Was it the misogyny, or what I didn’t do that nags me decades later? Boys will be boys. Image by Kevin Phillips from Pixabay My French uncle’s comment still drives my aging brain into woulda-shoulda-coulda mode. It was what I didn’t do to get back at my cousin, and teach my lackadaisical uncle and aunt a lesson. I’m still kinda pissed, forty years later. “Dat’s what you get for playing weet boys!” I have enough to be neurotic about without adding the Fireworks Stunt to my existential angst. I began pondering the crazy mini-traumas lodged in our brains after reading a writer’s tale of sexual harassment on the school bus . Her debut into the sexist world for her tween-age self still bothered her twelve or thirteen years later. It’s funny, isn’t it, how little events can mark us for life, when we often move on from the larger, more serious ones. What’s done to us by others is what sticks far more than ‘shit happens’. Studies after Hurricane Katrina found survivors were more traumatized by the government’s half-assed heckuva-job-Brownie response than by the hurricane itself. Hurricanes gonna hurricane, but government officials make choices. Getting groped by a schoolboy, not knowing what to do about it, or how to make him stop, still stuck in the writer’s craw. I wondered if she’s tormenting herself with the woulda-coulda-shoulda years later, as an adult, thinking now what she should have done? I can relate. Forty years later, it’s glaringly obvious I should have taken my cousin’s knife. Or hidden it really well. Ona hot July night my cousin played with my brother and some of the neighborhood boys in the yard. My cousin was the oldest, about 17, and the others were a little younger — my brother was twelve, the other kids in between. I went down to the basement via the outside entrance. The basement doors slammed shut and locked. I was enveloped in darkness. “Let me out!” I demanded, and of course they didn’t. Boys! “Come on you guys, cut it out!” I yelled, but they laughed. Exasperated, I groped for a broom I’d seen next to the fridge. My uncle and aunt were upstairs, directly beneath me. I pounded on the basement roof to get their attention. After a minute or so, they failed to show up. What the hell, had they fallen asleep up there? It was early evening, right after dinner. “Hey, let’s get a firecracker!” my cousin suggested. Was he out of his mind??? The others exploded with excitement. He wasn’t serious, was he? Were they really going to throw a firecracker down here? Don’t they understand how dangerous that is? Boys don’t think, or if they do they don’t care. They opened the door, tossed a lit firecracker down, and slammed it shut. I felt held hostage. I knew the most important parts of me to protect. I shut my eyes, turned away, and plugged my ears. The firecracker exploded, as did the boys. How hilarious! They locked The Girl in the basement! Would it have been even funnier if they’d blown a hole in my leg? If I’d been rushed to the hospital with a flesh wound? What if I hadn’t had the forethought to protect my ears and eyes? How funny would it have been then? The adults didn’t take it any more seriously than the hormone-addled morons. I ran upstairs to my aunt and uncle, placidly reading on the couch. “Where the hell were you?” I demanded. “Didn’t you hear me pounding on the basement roof?” “Oh, is that what that was?” my aunt replied, regarding me over her half-moon reading glasses. “We wondered where the noise was coming from.” I exploded. I named my cousin, their son, as the ringleader and instigator. My French uncle’s reaction? He laughed. “Well, dat’s what you get for playing weet boys!” “I WASN’T PLAYING WITH THEM!” I yelled. “I went downstairs to get a soda! And even if I had been, it doesn’t matter, what they did was dangerous! Don’t you understand? I could have been blinded, my hearing could have been damaged, it could have hurt my leg!” They laughed the whole thing off and told me to forget about it. My cousin didn’t get in trouble. I’ll take his knife, I thought. The Family Shuffle to accommodate our visit left me in my cousin’s bedroom, who moved upstairs to share bunk beds with my brother in the furnished attic. We’d celebrated my cousin’s birthday a few days previously, and he’d gotten some special knife he’d really wanted. I forget what was so awesome about it. Probably it was some sort of Swiss army knife. It was on his dresser. I decided to take it home to Ohio and call him to say I’d bring it back next year. Maybe that would teach him a lesson. But as I thought about it, the more I considered this would backfire on me with the unsupportive adults. When I told my parents about it, implicating my brother