t really old enough to understand this themselves—is that what doesn’t work and hasn’t several times over just doesn’t friggin’ work. Capiche? When I was young, I wasn’t much interested in marriage or children. I decided I’d rather play the field with my wandering eye. Later, when I wanted to settle down (but not breed), marriage was falling out of favor. So was not breeding. Where were all the men women complained about who didn’t want children? Could you give me some phone numbers? Today, romance is dead, pornography glorifies violence against women in a way Larry Flynt only ever flirted with, everyone is glued to their phones with loneliness, and young people aren’t even having sex. Ergo, ‘traditional marriage’ is making a comeback. Fifteen years ago, whiny and perennially victimized ‘feminist’ Jessica Valenti, still living in 1965, worried her pretty little head over America’s ‘obsession’ with female sexual attractiveness and purity in The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women. Which makes me wonder what her social circle looks like because I’m not sure if I even know any virgins, but if I do, they’re probably under thirty. Now women are trying to figure out what went so hideously wrong. Conservatives blame feminism. Religious folk blame a turn away from God. Feminists blame unevolved men, conservatives, and religionistas clinging to their sacred privilege and patriarchy. Others blame the Internet, social media algorithms, ubiquitous phones, the pandemic, divisive politics and Zoom. I think there’s a whole lot of right in all of it. Here come the ‘tradwives’ with the usual liberal hand-wringing over Creeping Conservatism and a dialing-back of women’s rights. This too, again, Brute? Periodically, human society regresses when the world becomes too crazy to understand. Maybe things were better ‘back then’, with rose-colored reverse hindsight. Remember when things were easier? And they were. Sometimes. Today, other things are easier. Like being skilled enough and financially stable enough to escape a bad and/or abusive marriage. I can’t completely blame some women for wondering whether perhaps fulfillment comes from letting someone else make the decisions. For committing themselves to home and hearth, to raising new human beings. I actually respect and appreciate people who accept that awesome responsibility. Every human life truly is precious. In my perfect world, only people who really wanted kids and had put a lot of thought into it would make new humans. No one would be forced to squeeze out a human life they never wanted, which wouldn’t happen if we had lots of cheap, reliable ways to prevent conception. But still. Here we go with this shit again. The magic recipe Sixty years into yer grandma’s feminism, we’re re-examining the free love world the hippie counterculture wrought. In hindsight, it may not have been as good for women as it initially looked. Or maybe it was a good idea, but got waylaid and sideswiped by technology, and male sexual interests (as always). In 2024, women dominate college campuses and populate corporate boardrooms. Men have lost some ground in these areas, and it’s not all feminism’s fault. Many men have fallen down and refused to get up. To try harder. Study harder. Do we need affirmative action for underachieving men now? The Feminine Mystique described the malaise the so-called Happy Housewife felt, even as she guiltily thought she shouldn’t. Why did the neighbourhood kaffeeklatsching include more and more vodka in the pitcher of screwdrivers as the months and years wore on? And why did they pop so many ‘Mother’s little helpers’ as they condemned Today’s Kids for indulging in hipster drugs? We still haven’t found the magic mating recipe, but we’re making progress, and both feminism and yes, the Tradwife Phenomenon will help to better refine and evolve a life we can all aspire to and live with. Because tradwifery isn’t all bad but it still re-makes some classic mistakes. I for one am grateful the Counterculture gifted me with more career opportunities than I had in 1969. I don’t feel I chose wrongly. I regret not being able to find a man I could be happily childless with, nor today a man whose life isn’t over. Regrets, Oy’ve ‘ad a few-ah! All things considered, I haven’t had a bad life, and I’ve begun keeping a mental list I call The Best Stories Of Anyone In The Nursing Home, to remind myself of the things I’ve done, the people I’ve met, the places I’ve been, the things I’ve experienced, the funny stories I have to tell, the things I learned how to do and the lessons I’ve learned. To remind myself I didn’t live a wasted life. All things considered, I have much to be grateful for. But romance, for me, has been largely unsuccessful, and I can’t fault Tradwives for giving conservative marriage a go again, nor do I know that it necessarily heralds the Republic of Gideon. Nothing ever remains the same. Today’s women are better educated, more confident and raised in a different time and place, but they’re opening themselves up to risks generations of women simply don’t think through: The Fifties’ Happy Homemakers were sometimes physically abused by their husbands and had no recourse to get out. Society frowned on divorce, families told her to tough it out, religious leaders told her it was God’s will she stay with her abuser, and how was she going to support three kids on her own? She couldn’t even own a credit card without her husband’s signature! And what was she going to do, stock shelves? Work the cash register? And who would take care of the kids? I suspect many of today’s Tradwives aren’t quite as helpless as all the TikTok complainers seem, but it’s never a good idea to give that much power to men. Even good men can abuse power, just as good women can do the same. I understand the desire to turn your pretty, well-toned back on the corporate rat race, as I watch the expressions of TikTok’s scrubbed women in 1956 Better Homes & Gardens- reminiscent dresses, earrings, and Mrs. Cleaver hair embracing values that sound less frighteningly right-wing and more common-sense and mature. I do not complain about my husband to anyone who will listen. I protect my husband’s heart by not broadcasting his shortcomings. Out of mutual respect we keep our disagreements and spats in the family, in public we are a united front. Divorce is not an option or threatened. There really is something about doing things the way our ancestors did. It kind of puts your heart back into this thing we call life. (Isn’t that what Martha Stewart does? Make everything from scratch?) And