Oh no! Not another Messiah! CC0 public domain Just what we need. Another bloody Messiah. The name’s Flatulous. I’m a Roman soldier in Tiberius’s army. I’m stationed here in Jerusalem. My job is to keep the Jews in line, and the gods know those people are always agitating about one damn thing or another. Pontius Pilate is forever downing Medea’s herbal remedies for his migraines. As if I don’t have my hands full dealing with the damn Philistines. So the latest thing to rile the Jews is the news that some forthcoming kid in Galilee is their prophesied Saviour. Third one this week, and it’s only Wednesday. And they’re saying he was born of a virgin. Yeah. As if. I may not be a learned man, but even I know when someone’s feeding her betrothed a major line. Anyway, I hear ol’ King Herod is absolutely ripshit. He, uh, liquidated a bunch of the Jewish boys a few years ago — that was before I joined the army — because he believed one of the prophecies. Why he picked  that prophesy   to favour I’ll never know. Cripes, if he murdered the sons who fit the profile of every Messiah divined from sheep’s entrails or reading the fires, there’d be nothing but Jewish chicks left. Look, I don’t believe in Messiahs. I was raised in a household that favoured Mars. My brothers were all soldiers, my dad Leprous was a soldier, his dad was a soldier, and his dad was too. Even my mom, though never a soldier, could kick your ass. We had a little altar in one corner of the hovel devoted to Mars. We made burnt offerings and other sweet scents in an effort to gain and keep his favour. He watched over us, too, because no one in the family died in battle except for my brother Scrofulous and that was his own damn fault for converting to that Yahweh guy when he married Rachel bat-Dinah. See what happens when you don’t keep the faith? is my kinda god. Manly and heroic and he's bangin' Aphrodite! Photo by Andrea Puggioni - Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution Generic I do my job. I’m a good soldier. I don’t rough up the Jews like some of these guys. When they get out of hand I push them back with my spear and a few times I’ve had to use my sword, but I’ve never drawn Jewish blood. I don’t believe in unnecessary violence, which is kind of weird coming from a Roman soldier, I guess. Out here in the hinterlands, our main entertainment is the Jewish priests who keep us laughing with their ridiculous laws for their people. Who could ever trust a god who forbids the eating of a good side of roast pork? The other day, three guys on camels showed up asking for directions to Bethlehem. Pretty rich and fancy guys too, all from faraway lands. They were carrying some pretty nice cargo and I offered to send a few guards with them to make sure they didn’t get waylaid en route. They turned me down. They were following this really bright star they said marked the spot of the Saviour. I asked them which Saviour and they didn’t think that was very funny. You mark my words, no one’s gonna remember this kid a year from now. Merry Christmas! 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!

The experience of 'The Bearded Lesbian' reminds us some folks really do need to transition; and how LGBTQ can fail them I began following Aaron Kimberly , ‘ The Bearded Lesbian ’, because she struck me as a genuine transgender person—someone who chose to become a man rather than stay in in her biological body, not for messed-up ‘woke’ reasons, not because she wasn’t properly raised to understand the answer to misogyny and male objectification is to fight back, rather than become a man; not because she had psychological morbidities that predisposed her to fix them with psychological snake oil; but because she seemed pretty genuinely masculine and dysphoric from an early age and didn’t outgrow it. She identified as a butch lesbian, but the It as she describes it—her inherent ‘manliness’—has always been there. Kimberly transitioned in her thirties and came to regret it. Typical of the ‘trans’ medical profession, no one warned her about the health and surgical problems that reside permanently with transitioners. Or that pro-trans websites delete unwelcome pictures of trans surgery gone horribly wrong and that surgical complication rates are woefully under-reported. She de-transitioned. Recently, Kimberly decided to de-detransition  and go back to being a male. He believes his inherent maleness—which has been with him for as long as he can remember—is due to the discovery that his ‘unrecognizable’ ovary was a mass of both ovarian and testicular tissue. Kimberly has a congenital disorder called Ovotesticular Disorder of Sex Development. As a fetus, he was exposed to testosterone at a particular time in development and which continued into early adulthood. As a result, Kimberly has always demonstrated a distinct maleness and manliness that has created much confusion and disorder throughout his life. Kimberly identifies as a butch lesbian but can’t backtrack on the changes. He looks, talks, and can only pass for a man. No one will hassle him in the men’s room, and he would for sure create chaos in the ladies’. Fortunately, he’s not the transactivist type, not that that matters much since transmen are markedly less activist and much quieter than transwomen. The only way you know Kimberly isn’t originally a male is in the way he expresses himself in his distinctly masculine voice. Kimberly is still, to a certain extent, a socialized woman between his ears. And he has no desire to harm, threaten, or intimidate women by pushing himself where he knows he will create fear. Which is how you can tell the bio boys from the bio girls. The way they think. Biology matters, and it’s real I’ve always kept in the back of my mind, as I harshly criticize the misogynist, morally bankrupt trans movement, that there may be real, biological reasons why at least some people might want to change sex. That maybe there were physical/medical reasons why they genuinely felt ‘born in the wrong body’. We know there’s a tiny fraction with various chromosomal ‘intersex’ disorders which make them more bi-sexual (as opposed to bisexual) than others. Some already 'identify’ with what appears to be their conception-determined sex and are surprised to find they’re a little less cut-and-dried as they thought. Like Caster Semenya, the South African Olympics runner who had no idea  she possessed far more testosterone than a typical woman. Aaron Kimberly appears also to be someone who didn’t know he possessed a little of the other sex’s physiology. He simply lived as he was—a very boyish girl—as authentically as he could in the 1970s and 80s when ‘trans kids’ were unheard of, and he was so super-tomboy he once accidentally, but happily, was included on a boys’ baseball team. Transition in Hindsight: Aaron Kimberly’s Story  - Genspect, 07/26/21 So biology matters. Differences in sex development, or DSDs, are, according to USA Today, “a set of rare conditions involving genes, hormones and reproductive organs that can cause the sexual development of a person to be different than others.” Two ‘female’ boxers were at the heart of an Olympics controversy this summer for allegedly testing as male rather than female, though neither identified as transgender. It points to a diversity of physiology that won’t be easily solved with a gender certificate or ‘feeling’ and raises the need for more finely differentiating how male an athlete is before that person can be permitted or barred from competing on female sports teams. Kimberly cites research by the author of a book on testosterone and its impact on girls with DSDs. Carole Hooven notes that over a hundred studies since the late 1960s of girls with a DSD called CAH (Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia), another condition which exposes female fetuses to testosterone, shows that female CAHs’ toy preferences digress from ‘typical’ girls’ preferences; they prefer to play with trucks, blocks, and prefer rougher ‘boys’ games. They don’t outgrow it; it continues into adulthood with an attraction for more traditional male roles involving things rather than the human relational professions women gravitate toward—teaching, nursing, child care, etc. It’s not all ‘socialization’ that makes us, to one degree or another, ‘gender stereotypical’, but the way our brains and physiology develop as well. Especially by still-poorly-understood DSDs. Many find it noteworthy that female-identified men, i.e., ‘transwomen’, are the most public and vocal and aggressive in their demands to be ‘accommodated’ in places previously reserved for biological women. They’re driving the trend to allow men claiming to be women to compete on women’s sports teams, where to the surprise of no one except the denialists in the woke left, they’re stealing prizes and awards from real women who simply can’t compete against biological males. Transmen? They sit quietly on the sidelines, just like, well—women. Male and female brains are more dude-y and chick-y than many want to acknowledge, and even trans people who successfully ‘pass’ as the sex they’re not, out themselves eventually. It’s the way they move, their relational communications style. Biological females simply are more sensitive to others’ moods and feelings when they communicate; I say that observationally, not critically. Males are more assertive, more aggressive, and sometimes more manipulative. It’s kind of like when a woman meets a man who seems fairly dude-ish and masculine, but after a few minutes of talking to him she gets the sense he’s gay. It’s something different about him, a slightly different way he relates to women he has no romantic or sexual interest in. Straight guys, on the other hand, who aren’t attracted to a particular woman don’t usually come across as gay. The hidden caveats of ‘acceptance’ For all the lofty speeches Team Rainbow gives gender and sex, and how no one is really one thing or another and we’re all fluid and should just accept each other for our various identities, they’re remarkably uncomfortable and even a little intolerant of The Bearded Lesbian. Kimberly writes of the initially cordial online relationship he had with Holly Lawford-Smith, a New Zealand university professor and gender critical feminist. Lawford-Smith, it seems, is annoyed that Kimberly acts very much like a man sometimes and should stop. He writes of how he was asked at a women’s festival if he couldn’t girl himself up somehow (with a ‘pink bow’? So much for smashing stereotypes!) as he warned young lesbians about the regret levels in transitioning. His ‘manliness’ seems to discomfort those who need a small symbolic pacifier to remind them that Kimberly is, in fact, a biological woman. Reading of Kimberly’s struggles makes me wonder how the world could be more accommodating of people like him in the future. Could he have lived happily dude-ily female or however he felt without medical intervention in a world that truly accepts each one of us as the truly unique individuals we are? Isn’t that what LGBTQ preaches? Humans naturally gravitate toward ‘tribes’, people who are like them in one capacity or another, but what if we stopped assigning so much value to our various labels? It’s one of the greatest failings of today’s LGBTQ movement: The horrific authenticityphobia  that encapsulates the very worst of our modern hyper-competitive world. You are born not good enough.  You need to be better. You can’t be you, because ‘you’ are fundamentally imperfect. The last time I went to Toronto Pride, I felt like a quiet enemy walking among them. I used to feel quite at home with LGBTQs, despite being relentlessly heterosexual. People are what they are and as long as they’re not hurting anyone, what do I care? That changed several years ago when T and Q began harming people, especially women and children, and now they’re marginalizing gayfolk. I no longer feel comfortable around anything LGBTQ. I see pink hair, pierced eyebrows, rainbow backpacks and I’m immediately on my guard thinking, Avoid, avoid! They look like a giant pain in the ass! I can’t even know whether the cis-gay person in front of me is a ‘normie’ or someone who’s drunk the explosive woke Kool-Aid. LGBTQ has become the very face of ‘wokeness’ which is why Donald Trump chose to exemplify his opponent’s allegiance to it with, love it or hate it, one of the most highly effective and spot-on  political campaign ads we’ve ever seen. Betcha a lot of those new female Trump voters noticed how vicious, angry, hateful, misogynist transactivists vilify and abuse biological women with impunity, demonstrating what you have to do to get away with that in our so-called ‘feminist’ world. Don’t think many men aren’t donning dresses and overdone makeup for the ‘privilege’ of beating up women. If Team Rainbow could ‘do the work’  and move beyond its near-psychopathic narcissism and just chill out, we’d all be able to live and work together more harmoniously. Meeting someone like Aaron Kimberly or a non-binary wouldn’t induce stress at first sight because you know what you need to know and if you don’t, all will be revealed shortly: Kimberly is a man. And the normie non-binary, if such a person can exist, and I believe it’s possible, would be, well, non-binary. When you speak to them your pronouns are I, me  and you. No drama. I’m drawn to Aaron Kimberly’s Substack because he’s just so real, and his perspective reflects both sex experiences . He’s a dude born in a bi-sexual body who’s trying to navigate life as best he can, just like the rest of us. Most importantly, he’s sensitive to the impact he has on women, recognizing that strange men can be perceived as a threat by many women. He has no desire to make someone’s wiz more stressful by occupying the stall next to them with his convincing manliness. Kimberly makes me think  about sex and gender in more productive ways than hateful transactivists ever will and illuminates what I love about transgenderism, even though I spend more time criticizing than praising it: Genuine sex-changers have much to teach us about what it truly means to be male and female, when they’ve literally lived on both sides of the divide. I also hope women and others can come to accept Kimberly for what he is without needing to ‘girl it up’ for them. He’s a biological woman (mostly) who truly feels and believes he needs to be a man. These are the genderfluids who truly ‘slip through the cracks’, the ones who need our support and help. I’m good with that. I don’t need his pink bow. Hell, I’ll even share a bathroom with him without dragging the U.S. Supreme Court into it! ‘Coz I’d feel comfortable with him. 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!