but still holding my cousin primarily responsible, they were sympathetic and my brother got scolded, but they wouldn’t confront my uncle and aunt about my cousin. My mother didn’t think it was her place, as the in-law. My father looked up to my aunt, who’d been a bit older and sort of a second mother to him, and he would never stand up to her. My parents’ wimpiness didn’t help. But what really bothered me was my uncle’s comment. “Dat’s what you get for playing weet boys!” We didn’t talk about misogyny and male privilege back then. We accepted oh, ha ha, boys will be boys. Society didn’t yet recognize toxic masculinity starts early, accompanied by sexual harassment. No one yet realized tolerating sexist behavior in children often cements male entitlement for life. Girls were expected to grin and bear it, get over it and move on. I sat on my cousin’s bed, still burning with righteous anger over the lack of empathy and concern for my safety. This wasn’t a silly, annoying boyish prank; my cousin should have been punished for putting me in danger. I kept thinking about my sight, my hearing, the permanent scar on my leg I might have gotten. Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash A lifetime of summer vacations with my misogynist cousin acting like a little dick flooded back. Like not allowing me into his treehouse because it’s ‘no girls allowed.’ My aunt argued with him but didn’t make him come down if he was going to act like that, and she was a girl. “Why does she let him do this?” I asked my mother. I was only five or six at the time. “Shouldn’t she tell him to let me come up too, or he has to come down?” That’s exactly what my mother would have done. I knew it. But she wouldn’t say anything because it wasn’t her son. Many times he and my brother ganged up on me because I was The Girl, and times we ganged up on my brother because he was The Kid. But my brother was never the little misogynist my spoiled cousin was. I remembered all the times my cousin treated me like crap because I was a girl, and I resolved to confiscate his precious knife for a year. But oh Darwin, the consequences. What would my parents do when they found out I’d taken it, even as I explained I didn’t want it for myself, I wanted to punish my cousin since no adults would? Given neither of them had the balls or the labia to stand up to my aunt and uncle, I guessed their reaction would be to mail it back, and make me pay for it out of my allowance. I wasn’t sure how much shipping cost but I didn’t get much of an allowance anyway and I didn’t fancy being money-less for the rest of the summer, which would be all my cousin’s fault and yet another reason to dislike him. I decided not to risk it. Maybe a better option was to hide it, and call him to say I’d tell him where it was when I felt like it. I stuck it behind his bed near the dresser. I knew he’d find it before Christmas. It wasn’t much of a punishment but as my anger lessened, so did my resolve to make him pay for what he’d done. The next morning, I decided I was over it and I put it back on his dresser. The memory pops from time to time, I suspect because I want to help others, particularly women, become more assertive, take back their power, fight genuine misogyny, and ‘grow some labia’. (Hey, we can’t ‘grow some balls’ like we tell men.) Now, of course, if I could do it over again, I’d take the knife back to Ohio, hide it from my parents, call my cousin, and tell him he’ll see it next year. I’d talk serious turkey to my parents, make it clear they abrogated their responsibility not forcing my aunt and uncle to reckon with their reckless child, and if they insisted on mailing it back, they’d pay for it, not me. And if they punished me I’d dispose of it. But I didn’t. I was sixteen, and a Good Girl, as they raised me to be. I didn’t have the forethought to plan things out further. To realize the better-laid plans of mice and wronged women emerged after sleeping on it. I could have announced as we were leaving that I‘d taken his knife and he wasn’t getting it back until I got an apology. I could have thrown it into the bushes after receiving it and made him work a little for it. Woulda-coulda-shoulda. What good does it do me now to think about what I should have done about a past I can’t change? Here’s the funny part: My cousin turned out fine. He grew up, stopped being a dick, has a daughter from his first marriage and is married to a wonderful woman. He runs his own liquor store and he’s an expert on wine, how to cook with it, which one to pair with your meal, and he does it in a non-snobby, utterly engaged way. He believes in what he’s doing. He’s not some upper-class asshole trying to impress everyone with his tortured oenophile jargonbabble. The 2000 White Zinfandel from De Carro Winery combines crude crack-cocaine essences with a voluptuous rose flavor. Pusillanimous without being too obfuscating .