is making your husband a customized owl cookie such a terrible way to show him you love him? I found these expressions in a TikTok compilation about tradwives. There’s plenty in there to disagree with—too much Christian ‘submission’, especially the cringey black woman extolling these ‘virtues’ to her white husband. But maybe I’m being too political. Conservative Christians, like feminists, seek to improve upon practices, ideas, and values that clearly don’t work, but too often focus only on what we want. Conservative Christianity is patriarchal, feminism matriarchal. Tradwifery should expect more from men than it does, as feminists should from women, yet neither do. There’s a downside, of course One former tradwife never considered how much her good life in million-dollar homes rested on her marriage. She worked in the family business with money that went into her husband’s bank account—not a joint one, and she had no bank account of her own. When he divorced her 25 years later, she lived in her car and made $44/day as a teacher’s assistant. “I have no retirement, I have no savings, no education, no resume.” She wonders why she never had “a fucking backup plan.” Gee, who could have seen this coming? (Feminism, are you there? It’s me, Sister Margaret!) It’s the age-old dilemma that challenges Tradwives past and present, consensual and not: If you have no education, no skills, and no resume, you’re sentenced to low-paying jobs and no future. Or a shit marriage. You might get lucky like Nicole Brown Simpson (for awhile) and get a good settlement from your celebrity husband, or you might get nothing. It’s never a good plan to allow a man to take complete care of you and be especially aware of ‘ submission’. It gives him carte blanche to screw you if it all goes—pardon the sexist expression, ladies—tits up. Another video revealing the downside to Tradwifery warns, “You’ll never see tradwives in their forties advocating for this life.” Another warns, “A man is not a plan,” and notes that “…your finances should not depend on someone being in love with you.” Another realizes her tradwife life was dependent on how pretty she remained and good at her housewifery. Some spoke of losing their identities and ability to make decisions or even knowing what they themselves liked. When you bought toothpaste you thought of the brand your husband liked; you made the dinners your husband preferred; his identity, even his name, was yours. It reminded me of the mothers we used to make fun of when I was in the old Usenet forum alt.support .childfree; the mothers who would show up and try to turn us away from our selfish, childfree ways, or combat the child-haters (and we did have some). When you’re extolling the joys of being a mom and giving your life to raising another’s, maybe it’s not the best image to post under the address “ amysmom@aol.com .” One lady counsels wannabe Tradwives, “I think freedom and autonomy and confidence are more important than making my kids think that having a mom and dad in their home is what makes a home perfect.” So why can’t I wholeheartedly condemn the Tradwife phenomenon? I think we should take a ‘salad bar’ approach to life: Take what works and leave the rest. It may be one-sided still, but the TikTok women making a real commitment to preserving their marriage and not running for the divorce court at the first sign of minor domestic strife are a complete one-eighty from the stomach-churning, loathsome new fad for wannabe ex-non-Tradwives: Women dumping their husbands and families on a whim when they get bored with marriage and want to sleep with boy toys and travel and do all the things they didn’t do before. Not women who are escaping hellish abuse or controlling men or life in a tin shack in the Ozarks. Entitled, privileged, and deeply narcissistic young women seemingly feel their husbands aren’t human beings with feelings but mere accessories, along with the children they’d have carried around in their oversized purse like chihuahuas if they could have. This is what the social-media-induced narcissism of the modern age has wrought: Women ‘empowered’ to be exactly like a stomach-churning Mad Man of yore—one who dumps her family to trade her hubs in a for a younger model (or three) and to gallivant around without a care, leaving a familial wreck in her wake. (Fuck ‘em! Let men know what it’s like, amirite my faithful followers???) Can’t there be a happier medium somewhere? One in which the TradHusband is as beholden to cleaving unto his Tradwife as the Empowered Mom throwing herself a Divorce Party to celebrate her reclaimed single freedom? Might she rethink her position before she books the banquet room and consider the other human beings she’s destroying? Both movements demonstrate exactly how ugly and narcissistic life is when one sex or the other has so much power. Funny how TradHusbands don’t declare on TikTok their commitment to not divorce their wives when they’re more drudge-y than the girl they married. I support women’s empowerment and the ability to leave a bad marriage if she truly has to, if he doesn’t want to work on it or think it’s his God-given right to beat her into submission, whether he believes in God or not. But it’s a complete abrogation of responsibility and ‘adulting’ to just dump everyone and leave it all in your ex-husband’s lap, no different than when a man does it! Equality means women must hold themselves to the same high standards they demand of men. And to demand of men what they demand from us. What we once derisively called a ‘sperm donor’ we must apply to an equally execrable ‘egg donor’. I see some real, laudable values in the Tradwife movement, as I see them in genuinely empowered feminism. Pure Tradwifery really doesn’t work for women and never has, and updating it to include more lifetime commitment for a Tradhusband will remove the Trad from marriage and home life. But it’s not all just about me me me me me and what I want. For thousands of years that’s the world men set up for themselves, with women objectified as sex toys, wives and mothers. Her job was to perpetuate his seed and raise them so he could go off and live his life as he wanted. It sucked for women, and it still does. But the ‘empowered divorcee’ movement looks every bit as hatefully misandrist as ‘patriarchy’ looks hatefully misogynist. There’s a happy medium somewhere, but it won’t be truly ‘traditional’. Nor 100% feminist. We need to explore this ‘marriage’ of values more. 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! There are also podcasts of more recent articles there too!