This is your life. Now who’s going to clean that up? Relax, it's just a sculpture. CC0 2.0 photo by Guano (of course!) on Flickr) “Someone just dumped a big pile of shit on your porch. What are you going to do about it? The people who dumped it aren’t coming back to clean it up. No one else is going to clean it up for you. It’s unfair, but life isn’t fair. Are you just going to leave it there to stink and get worse, or are you going to clean it up?” I’m paraphrasing, but that’s what Ajahn Brahm, the funny, non-reverential monk and Spiritual Director of the Buddhist Society of Western Australia says about the problems, obstacles and injustices in one’s life. It makes you part of a highly non-exclusive social club. It’s called the Human Race. Which means you have to clean up your own massive mega-deuce, regardless of how much or not you contributed. Of course, as Ajahn Brahm points out, shit is critical for real growth. In fact, mud that little fishies and turtles and froggies crapped all over, maybe even some alligators depending on where you live, lies at the very core of what Buddhists believe. The lotus flower symbolizes the beauty that springs joyfully from the mud. That messy, messed-up mental muck is where the beauty of the lotus — enlightenment — lies. This is a lotus flower in mud. This is your enlightened brain on mud. Any questions? Creative Commons CC0 photo from Pxfuel It doesn’t necessarily mean sitting-under-the-bodhi-tree-while-the-kundalini-energy-shoots-up-your-spine-like-a-newly-plumbed-spigot enlightened, but more peaceful and insightful than you were before. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to do this, of course. Christians have a ‘born again’ experience, which is when you take your faith and beliefs more seriously and actively strive every day to be a better Christian. What Would Jesus Do? I don’t know what other religions call a similar enlightening experience, but I’m sure they have it even if they use a different name. Regardless of your label, once you consciously commit to becoming a better, more enlightened person, you’re confronted with a big pile of shit you may have largely ignored most of your life. Which is, your life. Nobody likes dealing with it, and feels fairly resentful because we prefer to blame everyone and everything else for it. But…you can’t spiritually grow without that life-giving shit. In fact, you waste a lot of energy railing against a cruel world that dumped it on your parietal porch because absolutely everyone who has ever lived has had to deal with their shit (or not). Even Jesus had to struggle against the Temptations of Satan in the desert and doubts about his own divinity. Buddha famously spent an entire night, according to legend, assaulted and attacked by the demon Mara while he was meditating. Mara ended by lobbing his final thermonuclear-level self-doubt Buddha bomb, “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?” Needless to say, both Masters survived the onslaught. They famously grew to be great teachers before their deaths. But both were cursed at birth with a human brain, and they couldn’t escape having to clean up their own shit. Neither can you, which is why your deity or Darwin’s biology gave you, quite conveniently, your own cortical caca from which you can grow and flourish and turn into something as lovely and sweet-smelling as the lotus. Thank God! You’re welcome. (Or just be grateful for evolutionary biological bullshit, if you’re an atheist.) Plus, we all play our part in the spirit of cooperation by generously dumping more shit on each other in the form of family dysfunction, social and economic inequality, bullying, abuse, war, crime and a wide assortment of extremely unfair conditions into which we’re born without any say in the matter whatsoever. The big Pile O’ Poo springs from different places. Some you control, some not: Your default cavecritter neuro-circuitry Your genetics Your environment and proximal humans The circumstances you were born into Mental illness (psychological disorders) Mental illness (more common — depression, anxiety, stress, maybe PTSD) “Some are born shitty, some achieve shittiness, and some have shittiness thrust upon them.” — William Shitespoor It’s not fair, but there it is: We all have shit to deal with. One reason why I like writer Ayodeji Awosika is because he reminds us over and over that life isn’t fair. That people rage against government, inequality, the machine, politicians, unfair employers, and anyone else they can blame their problems on. He acknowledges these obstacles are real; but he questions how much they have to control you. Social media certainly seems to be Ground Zero for the permanently outraged. I’m frustrated with the relentless negativity of both political sides in the United States, from whence I came, and Canada, to which I’ve come. Folks rage about a lot of real and systemic odds unfairly stacked against them, due to unfair interpretations about their biology or merely the circumstances into which they were born. Then there’s the other side, railing against having been left behind economically, a changing world they didn’t have time to keep up with, stagnating income, and getting really, really, tired of this so-called privilege others say they have which they legitimately can’t see sitting in their trailer park home with a fifth baby on the way, no health insurance and an employer that just cut their wages again. Also, very real and systemic challenges. “That is one big pile of shit.” — Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park Many writers expose us daily to the challenges they face from their own traumatic upbringing, including rape, other forms of sexual abuse, neglect, crazy religious and cultural traditions, and sometimes just poor decision-making by young people born into this world without a reliable user’s manual or effective parenting. It’s fair to differentiate who’s responsible for your shit, because blaming yourself for it all, as many do, is counterproductive and downright toxic. But…blame is the name of the game in our divided and hyper-individualistic culture where assigning it means never having to assume any responsibility. I.e., having to clean up your shit. You can debate whose fault it is, and how much you added to the shit pile, and dissect the intersectional subtle and overt institutional and systemic aggressions and microaggressions that obstruct your maximal self-potential, and you can fight this white cis-centric patriarchal power structure with protest signs and pussy hats but in the end (or out of it, ar ar)… It’s still your shit, and no one’s going to clean it up except you. Or not, as you choose. The good news is, as the Buddhist teacher Tara Brach likes to say, if you shine the light on the deepest wounds, therein you’ll find healing. Buddhist monk, poet, activist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Thich Nhat Hanh speaks of Encouragement, the second turning of the Four Noble Truths wheel. “Our suffering — depression, illness, a difficult relationship, or fear — needs to be understood and, like a doctor, we are determined to understand it. We practice sitting and walking meditation, and we ask for guidance and support from our friends and, if we have one, our teacher. As we do this, we see that the causes of our suffering are knowable, and we make every effort to get to the bottom of it.” — The Heart of the Buddha’s teaching: Transforming Suffering to Peace, Joy and Liberation He doesn’t differentiate between the pain we’re born with, or created ourselves, or which was forced upon us by others. It is our unique pain, ergo our responsibility. CC0 Public Domain by Linnaea Mallette It’s not easy, and usually pretty damn scary, and sometimes our shit is so critical we require professional help in handling it. Sometimes, it’s best not to go too deeply into the shit-wounds without a trained professional, or at least a very good friend, to accompany us. It may be hard to let go of our shit. It’s been with us all our lives; how can we live without it? Who are we if we’re not defined by our shit? What if we’re supposed to forgive those who tres-pissed against us? Are we seriously expected to just let them off the hook? Forgiveness isn’t for those who dumped a lot of that shit on you; it’s for yourself so that you no longer suffer from it. The good news, the great news, is that truly letting go of your shit, learning different coping mechanisms, perceiving the world in a different light with a less egocentric point of view, and taking life and perceived slights less personally can be marvellously healing and reduce the negative emotions and reactions that now darken your otherwise astounding life. CC0 Public domain on PXhere The reason I call myself the Crappy Buddhist is because I’ll never finish shoveling my shit, and I sure as hell will never become an enlightened kundalini-spewing spine spigot. But a couple of years ago I decided to face my anger management problem and have been actively working on becoming less triggered, correcting my Wrong Perceptions as best I can, and thinking before I speak. I’m far from perfect but I’m less easily triggered than I had been, and I recognize now which triggers to avoid and sometimes I even stop myself before an emotional hijacking kicks my tongue into high gear. I must do my Buddhist duty, dodge the fecal finger of fate (not to mention my colonoscopy-obsessed doctor), and shovel more of my own shit, but there’s room for a few lotus blossoms now. Here, take a few seeds. I want you to have some lotus blooms too. Namaste! Public domain photo by Namair on Needpix This shitty article first appeared on Medium. 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 post!

Can students even experience learning something intriguing or unexpected? Or are they only told what to think? "Just kill me now!" CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0 image by Konrad Adenauer-Gemeinschaftschaupteschule Wenden on Flicker. Say THAT five times real fast! Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning? - George W. Bush, 2000 What an incurious little dipsy-doodle I was when I entered university at the dawn of the Reagan Era. My original life plan after high school was to move back to Florida and make bad horror movies with my mother’s best friend’s daughter. But Dad said ixnay on the upidstay idea. So there I was, sitting at a long, curved classroom table at Kent State instead of sweating my ass off in a Florida swamp. It was a Sociology class. Whatever that was. It had to do with society. Or something. I avoided taking anything boring . That meant no history, hard science, classic literature, business administration, and definitely no math classes. I took Rhetoric (what was that?) instead, and Environmental Geology, which seemed less hard. I liked science but it was ruined by mediocre high school teachers, and arguably my lack of interest in any science that didn’t involve animals. Something weird happened. Sociology fascinated me. People were interesting! Who knew? It led me to Psychology. I pushed myself and took a Literature class, in which we read classics, not the pap they assign today written by some obscure mixed-recipe woke chick who can’t figure out her belly button from her heinie. My new friends and I engaged in brainier discussions than in high school, because we were all so intellectually engaged for the first time. The next semester I took Philosophy (it sucked, but I had the world’s worst prof) and speech class, along with History, because, like, why the hell not? A great prof introduced me to Voltaire and other 18th-century mavericks, from whom I embraced speaking truth to power. Dr. S taught me there was real context around history, an evolution of understanding humanity and social cohesion, and especially not remaking its mistakes. My brain became an awakening octopus, unfurled, stretching its langorous tentacles in pursuit of a greater world that six months prior had contained mostly me. My octopus embraced a plethora of interesting people, places, times, books, and most importantly, ideas. I finished my freshman year with a bad case of intellectual snobbery, arguing with my mother that you can never really know something, and how can you truly know it when—I forget what the epistemological argument was but Philosophy was useful for something, primarily annoying my mother. I remember the sheer dopamine rush of becoming engrossed in a book I’d thought I wouldn’t like and reminding myself I had to stop as I had other homework. I checked out additional reading, spurred by new interests provoked in class. I posted my favorite Voltaire story over my typewriter because it was just so damn badass. Science no longer needed to provide cute furry things to hold my interest; I became engrossed in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series, which Dad and I watched together on Sunday nights. I devoured science fiction and looked up at diamonds scattered across the night sky, pondering cosmic necklaces of other worlds and galaxies, where the alien life was. I longed to live hundreds of years in the future, when I could travel on spaceships like the characters in Heinlein’s and Asimov’s books. My friends and I cracked intellectual jokes, not out of pretension but via a shared inside knowledge. “I require a spoon because I have an oral fixation,” one of my fellow Psych students said in the cafeteria, and we both laughed. Creative Commons image by Pseudopanax at English Wikipedia “Teaching is dead.” Can modern college kids even experience joy? They crawl social media feeds, their curiosity reserved for strangers’ carefully curated lives. It keeps their chronic anxiety on life support, relieved by instant coolness and cred when adopting the mental health pop-identification du jour. Millennials and Zoomers suffer the worst mental health problems and demonstrate fewer social skills than we had just half a generation ago. The ones actively engaged with politics seem mostly preoccupied with pretending to give a shit about Gazans. They graduate, seemingly, several magnitudes more ignorant than they entered. Critical thought makes them feel ‘unsafe’; as in, their friends will hate them. They render the campus more dangerous for anyone daring to question whether the Renaissance was truly an orgy of privileged white male Eurocentric supremacy. They will never be introduced to Voltaire, a hated old white European dude. Maybe they’re afraid of him and his maverick buds. I know I sound like an annoying “Kids these days!” grandma and maybe I am; but students aren’t taught to think anymore. Not that my gen was a bevy of untamed original thought. Nearly forty years ago Garry Trudeau famously lampooned us Xers in a classic Doonesbury comic featuring a college professor assigning an essay on independent thought. Touché , Mr. Trudeau. We deserved that. Ultimately, we can’t blame today’s students. Blame the parents, the teachers, and out-of-control woke ‘progressives’ that regard the young as brainless little bots that must be programmed with leftist, self-defeating, mental health-reducing cultural Marxist theology to function correctly. It reminds me rather a lot of the spectre of the old Soviet Union with which I grew up. Russians and other Communist students were taught what to think, not how to think. As were, to be honest, American kids who went to conservative religious schools. Both were anti-intellectual, and I was anti-anti-intellectual. Education was power. Thinking was power. Not so anymore. Social justice constipation The most brainless, doughnut degree you can get, I suspect, is ‘social justice’. I have an ex-friend who defriended me on Facebook, I assume because he didn’t like my Substack article headlines. He had just gotten a ‘social justice’ degree. He had a brain before he went back to school to get an MBA. I helped him out. I think I proofread his application essay. Unfortunately, he minored in ‘social justice’. They turned him into another insufferable programmed wokie-bot. ‘Social justice’ wonks are like the pretentious Philosophy-major pedants I used to encounter in college. They considered themselves morally superior, they were boring as hell, and they never, ever shut up. My job was to sit there and placidly listen, but I wasn’t very good at it. Eddie would call, often late at night and ask, “Have you got a couple of minutes?” which meant, if I’d valued our friendship over sleep, two or three hours of the dreariest social justice gibberish. I poked his self-importance by challenging his silly-ass sermons. Like making fun of the pronouns obsession. He archly informed me such thinking was ‘colonization’ of others’ identity, and a marker of my white privilege (isn’t everything?). I asked if he even knew what ‘colonization’ was, because it didn’t mean what he thought it did. Then I’d chastise him for supporting ‘colonization’ of women’s identity, sports teams and private spaces by men in dresses. That’s typical misogynist thought, I informed him. When he blathered about American white privilege I reminded him that he hailed from the original imperialist, cultural oppressors, the Chinese civilization, the oldest in the world. “Yes, I know but—” He wanted to talk about white privilege, not the Chinese conquest, colonization and subjugation of large swathes of Asia during the Han and Tang dynasties. Another ‘social justice’ friend got mad because I wasn’t convinced George Zimmerman had muttered the N-word just before he shot Trayvon Martin. Later he got peeved when I failed to insufficiently