— Random Wine Review Generator , with a little addition from me We never talked about it, and today I’m more inclined to beat myself up over beating myself up about it rather than for my non-response to the incident itself. It didn’t end badly, although in some alternate universe I may be wandering around half-blind, half-deaf with a permanent scar. I can’t change the past, but I can change my relationship with it. I guess it’s desire for closure. The feeling someone got away with something. Why is it so important? It’s an ego thing. He should have experienced consequences for what he did. He didn’t. It’s an unfair world. Now I wonder: What consequences have I never experienced for something I did to another I’ve long since forgotten about, that the other party hasn’t? Whose craw might I be sticking in? I can think of several likely candidates, and I’ve just identified one. Digitizing my life last year I ran across something I’d completely forgotten about: A couple of essays detailing my freshman year in college. I was utterly appalled at the way I treated someone with a crush on me whose feelings I didn’t return. Long story, but I Googled to find the guy. I’d send him an apology, if I could find him. I did, but with multiple email addresses and I didn’t want to email random strangers with the same name. Then I wondered if it was even a good idea. What if I re-traumatized him? I didn’t email him, but I still think about it. Some of those emails must still be active, especially his Gmail addresses. Gmail never dies, right? I read another Medium story about a ‘hit and run’ apology someone made for abuse she dealt the writer many years ago in a so-called drug abuse rehabilitation program called Straight Inc. Now I wonder if I’d be better off thinking about the wrong I’ve done to another, and others, rather than the one done to me. This originally appeared on Medium in January 2021.

It’s the ultimate hypocrisy destruction weapon, yet its power unites by exposing us all. “Are we racist for laughing at this?” “Probably, but damn, that’s some funny shit!” Image by Omar Medina Films from Pixabay Carroll O’Connor had passed away , and some cable channel ran a marathon of his classic TV series All In The Family in tribute to Archie Bunker, America’s Most Lovable Bigot. I finally understood the adult political humor my parents’ generation adored in the early 1970s. Nineteen years after All In The Family ’s introduction, In Living Color debuted, a sketch comedy show largely produced by blacks. They slaughtered enough sacred cows to threaten McDonalds’s bottom line. Their favorite target? Racial stupidity, ALL of it. They made fun of women and men; they even offered humor bombs like the disabled superhero Handi-Man and a fire safety burn victim. The characters didn’t look ‘less than’ or inferior. Anyone caricatured on In Living Color could become a member of Our Tribe if they chose: The ones who know to be human is to be funny, and if we can laugh together we can stop fighting each other. One of us! One of us! Gooble-gobble gooble-gobble! Do you know who was most offended by the Handi-Man sketches? Not the disabled. They thought he was funny. Performer Damon Wayans reported criticism came from those who weren’t handicapped, or with handicapped relations they didn’t support very well. Wayans himself grew up with a club foot, the butt of far crueler humor than anything on the show. Handi-Man: He brought laughs, and justice for for the physically disabled The late quadriplegic cartoonist John Callahan’s assessment of the offense his disability cartoons caused was far more blunt. “My only compass for whether I’ve gone too far is the reaction I get from people in wheelchairs, or with hooks for hands, he said. “Like me, they are fed up with people who presume to speak for the disabled. All the pity and the patronizing. That’s what is truly detestable.” Seems the disabled felt a lot less ‘untouchable’ once allowed into the fraternity/sorority of fun. Set hypocrisy phaser to Stun, Lefty! The Left’s politically correct, hypersensitive, oh-so-woke War On Humor faction is largely oblivious to how exclusionary it’s become. Their well-intentioned search-and-destroy missions for the moral and spiritual toxins poisoning North America, metastasized in the Age of Trump, has unwittingly obliviated avenues for confronting our fears and discomforts, and most critically, to bond with others who are different. Hard to imagine today, but in the days of Archie Bunker and In Living Color ’s prison-release inmate Homey D. Clown, the Left possessed an actual sense of humor. Before ‘cancel culture’ and career-destroying ‘call-outs’ and J.K. Rowling wizard hunts, the Left understood the bonding benefits of laughing with each other, at each other, and at ourselves. Homey D. Clown: He hated kids and white people The Left’s head would explode if Netflix re-created these comedic takedowns for 2021. Although I can’t think of a more desperately-needed time to Make Humans Funny again. Oh, the comedy motherlode for the Abhorring Twenties…! I’d love to see Blaine and Antoine, the flamboyantly gay movie critics from In Living Color’s ‘ Men On…’ sketches remade with two narcissistic overprivileged transwomen. Humor’s greatest gift is in exposing the foibles and fundamental heart of what it means to be a human being: We’re bloody hypocrites. Liberals loved laughing at Archie Bunker’s ignorant vitriol, but The Meathead’s social justice views got challenged too, like when his childlike wife Gloria discovers ‘women’s lib’ and spreads her nascent feminist wings, telling her husband she wants to be an equal partner in their marriage. That goes over like a Watergate break-in. When is humor a hypocrisy blaster, and when is it ugly bullying? We need to ask ourselves an important question. Do the targets deserve it? In 2021, Generation ‘Snowflake’ replaces pinch-faced aunties and bewhiskered, monocled moralists of yore with pursed-mouthed purists obsessed with the haunting fear that somebody, somewhere, may be having a laugh at someone else’s expense. What America needs now, more than ever, are outrageous new challengers to our assumptions of what we think we know about the world. Archie Bunker was an ignorant racist, (take that, you conservatives!) but he also possessed a human, kinder side (And you too, liberals!). Who knew bigots weren’t 100% evil? Even Mary Trump describes a few occasions of kindness from her notorious cousin. If you think no one should ever be made fun of, because they might hurt someone’s feelings, I have one word for you: Trumpistan. No one deserves satirical derision more than Donald Trump, except his toxic hyper-testosteroned fan club. Even though Trump appears to be a genuinely mentally troubled individual, likely suffering from dementia, with the sort of beneath-the-surface low self-esteem that customarily sends the Left running to fetch the tissue box. Few decried the four-year flow of often mean-spirited humor memes. I shared them too. Hey, is fat-shaming okay when it’s applied to an obese fat-shaming narcissistic psychopath? Donald Trump painted the target on his own chest. The most powerful man in the world had zero sense of humor. His ‘jokes’ were cruel barbs aimed solely at tearing others down to lift himself up. The last person who could get away with a disabled-person ‘joke’ famously mocked one anyway, and his spiritually disabled base roared with laughter. Imagine feeling so low about yourself you have to tear down a guy with cerebral palsy. Down. He had to tear down . Even the handicapped guy made Trump feel ‘less than’. The President of the United States subconsciously felt inferior to a guy with CP. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And Bill Maher. Trump’s loyal sheep couldn’t stand to see their guru mocked. Snowflakes also wear MAGA hats, flag pins and gold crosses. Collectively, they beg for comedic jabs. Compassion is one of the Republican Seven Deadly Sins. We love watching Trevor Noah or Steven Colbert mow down our own bête noires with comedic assault riffs, but the laughter too often stops mid-track when the barrel of the insult weapon turns toward ourselves. It’s why some on the Left detest Bill Maher so much. He’s an equal-opportunity political offender. Make fun of Trump all you want, but staaaaaay awaaaaay from us! Move along! Nothing to see here! “Okay, but if you spend your time combing through old TV shows looking to identify stuff that by today’s standards looks bad, you’re not ‘woke’, you’re just a douchebag.” The Wokenati fear humor’s soul: It’s the ultimate hypocrisy bomb. It destroys on impact. What if someone notices our biological sex science denial is near-identical to a Trumper’s denial of climate change or the COVID crisis? And why do some of these transwomen talk and act an awful lot like entitled white dudes? And when did we all become white supremacists? I for one have never burned a cross on anyone’s lawn! Didn’t we look an awful lot like clueless, irrelevant morons when we attacked John Wayne for being a racist, sexist, product of his time and generation? What if someone digs up that regrettable