condemn the Canadian broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi who was only fifteen minutes into being accused of physically assaulting dates. (Evidence? SJWs don’t need no stinkin’ evidence!) He defriended me too. It wasn’t as painful as he’d hoped. He was another one for calling for ‘just a few minutes’ and regurgitating a dog’s breakfast of woke balderdash. Like, he didn’t even stop to breathe! It won’t kill kids to read The Great Gatsby College kids have always been intolerant of ideas they don’t like. Hippie protesters shut down classes in the 1960s and 1970s. But they still got to talk, debate, disagree, get mad, and no one ever lost a career for saying something someone else didn’t like, even if they supported something unpopular like the Vietnam War. Just like we expostulated at Kent State twenty years later. Today KSU ranks 44 on FIRE’s 2024 College Free Speech Ranking s, ‘slightly above average’. Uh, yay? Students miss out on some of the greatest literature and art ever produced because of racist, misandrist hatred of anything white and male, replaced with culture created by ‘marginalized’ people whose experiences don’t resonate as universally as do the Old Dead White Dudes’. We need to learn those stories of genuine marginalization, but when one is preoccupied with one’s self and one’s out-group, it doesn’t leave much room for considering the greater, broader questions about humanity’s many commonalities. Group narcissism has its place, but so do the ground-breaking ideations of the educated European classes. “When assigned classics such as The Great Gatsby or To Kill a Mockingbird , both of which are set in the early to mid-1900s, students often find the text difficult to comprehend as they are written in a language and style that’s much different than what most teens are accustomed to,” writes Tisyah Singh, online editor for a high school student newspaper. Cripes, girlfriend, Harper Lee isn’t Chaucer! Singh gets points for writing a more cogent essay than many of her classmates probably could, but demonstrates why assigned reading is important. Neither novel is lengthy, and easy to read with a little historical context to illuminate the times in which they’re set. Both novels address themes of interest to today’s students: Gatsby handles the American Dream, capitalism, white supremacy and gender role expectations. Mockingbird feeds the modern obsession with racial inequality. Push yourself a little, Tisyah! Students might find they actually enjoy required reading. If not now, then later. Fahrenheit 451 reads relevantly today with both progressives and conservatives f ighting over which books to ban from schools and libraries. Read enough, and you’ll be keen to swap insights with anyone who’ll listen. Curiosity leads you down unexpected paths. My obsession with Voltaire and other Enlightenment writers led me to the works of the Founding Fathers, who were much inspired by their European contemporaries. That was how I learned what a hoot Ben Franklin was, especially his sarcastic commentary on the unpleasant treatment by Americans of the original inhabitants. Public school has always been a bit of a drudge and that used to be a selling point for college: To educate, inspire, and instill a sense of wonder and curiosity. How much can you truly learn while you’re scratching out notes from the professor’s lecture, secretly wondering why colonialism and imperialism by Africans wasn’t mentioned. Or why Indigenous bands are never asked to provide their own land use acknowledgements, since they too stole the land from others. But thou darest not ask, lest ye be called a racist and shamed into dropping the class. Moving beyond groupthink Learning is torturous when you worry more about your grade point average than whether it’s righteous to pull down statues of men erected because of amazing things they wrote and did, simply because they owned slaves at a time when everyone with wealth did, especially in slave-mad Africa. Thou shalt not ask obvious questions. How can you value knowledge when you’re constantly policing others’ speech rather than attempting to leave the world a better place than you found it, based on what you’ve learned from your own ever-stretching octopus? How can you support anything other than the fascism you claim to despise when you don’t believe in the fundamentals of democracy, free speech, free thought, racial equality, women’s rights, and children’s right to just be, as they were born? How can you know you’re on the ‘right side of history’ when you can’t even summarize the millennia-ancient history of two sides fighting over a slice of land caught between a polluted river and a sea you can’t even name, let alone spell? Kids can’t learn anything valuable when they passively consume ideological drivel, regardless of whose. Decades ago, conservative Christians figured out that getting elected to school boards was the best way to subvert education with religious dogma. Later, woke SJWs applied a similar, quite ‘successful’ strategy. I don’t know if President-Elect Trump will destroy the Department of Education or not, or whether it wil be a good thing, or not, but what North America needs is for everyone to work together to create a better education system, broader, more nuanced, that awakens the octopus in everyone. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 image license by h-e-d on Flickr Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. 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Please consider reading this and not just scrolling past. I ask you to re-embrace genuine liberalism. Purple America needs you! Yes, I'm serious! Clockwise from the top left: Photo by Petr Kratochvil at Public Domain Pictures; by Rawpixel; by Rawpixel ; the Gender Spectrum Collection I can well imagine how scary it must be to live in the United States today. The last time Trump won, I snarkily referred to it as the Ignited States, but that doesn’t feel accurate when so many voters slid right, and those who didn’t vote or voted for a guaranteed loser third party candidate are still trying to figure out whether they did the right thing. I understand your fear, wokefolk. I do. I felt the same fear during Bush II’s America as we embraced POW torture and I thought, “This is not the country I grew up in.” This was not the America into which I was born, the same summer in which Martin Luther King, facing the distant Washington Monument, electrified a nation. I imagine you must be thinking the same. This was not the country you were born into. You’re not alone. I felt so strongly about it at one time that I actually did move to Canada. Democracy decline wasn’t the only reason, but it was part of it. But here’s your horse pill, wokefolk. We lifelong liberals believe, along with our brothers, sisters, and occasionally crazy cousins on the right that you have completely gone off the rails. That you back insane policies that exemplify everything you claim to be fighting against: Racism , misogyny , antisemitism , colonialism, and your own ‘woke’ Project 2025 , begun around 2012. (Question for you: Was antisemitism ever part of antiracism? Seriously asking.) Wokefolk, a confession: A few days after the election, many of us felt weirdly hopeful. Just a little. And we can’t stand Trump either! But I’d think while exercising, Well he DOES say he wants to deport all the illegals, starting with the criminal element. Which happened under Harris’s watch! It would sure help with the crime problem! The sex trafficking of minors has skyrocketed in the US since 2021 - Why? - Podcast, Meghan Murphy at The Same Drugs Friends, that really really bothered me. Do you have any idea what these victims go through? Mostly underage girls, but some underage boys too? And some of legal age? Do you know what these filthy psychopaths do to these children so that sick fucks everywhere can wank off to it on YouPorn? Do you have any idea how they’re tortured and sexually abused in ways you can’t even imagine? Wokefolk, you asked us— demanded of us!—that we vote for a woman who is directly responsible for that and never addressed what she’d do to change it. In fact, she couldn’t even think of any mistakes she’d made. Not admitting one’s mistakes sounds fairly Trumpian. Has he ever publicly done so? Wokefolk, we’ve been frustrated for decades by progressive liberalism’s softness on crime and terrorism. You illiberals are the softies. Antisemitism has risen dramatically around the world not just from the Islamofascist right, but from you, who embraced it so readily. Real liberals know antisemitism is racism . It’s bigotry. Violence is not free speech. You condemn January 6th, but excuse your antisemitic Islamofascist overlords. The Middle East generates hate like it does oil. And you embrace it. You—the ‘Defund the police’ set— made excuses —for riots, for smash ‘n’ grabs, for property theft. You called it ‘distributive justice’. Trump calls it—and he’s right— criminal theft. He’s always been short on the details of how he’ll fulfill his promises, but Harris offered only Trump-worthy word salads when asked what she’ll do about, well, anything. If you look at the charts of how much the Republicans gained with men, women, the working class and almost everyone else, even gay people, it’s dark days for ‘progressives’. Only two demographic groups voted blue rather than red, those over 65 and college-educated white women. Elitist, privileged, and deeply out-of-touch white women. The rest voted for Trump. Or third parties. Or not at all. Do you know why gay people voted Republican? I do. You should ask a few. Red voters weren’t all right-wing. Or racist. Or misogynist. But you were widely perceived as being so. Please come back to us, wokefolk. We need you I’m serious. You were once liberal, too. But then you ran so far to the left as the famous meme shows, that you thought everyone else was right-wing. That’s because literally everyone is to the right of you, but many of us are still left of center. You’re not a liberal if you don’t adhere to the traditional values of liberalism. You don’t get to re-define them as you have racism, misogyny, the meaning of ‘woman’, and everything else. I state as fact rather than my personal opinion that you can’t re-define liberalism , because this election proved you couldn’t and you didn’t. Plenty of people you regard as your fellow but Bad Liberals just proved you are not in step with us liberalism-espousing liberals. You are, in fact, a very small part of the left, our yappiest chihuahuas. You arrogantly assumed your Project 2025 was a done deal. Yet you forgot that elections periodically trump (ar ar!) everyone’s ideological fantasy projects. Woke friends, your hearts are in the right place but your brains have taken an extended vacation. You are deeply out of step with Purple America. You don’t ask the obvious questions, and cancel those who do. But the jig is up. You can no longer pretend men are women and women are men because we’ve all just called you out on it. It’s, to be frank, pseudo-scientific bullshit. I’ve covered the problems with the trans movement extensively (some would say ad nauseum). You don’t support women’s rights; you support men’s rights. We liberals know it, even if you don’t. To be painfully clear, only you , the 8%, believe this. It was a huge losing issue for you. And we’re not even sure you believe your own narrative either. We, the traditional liberals who would rather make wicked fun of Trump and the MAGAs than ‘cancel’ them, because true liberals don’t believe in censorship , request that you abandon your authoritarian illiberalism and rejoin us. Even as we know Trump may actually do some positive things for America this time around, it’ll only be if he can personally gain from it, and he’ll probably FUBAR it no matter what. And everything else will be disastrous. He’s already nominating some of the lousiest Americans we’ve got to his Cabinet. I mean, here we go again. He wanted to appoint a suspected sex trafficker and alleged child molester as the nation’s Attorney General, and a woman who’s squoodgy-woodgy with ugly people like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Donnie’s li’l Putie-Pie. Not surprising for a president-elect who admires some of the filthiest dictators on the planet, but while we’re on the subject…. Why do you, as well? Trump may admire Putin, Kim-Jong Un, Rodrigo Duterte, and Xi Jinping, but wokefolk, many of you worship Hamas, Hezbollah, and stand with Iran: Terrorist groups and governments who hate everything you claim to stand for, especially free women and LGBTQ rights. So seriously, you’re on the same moral platform as Trump’s Christian Nationalists. In many respects, you are no better than they. But we know you can be. You used to be. We need you to find your moral compass and rejoin us. Because Trump is a wannabe dictator. Because Project 2025 is scary, and I for one remember the nasty Christian Right during the Reagan-Bush years. Trump plays well to these people because they’re as morally bankrupt as he. We liberals don’t want to replace your authoritarianism with theirs. America voted against you—literally, against you — on November 5th, less a pro-Republican election as an ‘anything but Democratic’ election. I’ll be blunt, wokefolk: Americans can’t stand you, but there is, in fact, something in this little black bag for you, Dorothy. It’s called redemption. It’s a Christian word derived in the 14th century meaning ‘delivery from sin’. Redemption happens if one is genuinely penitent of one’s sins which, in woke progressive parlance, might be described as ‘grievance’, ‘oppression’, or ‘offense’. Every culture understands redemption whether they’ve heard of Jesus or not. The only human culture we don’t find it in is woke ‘progressivism’. You folks are famous for forgiving no one, especially each other . You cancel, i.e., ruin lives over the slightest transgressions. You’re censorship-mad, and you force self-censorship among those who don’t want to lose their jobs or reputations over the most piddling First World ‘microaggressions’ you can imagine. We despise you for this. It’s social justice psychopathy; the perps feel no compassion or empathy for their victims. They’re objects, to be destroyed on a self-righteous whim like a child who breaks things for fun. Say what you like about the most authoritarian Christians in America, but they are better than you in one way: They understand the concept of forgiveness. There is nothing more sublimely moral than to accept a miscreant back into the fold if they committed a real offense, one that violates the fabric of decent society, and then genuinely regrets, apologizes, and makes amends. An Amish community famously extended compassion to the family of a man who shot and killed five of their children and injured five others. A mother forgave her young son’s killer. The Forgiveness Projec t collects stories of people who forgave ‘those who trespassed against’ them. Forgiveness is found in most religions, and is part of reconciliation. It’s easiest to offer when the person who harmed you apologizes. Forgiveness never happens in ‘cancel culture’. No matter how much one apologizes, the mob piles on even harder. Is it a big success when you drive a young person to suicide ? Does it make sense now why you are despised throughout America? I ask you, wokefolk, to please deviate from your finger-pointing election excuses and honestly address your own faults and mistakes. We know the Democrats didn’t lose for fear of a black President; we’ve already elected one, twice. We know it’s not fear of a female President, because we voted for Biden and Harris in 2020 knowing he might easily die in office. So please, stop it already. Trump lies, but so do Democrats: They pretended for far too long what was an open secret in Europe: That President Joe Biden was fuzzy, unsharp, prone to forgetfulness and mixing things up. The truth is, wokefolk, America didn’t vote for Trump or Project 2025. They voted anti-Democrat because of you. There’s still a place for you at the American table, but you’re not allowed to throw mashed potatoes at Grandma for voting for Trump or call your dad a fascist because he listens to Joe Rogan. We need you to exit your bubble, read books and watch videos that weren’t produced by people who never challenge you, and to self-critique. We need you to challenge yourselves with points of view that diverge from your own—and acknowledge that too often, the hate speech is your own . You can choose real progressivism, or, you can stay back there with your fellow social regressives. You’ve demanded penitence from others and rejected it—and we ask for penitence from you now but we will not reject you if you’re sincere. You have harmed many in your climb to political dominance and you do, in fact, need to apologize to many, just as you demand governments apologize to others. We may be divided, but we’re still on the same side, and I ask you to rejoin the America that rejected you soundly on November 5th. We’re not perfect, and neither are you. We don’t know everything, and neither do you. We’re not right all the time, and neither are you. We need to parse the difference between righteous and self-righteous. Let’s talk! Breaking Bread With My Republican Ex-Boyfriend What If New Hires Had To Take A ‘Snowflake Test’ To Get A Job? What Went Wrong With Wokeness, The Left’s Authoritarianism It’s A Sign Of The Apocalypse When The Right Supports Science And The Left Doesn’t 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!

The South Korean feminism project will be dead in the water. Like it or not, we need men, and they need us. Maybe we just need to reform #MeToo. The South Korean feminist 4B movement began several years ago in response to revenge porn and spy cam events targeting women by, guess who, misogynist men. South Korea has a lot of them , it seems. The movement galvanized further when an incel, irritated that women ignored him, killed a stranger in a public restroom. In the wake of the Red Tide washout in the U.S., progressive feminists are considering adopting 4B, so-named because in Korean, they name the four things feminists must renounce: No dating, no sex, no marriage, no babies. They’re sick of Korean men’s shit and they’re not going to take it anymore. It’s particularly irritating to Korea’s not-exactly-feminist president who blames the movement for the country’s declining birth rate (the lowest in the world), and that may be true. But his response has been stiffer penalties for women filing false sexual assault claims, rather than addressing the violence, male sexual predation, large wage gap between males and females, and the near-non-existence of women in high-level positions. Korean attitudes towards women appear still stuck in the ‘60s . Many blame women, their revealing clothing, and their sexuality for the sex crimes committed against them, a lot of it digital. It’s no wonder they’re forswearing men. Do Americans really need 4B? Of course American ‘progressive’ feminists, the very ones who practically chauffeured so many young men to Trump rallies, think they’re going to ‘show those Trump guys’ a thing or two—or not. 4B is a pointless protest for #MeToo Americans. Especially when Gen Zs are having less sex than even Millennials. Both generations are marrying less, dating less and ergo aren’t popping out kiddos. An American 4B movement will be dead in the water for another reason, too. The women who drove 4B Google searches 450% higher in the days after the Democratic trouncing are part of why Republicans won both the White House and all of Congress. Trump, love him or hate him, exemplified the masculinity so many of his voters feel, with some justification, has been under attack by man-hating feminists, and that Trump responded to the modern man’s very real crisis with sympathy, rather than rebukes. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris played to her educated blue feminist base, little realizing that progressive liberalism (as opposed to traditional liberalism) constitutes less than 10% of American political thought. Well, she won the progressive chickies anyway. Yay, Kamala. The wanna4Bes forget something else: A helluva lot of women voted for Trumpistan. What the 4B gang simply haven’t realized yet is how small a minority they themselves are, identified as part of the detritus many Americans felt the country needed to eject. For better or for worse. The Red Tide was unquestionably, but not solely, a mandate against progressive ‘woke’ ideology. 4B is a movement for the young, not the already-married and -bred. Marriage and commitment may even make a comeback under Trump II. For the rest of us, there’s the rotting carcass of #MeToo which jumped the shark years ago. A refreshed feminism is clearly in order for the U.S. It offers a good opportunity for liberalism— real liberalism, not woke déclassés —to inaugurate a lighter ‘blue wave’ for North American feminism. Grownups who honestly believe in women’s agency, power, and free will can sweep aside the babygirls who don’t, and embrace those who do along with those men who haven’t yet decamped to the other side, to move feminism to a new level—one more embrasive, less combative, and willing to cross the lines and open dialogue again. It’s simply unnatural to contemplate otherwise. As Magdalene J. Taylor asked on her Many Such Cases Substack, Why Is It So Hard To Admit We Need Each Other? She observes that ‘men and women no longer seem to like each other’ and identifies the intimacy crisis succinctly. “Every post about hating the opposite gender is fundamentally saying the same thing: they’re all so desperately trying to prove just how badly they don’t need anyone else.” She notes how irrational it is and against our natural state. Let’s remember, the core purpose of life on Earth, whether we like it or not, whether we agree with how it evolved, is to perpetuate life. We are social animals who evolved toward group cooperation as a survival tactic. It’s worked brilliantly; we are now the planet’s apex species. Only humans, inarguably the brightest of them all, have managed to screw it up so badly. Any movement predicated on not connecting with the opposite sex (or same sex, even if baby-making requires a third party), that demands we renounce the literal meaning of life is doomed to fail. Just ask a Shaker . American women are not in the same place as Koreans. The progressive left’s, at this writing, still-unwillingness to examine the misogyny on its own side for the Trump travesty, and the lousy candidate anointed by Democratic pols, without a primaries mandate, makes it clear they still Just. Don’t. Get it. It’s only been a few weeks, so maybe in a few months, or after the inauguration, ‘progressives’ will be more amenable to less extremist feminists who will find themselves self-marginalized if they don’t join us adult-ers in reaching across the divide. We liberal-but-not-crazy-feminists can hope to coax a few men away from the manosphere, and these angry young progressive women locked in their own ‘femosphere’. We traditional liberal women can embrace a more mature feminism over their self-infantilizing mental and emotional prison based on regarding men as our equals , not enemies. The Trump Train? It’s on us, too, not just their obviously-flawed voters whose candidacy requirements are as bottom-feeding as the Dems’. The piss-poor choices both parties offered this year appalled many, enough that some voted for neither. Or not at all. It truly does go against our nature to go solo, as tempting as that may be. Even men, who more famously pretend they’re self-reliant and individualist, still rely on women far more than they admit. They tend to jump into another marriage sooner when the previous one fails; wives function primarily for emotional support. And of course you can’t make babies without a woman. The Dalai Lama, and countless psychologists, observe that every sentient being seeks pleasure and avoids pain. While the marriage first, babies later model may make a comeback—and it’s not such a terrible idea—conservatives need to understand not everyone is wired to be that way, and that’s fine too. They disliked the authoritarian dictates of the woke-left forced on themselves, now they’ll have to consider their own mandates and whether it’s fair to force them on others. Shouldn’t it be mind-bogglingly obvious by now that the solution to the never-ending sexual battleground isn’t more division, but less ? That nothing will be resolved as long as men and women hate each other? That when two groups hate each other long enough, they inevitably wind up at war—literal war? Will the GOP declare a war on sex? On the other hand, if Republicans make good their Project 2025 fantasies to restrict or eliminate birth control, it may be worthwhile to revive the 4B chastity practice. Not that that’s gonna happen. America wants jobs, not blue balls. What would really cut close to the boner, though, is a No Blowjobs protest. I wrote about a Lysistrata-style strike, tongue-in-cheek, after the Roe loss, but if women lose access to birth control too, men must be forced to share the pain. This time, it’s personal. “NO MORE BLOWJOBS!” A New Feminist Protest Trump has no future in Washington after his second term is over, but the Republicans around him do, and wouldn’t it be grandly ironic if 2028 turned into a Blue Wave with reformed Democrats promising to make sex less risky and enjoyable again? Adopt, or reform? What if American feminists simply reformed or rebooted #MeToo? Purge it of the crazy woke nonsense, stop labeling everything even vaguely male as ‘toxic’, de-emphasize anonymous accounts of sexual assault, since ‘truth’-tellers’ may be lying to share the attention of the victimized sisterhood, recognize that women have a responsibility to themselves to improve their own lives, be ambitious, and not blame ‘patriarchy’ for their own shortcomings? What if feminists stopped talking about ‘microaggressions’ and encouraged young women to grow up and learn resilience and assertiveness, that if they want something, they should earn it, not ask nicely? Another way we can fight the crazier political wank fantasies of Trumpism is for women to agree to have each other’s backs. Relations between the sexes is likely to get worse before it gets better and the danger comes from those newly-Trumpified male voters who rallied around, yes, a known sexual predator. At least some of whom will likely feel emboldened to take out their hostilities—and sexual frustrations—on women more. I wrote about that a few years ago too. What If Human Women Challenged Male Aggression Like Bonobos? If you’re not up for the TL;DR version, here’s the synopsis. All primate species evolved a male dominance model except for one: Our cousins the bonobos, whose social model is more female-dominated. Despite physically larger and stronger males, bonobos are famously pretty peaceful. Yet when a male gets out of hand and behaves too aggressively, the females immediately band together and subdue him (there’s a video of it in the article). The primary reason for why this promotes more egalitarian social dynamics (which involves a helluva lot more sex than you will ever have!) is female bonding and friendship, including outside their own groups. Women have the power to drive a more co-equal social evolution, but we have to first acknowledge we have that power, and then unite to use it. We have, as I’ve always maintained, the power to end male aggression, if only we choose it, and the bonobos prove it can be accomplished. Women are fighting back even one-on-one. These attackers were alone when they fought back. What if women banded together and fought back against assaults in public? Whether verbal, sexual, or physical? Women won’t be alone. Many men still sympathize with the women’s rights movement and empathize with the challenges women still face. If feminists were less antagonistic to all males, rather than the truly problematic ones, we will have more male support too—and we absolutely need it. ‘The Patriarchy’ Just Saved Me From The Patriarchy What we don’t need is another feminist movement, borrowed from a culture observably behind our own on women’s rights. Trumpocalypse II is an opportunity for #MeToo to level up and emphasize personal development and power, helping younger, self-infantilized feminists still stuck in victimhood mentality to take charge of their lives. Take back their power. Grow some labia! And defend your sisters! Maybe we will need to borrow from 4B if the GOP really does limit, restrict, or ban birth control, but those are very big ifs. I don’t believe the numerous American women who voted red this month want a birth control ban. They want a return to protections for women against the predatory men of the left’s transactivist movement. Kamala Harris made a huge mistake emphasizing abortion rights which she was never going to be able to do much about. We don’t need our own 4B; we need to fix #MeToo. We need men, and they need us. That’s how life evolved and it’s not going to change. We need to re-accept nature, and reality. Because believe me, sex was a lot more fun back when I was your age. 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!