Halloween costume choice from 1984 before I became woker-than-thou? What are people going to say about me thirty, forty years from now, or after I’m dead? The Regressive Left knows, deep down, we all have much in common with the Trumpers. We’re hypocritical too, and we’d rather focus on their hypocrisy than ours. It’s ironic, because in destroying contradiction and exposing hypocrisy, humor is actually a Secret Equality Weapon. The mark of the emotionally intelligent and truly secure — left or right — is whether they can make — and take — a genuine joke about themselves. The humanizing power of humor Dave Chappelle takes heat for his trans humor , a movement ripe for risibility with its self-obsession, misogyny and science denial. Some see him making fun of transwomen; I see someone making fun of transphobia. I understand why some don’t find funny his joke about a perfectly-dressed transwoman walking into the boardroom on her high heels and slamming her dick on the table; but I see the ones who aren’t yet ready to give up their male entitlement. The ones who lead the baying mob against a children’s book author for speaking science. He speaks of one transwoman, Daphne, who laughed at all his jokes and then invited him to have a drink with her at the bar. “She said, ‘I thought it was interesting that they blamed you for R. Kelly, they said you ‘normalized him’ for telling jokes about him. I wonder why they never said that you ‘normalize’ transgenders by telling jokes about us.” There’s a key point: The humanizing and normalizing power of humor. Tragically, she committed suicide in 2020. Some of Chappelle’s trans humor comes across as a little homophobic, but he may ruffle feathers with his more-truth-than-poetry commentary. He says America embracing transfolk makes him a little jealous. “How the fuck are trans people beating black people in the Discrimination Olympics?” he asks. “If the police shot half as many transgenders as they did n — ers last year there’d be a fuckin’ war in L.A.!” Touché. What’s really eating Generation Snowflake? A veneer of social justice may provide a convenient excuse for oversensitive young people behind ‘cancel culture’ imbroglios to avoid examining the more painful, and real, feelings behind their almost programmed outrage over a lame attempt at humor or a poorly-executed joke. As Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff note in their book The Coddling of the American Mind , later Millennials and Gen Z exhibit the common cognitive distortions and catastrophizing exhibited by depressed, stressed, and relentlessly anxious psychiatric patients. No wonder, considering how Millennials were raised by obsessed helicopter parents hell-bent on keeping them safe from any negative feelings while driving them to achieve and perform practically before leaving the womb. In eleven years, from 2007 to 2018, the suicide rate for the 10–24 age group increased over 57%. No one’s quite sure what’s behind it specifically, but Millennials — heavily educated, underemployed, and never allowed to relax — also exhibit increased rates of the aforementioned mental health problems, juiced by social media absorption, self-comparison and FOMO, and today, enforced isolation. Is the problem really a comedian’s homophobic-sounding joke, or are Millennials reacting to a literal entire lifetime of being driven to succeed, only to find themselves stuck with their parents because, post-Great Financial Collapse, much of their opportunity disappeared along with their parents’ investments portfolio? Is the problem really someone who disrespects a Gen Z’er’s self-perceived right to an unchallenged assumption, or adolescent problems in a climate of decreasing personal intimacy, sexual pressures and gender identity conflicts, increasing misogyny/racism/ transphobia and a seemingly collective national downward spiral into violence, civil unrest and maybe even the breakdown of democracy? All at a time when younger generations aren’t old enough or experienced enough to understand and process what’s happening, at a time when their elders can no longer reassure them We’ve seen this all before. It will pass. Believe me, I remember when I thought Ronald Reagan was the end of civilization. Let’s make the world safe for humor again We need to make humor, and humans, funny again. Like knee-slapping, laugh-out-loud, and often cringe-inducing did s/he really say that? hysterical. The Left (and the Right) be damned. If we can laugh, we don’t have to cry. If we can only cry, then please, someone remove all the pointy objects in our vicinity, and lock up the handguns. We need to learn how to laugh at ourselves again. And with each