The foxy fauxminist has gone missing in recent years. No movies. No fauxminist outbursts. Not even any trans love tweeted. I investigated. And then she trended. I got to wondering what happened to British actress Emma Watson with the new explosion of JK Rowling hate after the Harry Potter author gave a giant middle finger to the Scottish government by daring them to arrest her for properly gendering cross-dressing men, and especially fake-ass rapists. A new Scottish ‘hate crime’ law gives men carte blanche to hate on, threaten, and abuse women while threatening with imprisonment any woman who fights back or protests. Or calls a man a man. It doesn’t mention any repercussions for trans-misogyny against real women. Carry on, boys. Fake or real. It’s kind of reminiscent of that Pakistani law that jails women for adultery if they report a rape to the police. Women should be fucked and not heard. As always, when the transmisogyny hit Rowling full steam, Ms. Fauxminist had fuck all to say about it. But then I got to thinking: Watson’s had fuck all to say about anything, recently, and is she still even making movies? The last one I saw was Beauty and the Beast. So I checked her out on X. She’s there, but she doesn’t tweet much and when she does, it’s about her family’s hooch business. They run a French Chablis winery and Watson has debuted her own Chablis-flavored gin, Renais. That got my attention! I like wine! I like gin! I like anything that distracts her from defending misogynist cross-dressers! I have never seen Renais gin where I buy good hooch, probably because I live in Canada rather than the U.K. But I would totally try it. It’s gotta be better than ‘Success Distilled’ Trump Vodka, which folded after six years because apparently it was, like many other Trump brands, distilled with less success than advertised. I never tried it, or even heard of it until recently. I imagine it tasted like failure and criminal tears. I remembered that Watson had been appointed, in 2014, as the UN Women Ambassador. Was she still in that role? I couldn’t find much about it. The UN posted something in March sounding like she still was, but didn’t mention any recent work. She worked quietly on a few non-UN feminist projects just before the pandemic, but after that she goes silent in the media. If there’s one thing Emmy-poo isn’t tweeting or talking about much anymore, it seems, it’s feminism. Which is a good thing, since she abandoned it several years ago to become a men’s rights activist for clever fetishists. Her last personally embarrassing scandal was in 2017 when she declared women shouldn’t sexualize themselves right around the time a Vanity photo emerged of her with her naked but (almost) nipple-obstructed breasts. It was a silly dust-up, fairly anemic potatoes in a world where transactivist cross-dressers sexualize and fetishize women and threaten to physically shut the fucking mouth of any ‘TERF’ who dares to challenge them. And they can get away with it now in Scotland. And next, as I fear, in Canada. Watson has fuck all to say about her fauxminist support for her pseudoscientific ‘Transwomen are women’ nonsense, too. And then, hours after I scheduled this article for publication, Emma Watson was trending on X. Why isn’t she speaking out on feminist issues anymore? The trans-misogyny was at full-blown OJ-New-Year’s-Eve level. That Rowling bitch was standing up for women’s rights again. Emma Watson trended, not Daniel Radcliffe, I assume because of her public fauxminism. I watched, waiting to see if she would respond. So far, she hasn’t. Nadda word. One must wonder why. Watson used to be such a promising feminist. I always loved her as mouthy, assertive Hermione Grainger, but when she first became a global face of feminism— real feminism, not the trans-pandering she turned to a few years later—I loved how she condemned feminist ‘man-hating’. “Thank you! Thank for saying that!” I said, because I was sick of the misandry too. Social and political movements always have their haters , and unless there’s someone exercising some sort of messaging control, the movement gets quickly hijacked by extremists, as happened to feminism somewhere in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s. At least the early ‘90s is when I stopped identifying as a ‘feminist’ and began calling myself a ‘humanist’, sort of an ‘All sexes matter’. It was just too embarrassing to associate myself with those women . Then Watson got woke, checked her brain at the door and began catering, witlessly, to the Holy Sacred Boner that lurks underneath transactivist dresses. She lost me. I still love the actress, but couldn’t stand the person. The thing that really aggravated me about her was that if she’s going to call herself a feminist, if she’s going to purport to speak for so many of us, if not all, she needs to address the biggest threat to women today: Trans-identified males so far doing a very good job of rolling women’s rights back. To zero. Frankly, they’re frighteningly more effective than the far right. Allow me to digress for a moment: Trump scares me less than the Transmafia. His biggest crime against women—and it’s a big one—is appointing three conservative Supreme Court Justices who finally gave the right’s misogynists their wank dream. Otherwise, he’s accused but never convicted of rape, of unsuccessfully paying off a porn star to shut up about an affair, and of confessed but consensual pussy-grabbing. He has not, to my knowledge, for all his famously offensive and often misogynist tweets, ever sent out anything like the following: But check it out: He’s against trans-identified men in women’s private changing rooms, bathrooms, and sports teams. And I ask semi-seriously: How much will the Zoomers need abortions anyway? Progressives have been sterilizing them for ten years with ‘transitioning’, and now they’re sterilizing themselves with tubal ligations and vasectomies because they don’t ever want to be faced with enforced pregnancy. Donald Trump is an utter failure with women in just about any way you can think of, including two failed marriages, relentless philandering, daughter-lusting, and I’m not blowing off the rape accusations, especially E. Jean Carroll’s . I suspect he’s got plenty of ugly misogynist policy up his sleeve which only the traddiest wives would approve of if he wins, and I won’t vote for him, but I won’t be voting for Biden either. In the Bizarro States of America, Donald Trump is the more feminist candidate. It seems pretty obvious why Watson wouldn’t want to change her tune and stand up for women like Rowling under attack. It would mean professional death. The Transmafia would silence her in a heartbeat. They could and would destroy her career. She doesn’t dare, and I am sympathetic to, her desire to preserve her career and not be subjected to far more credible threats to her life that already come packaged with fame, beauty, talent, and a prominent role as a women’s rights advocate. She received frightening threats after her famous UN speech. And that was when she was asking for something reasonable. My Emma hate comes from her horrendous hypocrisy: Feigning feminism while refusing to call out the Western misogynist backlash led by men who get stiffies in dresses. Watson was in a bad place: Speaking out against misogyny, but only when it didn’t offend the entitled who could afford the luxury of alternative pronouns. And so, I hope and pray, she may finally have realized she had become the very worst sort of hypocrite. Maybe defending her boobies are as feminist as she cares to get. It’s lowball. It’s safe. It’s old-school. Second wave feminists, who are more inclined to go after her newer fauxminism, can at least get on board with her sexualization-is-bad message. It was one of the first memos sent out during the ‘Women’s Libber’ era. “My eyes are up here!” I don’t think you can be a successful careerist and speak out on real feminist issues unless you’re ridiculously wealthy, like Rowling, or are ready to retire, which is what you’ll do as soon as your first pro-women tweet includes the #TranswomenAreMen hashtag. I’m speculating, of course, because I can’t ask Watson myself and because she’s keeping mum about transgender rights. And JK Rowling’s latest shot. I’d thought maybe I’m missed something since I don’t live in the U.K. or follow celebrity news, but I don’t think I have. I’m okay with her not speaking out against transactivism if she shuts up about feminism overall. It’s a matched set. Speak out against the most critical issue facing women’s rights, or clap that pretty little trap shut. Maybe she finally had a come-to-Jesus moment. Just how feminist am I, anyway? And how much did she value her career? I wonder (hope!) that’s she’s taken a cue from her mentor and realized that money is power , the very definition of ‘power feminist’ in Naomi Wolf’s classic Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change The 21st Century. Power, and wealth privilege, can be used for good as well as evil, as Wolf points out. That’s where salvation lies for women. Hey, it’s always worked for men! The future of feminism What’s Emma up to when she’s no longer mouthing platitudes directed by her (perhaps former) transactivist masters? When I first Googled her name and ‘2024’, I found she was doing a lot of modeling work. She’s also engaging in some quiet feminist personal empowerment that makes Grow Some Labia smile and wonder whether perhaps we might welcome her back to the feminist fold one day. Watson hasn’t made a movie since 2019 (Greta Gerwig’s Little Women ) because she became uncomfortable with not having any say, power, or control about the projects she was in. She felt ‘caged’. She took what she claims is a break from acting and intends to return to it eventually. In the meantime, she’s done a perfume commercial for Prada and directs her own projects. I found one quote which suggests she began experiencing cognitive dissonance over what she was promoting and what she believed in. She doesn’t offer an example of what made her feel inauthentic, but she told Variety magazine she took ‘flak’ from journalists as she promoted this or that who asked, “How does this align with your viewpoint?” She didn’t like having no say in the process that created something she now had to promote. “I was held accountable in a way that I began to find really frustrating, because I didn’t have a voice, I didn’t have a say. And I started to realize that I only wanted to stand in front of things where if someone was going to give me flak about it, I could say, in a way that didn’t make me hate myself, ‘Yes, I screwed up, it was my decision, I should have done better.’” I don’t know if she was challenged on, or thinks about now, her past public genderwoo. The questions were directed toward her projects. But if her answers were making her ‘hate herself’, did she also question whether, as she famously alleged on then-Twitter, that “Transwomen are women”? She’s directing. She’s producing. She’s fixing what she complained about years ago: The lack of female directors and producers in the movies. Well done, Ms. Watson! She’s also taking creative writing classes, as of the fall of 2023. She’s taking charge of her life and producing things on her own, including her own brand of gin. She’s become an entrepreneur. I like lady entrepreneurs. My niece is thinking of becoming one. Don’t depend on Da Man (or Da Woman), be the mistress of your own fate! She’s still promoting liberal, progressive causes. Emma Watson is still alive. Her feminist evolution appears to be more self-directed now, as she reclaims her power, or perhaps truly seizes it for the first time. I dislike her less than I did when I wrote an angry polemic about her abrogation of feminism in the face of a clear and distinct Woke War On Women. She’s doing now what I advocate for her: Shutting up about feminism, if she can’t defend trans-misogynists anymore, and especially if she’s figured out that human sex is biologically immutable. I’ll wait to see what she does or says next. In the meantime, Ms. Watson, we’re working on the current feminist challenge: The right to be a public, challenging feminist without rape and death threats or career suicide. You’re welcome. 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!

My mother called Marisol ‘a doormat’ because she tolerated verbal abuse. I learned never to be one. Wipe your feet here. Photo by Zipnon on Needpix My mother was a radical feminist before it was cool. Not ‘radical’ the way we know it today. Her radicalism stemmed from her uncommon conviction that on some level, women possess a certain amount of control over whether they’re abused. Mom never suffered physical abuse herself, nor do I know of any friends she had who did. They sometimes suffered what today we recognize as psychological or emotional abuse. Including Mom, who could deal it herself if Dad provoked her enough. If men possess the physical edge over women, one can argue women possess the same between the ears. We’re better wired to understand and process feelings, we express language with greater precision, we understand better the value of relationships and how to manage them, with which we’ve refined our darker powers of emotional manipulation. Men can kill us, but we can still destroy them. It wasn’t just the lessons Mom drummed into me growing up, making it crystal clear I had the power to decide how a boy or man would treat me. It was all those dinner conversations about Don and Marisol. Dad met Don, a fellow engineer, at the large U.S. government contractor where they worked in Orlando. Don was from France and a fast friendship grew with my American-born French immigrant family father. Mom and Marisol, both young mothers, hit it off. Sometimes we’d visit Marisol. I played with her two youngest while the moms chit-chatted. Mom regaled Dad over dinner with Marisol’s stories. Don was a real pain in the ass — dismissive, combative, rude. Once he called Marisol’s mother ‘a big fat cow’. Other times, he insulted or criticized Marisol or the way she handled their four kids. There’s no reigning expert on parenthood quite like a man in an office five days a week. “So I said, ‘Marisol, why do you put up with this? Why do you let him talk to you that way? I told her, ‘He treats you like a doormat.’” Later, I asked Mom what she meant. She replied, “Mr. V mistreats Mrs. V and forgets about her. It’s like he wipes his feet on her and she doesn’t argue. Neither does a doormat.” In the 1960s, women didn’t often recognize abuse for what it was. But Mom recognized the power Marisol wouldn’t claim. It wasn’t, and still isn’t, an unrealistic view. We’re responsible for ourselves, always, and in a modern world we possess far more agency than women had over fifty years ago. We have more power to decide who to allow into our lives, and how we’ll let them treat us. One can argue 1967 ain’t 2020. True. Marisol had her reasons for staying with or tolerating Don. But Mom didn’t tolerate crap from my father, a product of the same generation that produced Don. I sometimes wonder how many men — and women — would be more abusive if their partners allowed it. Respect. It starts at the beginning. Thanks to Harli Marten for sharing their work on Unsplash. The ones who disrespect women, who try to control and dictate their choices, who insult and condescend to get their way, need to depart forthwith, and never darken her doorstep again. Before the beatings begin. I’ve finished a book on the psychology of abusive men and the author, a male counselor who’s worked with them all his life, notes how difficult, almost impossible it is, to root out the entrenched sense of ownership and entitlement these men feel. Mom knew then what we’re only beginning to understand today: You can’t change another person, but you can change yourself. You decide how you’ll be treated. The sooner, the better. Prevention, etc. Her words of wisdom defined my life, even if she didn’t always take her own advice. I repeated her words back when she railed years later about how my emotionally remote father needed to change for her. Marisol may have not had as much choice with four kids, but today she would. She met Don at her dream job working for a cultural attache in a foreign country. Single motherhood today is no picnic, nor an option for all, but with 60% of divorces initiated by women, it’s not the entrapment it once was, either. Every child she bore for Don was a choice to stay, and to further tighten the bonds with him. Mom never liked Don. She told me years later she put up with him because of Dad’s friendship, and because she liked Marisol. Don once put the moves on her when Dad and Marisol were out of the room. Mom demanded my father never leave her alone with him again. His kids seemed to react against him. Mom believed they committed deliberate acts of rebellion. Once they crushed an Easter marshmallow bunny in Don’s workbench vise. It solidified before he discovered it, making it even more of a devil to fix and clean. I complained that Mr. V hugged me too hard. Mom said Mrs. V complained he was sometimes too harsh in his punishments with the children. I don’t know if it was abuse or not. I don’t remember the details. In one of our hoary old family movies, Don is at a 1968 Christmas party hosted by my parents. I love it for the sheer kitsch/camp value of a bunch of ‘squares’ celebrating like the party scene in The Graduate . Don is on the couch. When the camera points his way he makes a few silly, rude gestures, then a Seig Heil move. It wasn’t his only expression of racism according to Mom. She got mad one year when the avowed atheist blasphemously referred to Jesus as ‘That cat on the cross’. She didn’t say anything, of course. Good ’60s wives didn’t call out their husband’s friends. I don’t remember all my parents’ dinner conversations. Most had little to offer a preschooler. Dad talked about work, Mom about friends, church junk, boring adult stuff. I knew, though, anything involving the V family was bound to be engaging, even for a four-year-old. Don was a source of endless drama and Marisol an abject lesson in how to be a doormat. I didn’t realize how ingrained was my notion that women have control over their own lives until I caught a badly-imagined passage in my first dark fantasy novel. The main character, Samantha, has just broken up with her more-casual-than-she-would-have-liked boyfriend. She flees to a friend’s house after a demon set upon her by a frenemy almost beats her to death after she resists its sexual advances. A young male friend comes over to give her something and sees her bruised face. “Samantha,” [he says, assuming her ex was responsible], “how could you let him do this to you?” It took six or seven drafts before I realized how horribly misogynist it sounded. Especially from a male character who treated women well. But that’s how I thought. Still do. How can she let him treat her that way? The revision reads: “If it was that movie Indian asshole, I’ll kill him.” Dunham leaned back against the door and crossed his arms, leveling me with his own steely gaze. Samantha is a strong, powerful character. Her sort-of boyfriend Andrew isn’t an abuser, but he has a wandering eye. When she finds out he had sex with a friend who didn’t know about her own involvement with Andrew, she breaks up with him. In my mind, Dunham saw her the way I see women like her: As someone who, whether her trust or body was abused by a man, would never allow it to happen again. I realized how screwed up the passage was, and I changed it. Old thought patterns die hard. One can’t obliterate millennia of patriarchy, female ownership and entrenched male privilege in one century since the advent of modern-day feminism. Toxic beliefs and values permeate our beings as they do men’s, including women’s greater willingness, I believe, to accept victimhood and tolerate abusive behavior. Our brains are wired by our biological sex along with our evolutionary social conditioning, although we always have the power to change. Our neural pathways connect in malleable brains, not cement. We can change our thinking patterns, values, beliefs and perceptions. We can decide not to be slaves to our cave brains. If men need to uproot their entrenched toxic patriarchal belief systems, so do women. Men don’t have to abuse. Women don’t have to be abused. We can choose not to be victims. But first we have to recognize that power. Then seize it. This appeared on Medium in September 2020.

Women unconsciously collude with sexual predators. Know their tactics, and reclaim your power Women aren’t helpless little ‘targets’. We can fortify ourselves against males who seek to exploit our psychological weaknesses. Photo by SilviaP_Design on Needpix The smarter a girl is, the better it works. Party girls with attention deficit disorder generally don’t stick around to hear the routines. A more perceptive, worldly, or educated girl will listen and think, and soon find herself ensnared. — Neil Strauss, ‘The Game’ Loren blew into my life like a Highland warrior, the literal embodiment of the sexy, chesty, take-charge, long-haired hero of a medieval romance novel. We both belonged to the Society for Creative Anachronism, a medieval re-creation group I was part of in my twenties. Charismatic and compellingly attractive, dark-haired, dark-eyed, brash and brimming with sexuality, he glommed onto me like a Scottish laird to a guileless virgin. Except I was a flamboyant and outrageous belly dancer, famous throughout New England SCAdian ‘kingdoms’ for my flirting and sexual innuendo as well as my energetic performances. Loren epitomized the hottest, most popular guy in school whose head, just a few years previously, my dorky ass could never hope to turn. But, ugh, he flirted with every woman he met and often had a woman (or two) under each arm. Right in front of me, even as he actively worked to crank my every sexual button into hyperdrive. Seventeen years later, pickup artist (PUA) Neil Strauss, a/k/a Style, explained in his exposé and how-to manual The Game how this was ‘social proof’: “The notion that if everyone else is doing something, then it must be good.” Have one or more beautiful women around you, which always looks better than if you’re alone. I was no longer La Dorkola. Now I was Gisèle, with a ton more self-esteem and male admirers than high school. I disliked arrogant assholes, hip to the games they played with women to massage their own mammoth egos. Today we call them ‘players’. Back then I called them ‘sluts’. I decided not having sex with Loren would give me far greater pleasure than bedding him. I made a conscious decision to be the one woman he couldn’t nail. The best and worst of pickup artist practice Not all The Game’s advice for men is bad. It offers some pretty basic female attraction lessons many men never learn, even well into middle age. Here’s what makes me want to scream, “Hallelujah, Brothah Style! Say it again! Tell them like it is!” Smile when you enter a room. The game is on. You’re together, you’re fun, you’re somebody. Be well-groomed. Have a sense of humor. Connect with people. Don’t approach a woman with a sexual come-on; learn about her first. Strauss thinks she should earn the right to be hit on. No, he must earn the right to hit on her . Demonstrate value. Be different. (Oh dear gods on Mount Olympus, if men learn just one thing from The Game let it be this! ) The Game, for women, is a road map to every easy exploit in the female brain. Patch your weaknesses , and you’ll be impervious to the perv-ious. Ladies, take note of the following. This is just a taste of what women need to understand about themselves to effectively avoid not just PUAs but other toxic men. The less laudable, if lamentably effective advice: Negging. Alienating her by lowering her self-esteem and displaying an active lack of interest in her. (Remember: This works, particularly for those women PUAs correctly label LSE: Low Self-Esteem.) Cat string theory. If they make it too easy for her she loses interest and goes away. ( The Game ’s female counterpart, The Rules, is entirely based on this same premise.) Using NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) techniques to, essentially, trick her into wanting to be with him. NLP is considered hogwash by scientists, but it seems to work for PUAs, and strikes me as being at least a little based in current neuroscience: We can, indeed, rewire or ‘reprogram’ our brains. Strauss really nails many women (figuratively) with what I call woo-woo. He calls it ‘chick crack’, the conversational ice-breaker psychology ‘tests’ and New Age fluffy nonsense many women adore. One example: He writes down a number and asks you to choose between one and ten. You chose 7; he reveals that’s the number he wrote down! He knew you were going to say that because you’re meant to be together or some such crap! Amazing! (Except that 70% of people choose 7.) Or, he gives you and your friend some silly ‘best friends test’ and spouts a bunch of psychobabble he made up utilizing fairly pedestrian knowledge about people. Not only is he rarely ever wrong, but if he is he can find a different frame to make it look like he wasn’t. It’s what fake psychics do: ‘Cold reading’. The really execrable advice for men: Challenge yourself to overcome shyness doing things like talking a homeless person out of a quarter. If you can overcome that, you can be an effective PUA. You’ll also be a horrible human being, and everyone in Strauss’s book paid a price later. TANSTAAFL. Still, there’s a point: Push yourself to face rejection, and get so good at what you do you don’t get it nearly as much. Relentless rejection saps your will to live, but only occasional rejection is just part of The Game. I can’t wholeheartedly condemn their tactics. I’ve been in sales for almost all my career; we, too, know a lot of little tips and nudges to win prospects over. (As PUAs dehumanize women as ‘targets’ or ‘sets’, we salescritters refer to prospects and leads. No, nothing dehumanizing here.) Early in my career, a savvy, successful salesman told me, “When someone objects or resists, distract them by talking about something else; then go back to it, and keep doing this until they give you what you want.” I did this just the other day to a woman resisting booking a meeting with our team lead. I cracked a joke and she laughed and I laughed and then I cracked another joke and then went back to booking the meeting. And I did. These tactics work. Who’s truly being victimized? The #MeToo movement has focused much-needed attention on predatory men. Women have slid male manipulation, control and abuse under the microscope, scrutinizing experiences and exchanging data like scientists parsing the differences between ancient fossilized bacteria. Some women don’t yet connect the fact that we’re not, or don’t have to be, helpless recipients of male machinations. We can draw lessons from #MeToo, studying The Enemy, those predatory men who seek to use and abuse women à la Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, R. Kelly and Game rs. The Game helps us to better understand our own psychological weaknesses and eliminate them. Forewarned is forearmed. I was right speculating that PUAs were more adept at understanding female psychology than many actual females. But here’s the rub: Not all The Game’s ‘targets’ are the helpless, naive victims one might assume. Female readers will identify with the seemingly hapless ‘targets’ while guided dick missiles Style, Mystery, Extramask, Papa or Tyler Durden walk into a club or party and hone in on their ‘prey’. They’re about to ‘put one over on her’! They’re about to ‘use her’ and discard her! Don’t they understand these women have feelings? That’s how it would be if these guys targeted us, the mortal less-than-10s. These guys have set high standards for themselves. They weren’t good-looking or rich enough to score the really hot high school girls, so they learned The Game not just to get the head cheerleader, but the head cheerleader for the Dallas Cowboys. They’re all style and little substance. But the women they’re going for aren’t exactly Michelle Obamas either. Often lacking in substance themselves, both ‘targets’ and PUAs cater to the equally callow and shallow. Many have been super-hotties their entire young lives. Males have always come easy to them, and they’ve developed a hyper-awareness of the games men play. They retaliate with their own games. There are probably as many books on how to emotionally and sexually manipulate men as there are for men seeking the same for women, even if the desired outcomes are different (monogamy versus polygamy). Strauss was surprised to learn not all women are out to isolate a man from sexual nirvana with a ring, a house and a baby. Many women, he found, are just as interested in sex as men, but have to contend with matters like the Slut Rep. And sometimes women are commitment-phobic, too. Or accept behavior others would find creepy and threatening. Like the woman Strauss dropped off at her address, then followed her into her apartment without asking, and she didn’t object. And they had consensual sex. If you act as the authority, says his friend Grimble, many women won’t question you. He’s right. These women let them do these things. It’s not always oppression. Sometimes they consent, for their own reasons. One woman’s meat (ar ar) is another one’s poison. So women have to learn to not let them. Our bodies, our choices, right? Now that we know what they’re doing, we can put the kibosh on it if we want to. Often, women collude in their own oppression. Perhaps they don’t know any better, especially if they’re very young. Ignorance is bliss, for abusers. The good news is women don’t have to take it! I can’t emphasize this enough: Women respond to The Game ’s cheesy tactics because they work. For those who seek something more substantial than cheap hookups, it’s our job, as women, to educate ourselves, and educate girls better on how to identify and avoid men who are only out to use us. How to handle early male attempts at control. How never to allow a man to mistreat us. We decide how we want to be treated. We’re not victims. We empower ourselves. Image by Harmony Lawrence from Pixabay “Take my power. Please.” One PUA observed that the ‘weakness’ of small, petite women turned him on. Naomi Wolf observed in The Beauty Myth that super-skinny, anorexic women may be attractive to men because an undernourished woman is too weak to resist. The anorexic also conveys an important dark message: She’s so desperate for male approval and/or a partner, she’s willing to nearly starve herself to death. Anorexia is one way women hand over their power to men. The kind who will likely mistreat them. Women find other ways to collude with sexual predators, however unconsciously, to victimize themselves and others. And some of the ‘targets’ are little better than the PUAs themselves. There are some other pretty depressing truths about The Game’s ‘targets’ and ‘sets’: Men may drop women easily, but women will dump men just as quickly for a bigger, better deal. A particularly depressing observation is how women still think and allow themselves to be defined as ‘sluts’, as though men still held all the power of their perception, not to mention their reputation. Strauss describes LMR (Last Minute Resistance) as an understandable ASD (Anti-Slut Defense). The woman pulls back a bit so he understands she’s not easy. Women married three or more years were easier to bed than single ones. (So much for the evils of tomcats.) One PUA’s conquest accidentally sent her judgemental review of their date to her entire address book, revealing several details of how shallow and stereotypical she actually was. PUAs screen for women who are ‘users’. Touch é. ‘Style’ (Strauss) found women were usually okay with learning he’s a PUA after sleeping with them, and didn’t believe he’d been ‘running game’ on them. But once they broke up or stopped seeing each other, they used it against him. They were okay with what he was until the end. “If you lower a woman’s self-esteem, she will seek validation from you.” If there’s only one lesson I want women to learn from reading The Game, it’s this one! What I wish men would draw from The Game: Learn about women, understand them better. PUAs may be cads and rapscallions, but if guys with good will understood women as well as PUAs, there’d be no such thing as ‘incels’. Learn about ‘social proof’, something everyone responds to — if everyone else is doing it, it must be good. FOMO! My seducer-wannabe Loren exploited women for social proof, but a solo, confident man with lots of people around him is a good fortune magnet. Most importantly, Strauss learned one of the core lessons about women that many men never, ever seem to figure out: Women are not as ‘ready to go’ as men are. Most men are thinking and acting on getting into a woman’s pants before she’s even thinking about what’s in his pants. There’s a stiff (erm) price to be paid for focusing too much on one field of knowledge while ignoring another. The Game doesn’t end on a very positive note. Strauss, a professional writer already well-versed in analyzing and drilling down, details how the PUA community fell apart when the need for something deeper necessitated focusing on one compelling woman, perhaps marrying, and having children. These guys only knew how to get women into bed; they had no clue how to connect with them on a deeper level. Often the relationships fell apart, and they didn’t understand why. One PUA student who’d only wanted to get married found a wife, but his marriage fell apart a few years later for his lack of relationship skills. Mystery, Strauss’s best friend in the community, suffered a suicidal nervous breakdown over his failed real relationships; like a typical PUA with little self-awareness, he attempted to intellectualize failures with evolutionary psychology and other things he’d learned, rather than recognizing that neither he nor she had the requisite human connection skills. (Easily-acquired men and cheap, shallow sex comes with a price for women, too.) Goodbye to you Rather than go for Loren, I turned my attentions to David, his roommate, who’d caught my eye just before Loren blew in like a gale force wind over the Orkney Isles. Loren backed off. We remained casual friends. Several months later I learned he was leaving our community so I stopped into his place of work to say goodbye. “I will tell you something, Gisèle,” he said. “If you hadn’t gone for David I would have done my damnedest to get you into bed. But I wouldn’t do that to a friend.” “No you wouldn’t have bedded me,” I told him. “You were far too arrogant and women come too easily to you. I decided to be your one and only failure.” “You’re wrong,” he said, “I would have nailed you, but I guess we’ll never know.” Au contraire . As compelling as he was, as much as I wanted to do the dirty with him, I valued myself too highly. I refused to give him my power. I derived my own power in being the one woman he couldn’t get. Not all women can be Gamed. Seventeen years before the how-to manual came out, I’d studied and analyzed dating dynamics and the games men played. And I had a mother who armed me well against the games men have always played. You can’t Game a woman whose weaknesses have been identified and patched , like a computer network. Forewarned is forearmed. This originally appeared on Medium in October 2020.

Our own fear of personal power serves The Patriarchy quite nicely, thankyouverymuch. We need to uproot that #%^&. Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels “I want to marry a rich man,” some of my peers said in the 1980s. I tried to control my expression, since these were more often my office colleagues rather than close friends, few of whom valued themselves so little. These gold-diggers weren’t mired in poverty or hopeless circumstances with little ability to see a future over which they had any control. I worked in an upscale payroll services office crammed with overeducated entitlement-oozing ‘Yuppies’ in expensive suits and a certainty they were Going Places, all of which required flying First Class. Or marrying it. Twenty-five years into Second Wave feminism women positioned to Do Better were still willing to give up their power, hand it over to men. I guess a quarter-century wasn’t enough time to erase thousands of years of patriarchy between female ears. Sure, just let a man run your life. That’s the ticket. The one abrogating her power the most was the drop-dead gorgeous highest-producing account executive, the lone woman on the sales team. Solange, oozing a sense of beauteous female entitlement against which her colleagues were powerless, boasted about how a man had to have enough scratch to scratch her itch. “So the bucks started circling,” she recounted in the office lunchroom after a ski lodge weekend. Her voice oozed with condescending triumph, her face suffused with power. “But you’ve got to pay to play! If you don’t got the dough, you don’t get to go!” A faint, sick smile crossed my lips listening to Solange reduce marriage — her well-publicized goal — to rank whoredom. She was embarrassing. Didn’t she realize how unfeminist she sounded? Didn’t she understand rich men expected deference, submission and dependence from their often multiple women, whether they were married or not? A harem is part of the male entitlement package, and each woman is expected to cater unto him and him only. It’s why they want to be rich. They do it for the p**sy. ‘Scuze me, plural. Didn’t she understand how domineering and controlling rich men often were? The word I sought was patriarchal , but it hadn’t joined the vocabulary yet. Solange was partially the woman I wished I was: Strong, ambitious, successful. She made a lot more money than I. Solange embodied the New Woman birthed from the early labor of Second Wave feminism: Beautiful, street smart, educated, and made her own money. She didn’t have to depend on a man for survival. Underneath the whip-smarts go-getter was just another self-sabotaging princess willing to give it all up for, if not love, at least a big house in Fairfield County and a country club membership. The guys sniped behind her back she was the top producer because she slept with her prospects, something they couldn’t do. It wasn’t an unwarranted, misogynist response. Solange bragged about dating her leads. Working in that money-crazed office was an early lesson in how unquestioning women give up their power. The women I worked with came from good families, could have supported themselves, had careers of their own, but instead, they aspired to marry a rich man. Somewhere, the daisies rocked as Jane Austen nodded. “I don’t want to marry a rich man,” I’d say. “I don’t want to give up my financial independence. Why would you say that? We don’t have to do that anymore! This is the ‘80s! We can do whatever we want, be whatever we want!” While we organized Take Back The Night marches, maybe we should have also organized a few to Take Back Your Brain. It’s unreasonable to expect the human race to change thousands of years of male domination — patriarchy — in the century since First Wave feminism brought women’s suffrage to nervous males worried how female votes might cancel out their own or that politics and public policy might distract her from the only things she should be concerned with. Kinder, Küche, Kirche as they said in Imperial Germany. Children, kitchen, church. Patriarchal thinking, and submission to male will, dwells as much between female ears as it does male ones. I don’t know if as many young women still aspire to marry rich men — everything I’ve read about them indicates they’re too focused on their careers to even have sex — but I see how The Patriarchy is alive and well even in feminists. I researched personal development coaches on LinkedIn the other day and ran across one coaching women on how to nail a ‘high value’ man. A friend tells me he’s seen her, and other coaches like her. Old habits die hard. Marriage may be dying, but abusive partnerships aren’t. As smart, capable women gave their power to well-off men thirty years ago, many smart, capable women are still giving their power to controllers and abusers, ‘high value’ or otherwise. Women bare their teeth, patriarchal thinking fully displayed, when you question whether women are as powerless as they think. Just because a woman’s afraid to wield her power doesn’t mean it isn’t there. She doesn’t even know it’s there, especially if she’s an abuse victim. It’s buried treasure. Abusive traps don’t start in the seventh level of Hell. They begin at the top of the staircase, each step a choice the woman makes along the way. The educated, aware woman stops no more than a few steps down and backs away. She exercises her knowledge and power. The less savvy proceed down, giving away a little more of their power with each choice. Photo by Undermind on Needpix We, as women, need to stop being afraid of our power, to acknowledge we can avoid a lot of ugly drama in our lives, sleepless nights, self-blame and endless rumination on woulda-shoulda-coulda if only we’d known better. The longer we wait, the more w-s-c we accumulate. Not to mention psychological torment and worse. We live in an ocean of information in the 21st century. Time to stop blaming and start self-educating. Just as I saw nailing a rich guy as ‘something we don’t have to do anymore’ thirty years ago, I see tolerating control and abuse as something we don’t have to do anymore, today, either. Female patriarchal thinking is rooted in victimhood identification, the female acceptance of the traditional masculine view of women. We see it in some women’s inability to endure the everyday slings and arrows we all encounter. We can let every little insult or offense eat at us, screaming about victimhood, or we can choose to push them aside and not give the offender more power over us. We can be more vigilant and, instead of complaining to our friends how unfair life is for women, recognize it’s unfair for damn near everyone, and we’re not as different from others as we think. We can save our outrage for critical important battles and not waste energy and headspace on ‘microaggressions’ and other minor hypersensitivities. We can learn from our mistakes and break our own toxic cycles. We can continue to hold others fully accountable for the transgressions they make against us while acknowledging we must make better choices next time. We can stop making excuses for ourselves, and for others. When we don’t challenge our friends to do better, aspire better, choose better, we encourage a toxic subconscious dependence keeping women in their place — subservient to the larger patriarchy. We become enablers similar to those encouraging women to go back to their toxic relationships and ‘make it work’, by helping her stay stuck in life without tasking her with asking the woman in the mirror, ‘What can I do differently? What do I believe that needs to change?’ Photo by dawolf- on Flickr(CC BY-NC 2.0) My mother always said, “Even in an abusive relationship, it takes two to tango — one to abuse and the other to take it. They’ll give it to you if you’re a doormat.” She was often referring to her friend Marisol , whose husband was verbally abusive. Mom didn’t tolerate verbal abuse from anyone. Marisol allowed it. And that was almost sixty years ago. For some, it’s controversial to suggest women can educate themselves better. They can protect themselves against abuse by considering and tracing any ill-considered choices they’ve made already leading to, and deeper into, abusive relationships. Some self-infantilizing thought is still stuck in the ’80s populated, ironically, by many who hadn’t yet been born. It’s patriarchal residue designating helpless little girls to a realm once lorded over by husbands with near-supreme power. Just as right-wing gadfly Phyllis Schlafly once feared the liberties and scary new opportunities feminism brought, so, too, do some women still resist, on some unconscious level, personal responsibility for one’s life and safety even as they pay lip service to ‘empowerment’. When I was growing up young girls were counseled by assault prevention advocates not to ‘act like a victim’. Act strong, confident, walk tall and with purpose, like you know where you’re going. I believe this works. I don’t take a lot of dumb risks like walking down a dark alley alone, and while I attracted far more attention when I was younger, I don’t remember many fearful incidents from my youth. Now, victim feminists counsel women, “It’s not our job to not get raped; it’s men’s job to not rape. We need to keep the attention on them, and teach them not to rape.” Classic patriarchal thinking. First, suggest all men are potential rapists. Then give the rapists the power to stop, or not. Don’t seize the power yourself and protect yourself better, or learn how to stay away from patriarchal, misogynist men, thereby reducing the chances you’ll be assaulted or abused. ‘Don’t blame the victim’…rather than don’t be the victim. My youthful peers were women who didn’t believe in tolerating abuse, who looked out for each other. We reinforced each other. Today, some women reinforce misogyny and patriarchal thinking — in women. Educated prevention is always better than a cure. That’s what I want women, especially young women, to understand. We can do better. We can grow more. We can take back our power. We need never give it away in the first place. This originally appeared on Medium in October 2020.

Except world peace. Try not to answer like a beauty pageant contestant. Photo by Amy Humphries on Unsplash We solve the world’s problems every week at Archer’s virtual cocktail hour. You’re welcome. She started the practice in April to give us something to look forward to in the early days of lockdown and quarantine. Once we had a dance party to celebrate her birthday. It would be another month or two before we began habituating the Question of the Week. Five or six Canadians Zoom for an hour on Friday night to chat, complain about quarantine and enjoy a drink or two while pondering a Great Question to keep our brains from joining our waistlines in mushing out. Great questions in the past have included: “You have a time machine, you can pick one thing in your life to go back to. Where, when do you go, and do you just observe it from afar or do you change something?” (This inspired my article The Worst Thing That Ever Happened To Me May Have Changed My Life. ) “If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?” “My misspent youth: Tell us, if you dare, about some youthful misbehaviour that either taught you an important lesson or was memorable in some way.” Then we stopped thinking about ourselves so much: “Is there a statue or monument you’d like to get rid of, or revise? What would you replace it with, or how would you change it to reflect more aspects of the story it attempts to tell?” “Does free will exist? Is everything that happens determined by what happened before? Are our actions inevitable consequences of the events leading up to the action?” One conversation-provoking question was to imagine our ideal retirement community. Our ideas little resembled long-term communities today, places where old people go to play until they die. We imagined car-less sustainable communities, with great Internet access, and lots of resources to continue learning and pursuing one’s own projects. Libraries. Training centers. A diverse population different from today’s almost all-white LTC residents, taken care of until their end of days by non-white aides and caregivers who, at least today, may never be able to afford such care themselves. Recently we wondered: What ONE gift would you give to humanity, that isn’t world peace, and preferably doesn’t interfere with free will? It turned out our ideas fell under a few highly cohesive themes. Emotional intelligence Archer and a man who jokingly referred to himself as ‘The Emperor’ began with ideas that recalled two Hollywood movies. Archer named a Freaky Friday setup like the 1970s movie in which a mother and daughter exchange bodies for a day. Archer believes that at least once, we should spend a few days or maybe a week living in the body of someone quite unlike us for a brand new perspective. The Man Who Would Be Emperor’s idea was similar — the chance to feel most of someone else’s reality through just a few seconds of touch, which reminded me of the Stephen King book/movie The Dead Zone , where a man returns from a years-long coma to find he has the ability to foretell someone’s future by shaking hands or otherwise touching someone. Except in The Fantasy Emperor’s scenario, you would experience what it’s like to be that person. Not only would you see life from a different perspective, but in the immortal words of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! Sharing someone else’s reality includes what they think of us. Maybe we’re shocked to find we’re not ‘all that and a bag of chips’, as we might like to think if we’re inclined farther down the narcissist spectrum. Or we might be even more shocked to find that others don’t judge us as harshly as we judge ourselves. My own answer also involved the power of touch, but centered upon one’s self. What if each one of us could experience five minutes of absolute, total peace — our fears, insecurities, and anxieties completely removed — and we saw the world clearly, for the first time in our lives? In other words, what if we lived for a few fleeting minutes the enlightened, joyful ‘clear seeing’ many Buddhist monks experience daily — and then, when it was taken away five minutes later and we returned to our now clearly miserable existence, we were told: You can have that back again but now you must work to achieve it. Photo by Harli Marten on Unsplash Most of us are simply unaware, or are too busy struggling to survive, or are too afraid, as a Christian psalm describes, to undertake a foreboding journey through the ‘valley of death’, the darkest parts of ourselves, to face the fears, insecurities and anxieties that keep us locked in an existence far less fulfilling and joyful than the one we might live. Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash Freedom to create and innovate The Artist’s idea suggests one potential benefit that’s been floated as an argument for a Universal Basic Income. She would give humanity the opportunity to set aside a certain amount of time every day for some sort of creative project, and to be encouraged to spend it wisely, rather than, presumably, wasting time bingeing on useless time distraction. It sounds a bit like Google’s ‘20% Project’ , itself based on its predecessor, 3M’s ‘15% Project’, initiated in the years after World War II when 3M realized a company must ‘innovate or die’. It allows employees to spend 20% of company-paid time on their own projects, reasoning it will make them better, more creative, more innovative employees, and Google, by extension, a better company. Just imagine if we all had 2–3 hours a day in which we actively engaged in a creative pursuit — writing that novel, painting, learning all six chords on the guitar, starting up your own business, writing that killer app, exploring a better way to streamline an old, kludgy manufacturing process. The funny thing about imagination-capturing projects is they don’t depart when we have to go back to ‘real’ work. Our brains keep working on them, in the foreground if our ‘real’ work is the sort that doesn’t require much brainpower, and in the background if it does. Our mental downtime wastes fewer cycles on the externalities that annoy us, especially those we can’t change. Photo by Med Badr Chemmaoui on Unsplash Fixing those externalities Our nuts-’n’-bolts folks focused on global issues. The Scientist believes overpopulation is our biggest problem and that reducing our numbers would increase environmental stability. One might observe the pandemic is doing exactly that. It’s hard to reproduce from six feet away unless you live with someone. His partner, The Nurse, wanted to remove the desire to commit crimes from everyone, which would reduce a lot of global angst when everyone felt safe (and perhaps more inclined to take up The Artist’s 20% Project). She wondered if it might accomplish the opposite of her partner’s idea and drive up human population with everyone feeling better. Archer considered that feeling safe might make people consider more carefully having children. Archer’s husband, a recently retired tech exec, wanted to give everyone free, non-polluting energy, but only after ten years’ preparation, to give people the chance to think about how to prepare for this future. The Man Who Would Be Emperor, living in dark times in the United States, commented it might just give people ten years to plan for how they might kill their enemies! These ideas all integrate well with each other for a kinder, gentler world. Except, of course, for sustainably killing one’s enemies. Archer’s, The Nurse’s, The Emperor’s, and my own ideas emphasize increasing emotional intelligence, compassion, and appreciating perspectives different from one’s own, all contributing to more peaceful individual existences. This will incline people more toward The Artist’s idea to make more time for creative, innovative pursuits. With eventual free clean energy provision, and perhaps a slow reversal of climate change (or more brainpower to plan better for the impetus we’ve created we are now powerless to stop), we would also work toward The Scientist’s dream of a more sustainable environment with fewer people vying for scarce or limited resources. And we’d have something else to do besides shag irresponsibly. In other words, to quote an Internet meme I’ve seen: What could we accomplish if we stopped being dicks for just, like, five minutes? Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash What would your one gift to humanity be? I’m curious! This was first published on Medium in 2021.

I was my worst abuser. I’m not the only one. We all are our own worst enemy. Photo by Jude Beck on Unsplash Blaming the victim? Oh, don’t talk to me about ‘blaming the victim.’ Been there, done that, got the toxic private journals to prove it. No one has ever been more vicious to me than myself, including Dan, my worst bully in high school. After my longtime partner dumped me out of the blue and I found myself low-valued in the singles market (over 30, quel dommage ), I turned on myself. We women like to think it’s our unique female cross to bear, that we’re ‘socialized’ to blame ourselves, but I argue it’s human, and if you want to blame socialization, let’s point the finger at American culture, presided over, if you can call it that, by America’s most swaggering self-hater. I know plenty of self-hating men, including one I suspect is as vicious to himself as I have been to myself in the past. On the other hand we do love to blame others, who can and will commit cruel, heartless, or just plain thoughtless crimes and misdemeanors against us. Yet we soon turn on ourselves. Women tie their identity and value to their personal relationships; men to their jobs. When women lose a friend or a partner they think, What was wrong with me? Why wasn’t I a good enough friend/partner? And when a man loses a job he thinks, Wasn’t I good enough? Why wasn’t I worthy of retention? When life goes tits-up, as the British like to say, a ‘post-mortem’ on what happened and what went awry is a terrific healing practice, but it can create new trauma. Every examination into what we might have done otherwise turns into a toxic dance of woulda-shoulda-coulda. Especially “WHY THE HELL DID YOU HAVE TO WAIT SO LONG TO DO/STOP/START/UNDERSTAND THIS?” Insight sucks. I’ve compared the descent into an abusive relationship as a spiral staircase where one makes decisions, conscious or unconscious, informed or uninformed, giving away a little of one’s power each time until one reaches the bottom where there’s none left. Within a few years of the partner split, I thought of it as a hole. There were key differences between myself and the woman at the top of the abuse staircase: I was the abuser, not some man. Every goddamn foot deeper I dug, I knew , consciously, I was hurting myself. I was making things worse. I was going through a bad time and saying the most vicious things to myself I’d never tolerate another human being saying to another within earshot. It sounded shamefully brutal when I thought of saying it to any other human being, including my ex, the person I hated most. I even wondered why I gave myself permission to be so vicious to myself. “Nicole, you worthless piece of shit, what makes you think a guy like him could ever be into you?” “This is your fault, you big fat lump of protoplasm! Who can ever love a fat piece of shit like you? You stuff your damn face and then wonder why no one wants to go out with you!” (I was overweight, but no Jabba the Hutt.) “You are so stupid. You put up with all of Jerry’s alcoholic bullshit and you were dumb enough to take him back! Now you’re over the hill and no one wants you and it’s all your damn fault! Why did you have to pick the Loser of the Pack? What does that say about YOU?” “Don’t even bother getting out of bed this morning, you stupid bitch. It’s Saturday. What do you have to look forward to except another day of nothing to do and all day to do it? Why can’t you just die? You’re fucking useless. You’re a fucking loser.” “I hate you. You’re ugly. You’re fat. You’re unlovable. Guys ignore you because they can get better-looking, younger women, you old fat slob. Judging a woman for growing older, for something we all have to do, is men’s fault, but you CAN do something about the rest of you, and you won’t, because you’re lazy and stupid and there’s no point because no man will ever love you again no matter what you do.” “You worthless piece of shit.” “You worthless piece of shit.” “You worthless piece of shit.” My favorite slam. I still made plenty of time for man-blaming and man-hating. When I criticize victim feminism (not representative of all feminists) for its misandry, I know whereof I speak. Been that, done that, made all the castration jokes. Just like there’s nothing worse than a reformed alcoholic or smoker, there’s nothing worse than a reformed misandrist. The difference was, my problems with men weren’t political or feminist, they were personal, served with a heaping side dish of romantic entitlement. But misandry comes from the same toxic spiritual waste pool; the belief others are more responsible for our lives than we are. As we’re fond of saying, the personal is the political. And, vice versa. I always returned to my favorite scapegoat, the worthless sack of shit calling herself Me. I dug deep down, then dug some more. Sometimes I reminded myself, “Nicole, you’re digging this hole and no one else will pull you out of here. The deeper you dig, the harder and longer it’s going to be to climb out.” So great was my self-hatred and self-loathing. Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay. The post-Jerry nadir of my world-class victim-blaming Olympic-level self-abuse marathon is what I think of as the Angry Drunken Bitch Years. The self-loathing in my old journals appalls me. Now, instead of wanting to beat up on that poor critically wounded woman, alone and rejected, I want to beat the snot out of the vicious bitch who tortured her at every opportunity. Who, when the hurt woman was feeling most down, laced up the spike-toed red-hot steel boots and kicked her some more, just to remind her what a worthless piece of shit she was. Victim-blaming? No one else has ever blamed me as much as I’ve blamed myself. I’m not alone. What we shoulda done, or not tolerated in times past, is a new way to torture ourselves once we move into healthier ways of managing our lives and anxieties. Our own personal Terminator doesn’t like it when we start to heal. It regards personal insight as a direct threat to its existence. In a sick sense, our worst abuser is a trying to protect us against further pain. I began digging out of the Angry Drunken Bitch hole four years ago, when I embraced Buddhist teachings and listened more to podcasts and YouTube talks than to my Terminator. Image by David Mark from Pixabay Now I think about that poor hurt girl and want to embrace her and tell her it’s okay, rather than kick her with the spiky-toed boots. The other bitch still exists, but she’s weaker. Still, she likes to get her licks in every now and then. Last year, when I was unemployed and crying, curled up on the couch, getting treated by hiring managers the way I once got treated by single men (and for the same reason — age), the bitch said, “Nicole, you have no marketable skills!” Now I have the presence of mind to respond, “Huh? No marketable skills after decades in the workforce, with a resume hiring managers once salivated over to realize I was versatile and could move from one damn thing to another I knew little about and get our sales team in the door?” Just as single people (not just men) often don’t know what they want in a partner, neither do hiring managers or their department heads know what they want, either. (Hey, nothing is all our fault.) The toxic bitch was wrong, as usual. Because I’m back to doing what hiring managers think I can’t do: Working with small to medium-sized businesses moving into the initial branding phase of selling their product or service and getting their foot in the door. It doesn’t matter that I don’t have a Ph.D. in genetically modified AI-driven cold fusion-powered superwidgets or whatever else I’m flogging at the moment; in fact I only just learned they exist. I’m doing what I do best, and then I move on to the next shift. The bitch was wrong about me lo those many years ago, but it’s still hard to move on and not woulda-shoulda-coulda myself. “Nicole, why did you wait so long to realize the only person you can change is yourself?” “You described yourself years ago as a ‘Pagan with Buddhist leanings’. Why didn’t you just embrace it when you were so unhappy? Why did you reject the antidote?” “What if you’d lost weight sooner? What if you’d dyed your hair blonde sooner? What if you’d stopped digging in, say, 2009 instead of 2016?” “How many great guys did you push away because of the Angry Drunken Bitch thing?” I have to remind myself of the answers. Because I didn’t know. Because I didn’t believe I had to change myself. Because Buddhism didn’t resonate with me until the third time I read Tara Brach’s book, when I was ready for the message. Because I didn’t believe the antidote would work. Because I hadn’t yet read He’s Just Not That Into You. Initially, it hadn’t even been published yet. The thumbnail answer encapsulating all of it is: Because I didn’t know any better. And sometimes it was because I rejected the answers, or didn’t know what I didn’t know. Sometimes, the information wasn’t even available yet. Like what we know today about the neuroplasticity of the brain. I didn’t know I wasn’t a victim of my own history and experiences and could change my own brain. I can’t blame myself for that. Even as I castigate myself for not getting healthier sooner I think, “Well, better now than ten or twenty years from now!” I force myself to reflect on all the things I did, the decisions I made, right for me at the time , and if that doesn’t sit so well with my present self then tough shit, Bitch Nicole. We struggle through every damn day of our lives one day at a time, without ever having a clue what we’re doing. I beat myself up this past year for not striving harder professionally, getting stuck in a world where I did the same thing for too long, then remembered saying to my brother and sister-in-law, “I made the decision not to climb the corporate ladder. I valued my personal time too much.” Seems like a 20/20 bad decision when you’re on unemployment benefits and you’re not sure how you’ll survive and you beat yourself up over woulda-shoulda-coulda, but then I consider all the miserable people on LinkedIn posting hopeful positive-thinking memes, or inspiring messages about believing in one’s self and not letting others define you, and I wonder, who are they trying to convince? Me or themselves? I know everyone suffers from Imposter Syndrome. Someone I once admired I know has been suffering a bad bout of it this past year. None of us believed a pandemic would shut down life as we know it. Yeah, we were warned, but no one believed. We didn’t want to. It seemed silly! Wouldashouldacoulda. I didn’t climb the corporate ladder, but I traveled because I had the time. I’m glad I didn’t listen to the old folks saying, “Why are you traveling? What will you have to look forward to in your retirement if you go everywhere now?” Uh, staycations because Quebec is a pandemic mess and the U.S. is so bad even Mexico has shut its doors to Americans? I became a belly dancer and have great tales to tell from those days. I spent my twenties going to medieval re-creation events, flirting outrageously, dancing during feasts, camping during the summer at events with battles, campfires and games. I dated Vikings, bards, samurais. I had a wonderful life. I read a lot of great books others didn’t have time for. I published several novels even though almost no one read them. I immigrated to a new country and live better here than in the now-Ignited States. I have far more friends than when I was an isolated hot mess in Connecticut. Now I’m learning how to become a personal development consultant and help women, and eventually others, claim or regain the power we give up, give over, and give to others because we don’t know any better. I still blame the victim. I still beat myself up sometimes. I push the message of taking responsibility for one’s life and people snap, “Don’t blame the victim!” and I’m beginning to understand why. It’s not because I’m blaming them for their traumas, it’s because I point out we have the power to learn from those mistakes, however unconscious, to move forward more fearlessly. Insight sucks. Did I mention that? Not everyone’s ready for the message, but for those still crying on the couch as they realize, “The only person I can change is myself,” and get up to take that first power-reclaiming step — those are the folks I believe I can help. I’m registered to take a course on becoming more assertive. It promises to teach us to learn how others manipulate us, and understand how we hold ourselves back. Most importantly, how we submit to being a victim, something we all need to work on in our finger-pointing, responsibility-abrogating, self-obsessed, self-victimizing culture. The hell with why I didn’t do what I woulda-shoulda-coulda. We enter this life screaming protest without a road map or a user’s manual. We’re always moving into the future semi-blind. The past is always much clearer. But fuck the past. The present and the future are what I can also change, besides myself. I don’t want to waste any more time just because my worst victim-blamer still exists. Fuck her too. Getting there. Photo by Filipe Delgado from Pexels This post originally appeared on Medium in November 2020.