other, occasionally at each other, and our common human silliness, stupidities, hypocrisies, contradictions, overblown egos and essential differences. You know, all the faults and frailties that universally make us human. The humor that doesn’t kill us will make us stronger, and today is the worst possible time to be spiritually and morally delicate. It’s not only the other side’s problem. It’s hilarious you think so! “I didn’t even hear what you had to say because the objectionary programs that my mind carries that I mistake as my own thinking reflexively went off.” We need to be emotionally intelligent enough to recognize the difference between cruelty and bullying, kinship and common ground. Every time the far Left complains jokes about others are really racism, sexism, or your least favorite -ophobia, it sounds more and more like Pay no attention to that bigot behind the curtain’. If you laughed, it’s because you’re an anti-American bigot. I’ll bet you’re a Canadian. Or worse yet, a European!!! This post first appeared on Medium in February 2021.

Bigotry comes naturally to all of us. When we can joke about others, we’re not slaughtering them in caves Image by Jakaria Islam from Pixabay Homo Sapiens is a fearful species. Possibly genocidal since we left Africa, anthropologists and archaeologists note that with every migration into a new land, an extinction of most native species occurred shortly thereafter. This may have included our human rivals. The Neanderthals and Denisovans also disappeared with the arrival of us. We’ve uncovered countless millennia-old suspected murder victims. Like Otzi the Iceman, who died of an arrow to the back 5,000 years ago. They got him good. He probably wouldn’t have survived even with modern immediate medical attention. Image by bastiaan from Pixabay The oldest so far is a 430,00-year-old Homo Sapiens — that’s us, folks! — in a Spanish cave. A reconstructed ancestral skull contains two holes unlikely to have happened by accident. There once were no fewer than nine human species in the world, up until about 10,000 years ago. Then they all disappeared around the same time , coinciding with the appearance of Guess Who. And no, not the old hippie band. We emerged from Africa newer, smarter, and better prepared to adapt. It was a game of Ten Little Indians, starting at nine. Nine human, eight human, seven human species, six human, five human, four human species… There’s no corresponding event to otherwise augment or explain the systematic disappearances. Not climate change, nor a pandemic (which likely wouldn’t have reached some of the more remote species), nor famine. There isn’t hard evidence for genocide theory, but if you follow the trail of victims, where Homo Sapiens moved, the Others, the animals, and the land all died off. We may have good reason to fear each other, even if it’s a chicken-and-egg condundrum: Do we fear Others because a few prehistoric assholes started it all, or are we proactively bigoted against anyone we don’t understand? One wonders how interspecific humanity might have fared if they had comedians back then. Something which has never occurred since time immemorial — a young woman did not fart on her husband’s lap. — The world’s oldest recorded fart joke, by some anonymous Sumerian wit, circa 1900 BC I explored the Left’s gelotophobia in my last article. Humor: Why The Left Fears It So Much Other primate species share our ability to laugh and it emerges in infants in the first few months. Researchers theorize laughter emerged to create social bonding, especially after humans organized into more complex societies. If another can make you laugh, you’ll feel more kindly toward her. Laughter triggers a stress- and tension-relieving endorphin rush. It relieves pain, strengthens our immune system and encourages a sense of belonging. Which leaves humor rather like The Force: It can be used for evil as well as good. Laughing at others with others creates bonding; laughing at them without them creates harsh division. Key & Peele: Make fun of everything! I guess you had to have been there. The comedy duo Key & Peele, in a 2014 Time Magazine op-ed article, argued for the right to Make Fun Of Everything without a bunch of politically correct pretend-to-do-gooders jumping all over comedians’ asses. Make Fun Of Everything — Key & Peele They note how how rendering others ‘untouchable’ is exclusionary. It becomes, however unintentional, a form of bullying. One wonders who’s truly uncomfortable with others who aren’t like them: The person cracking wise about them in their presence or the politically correct with their patronizing assumption If you want to read it first, go ahead, it's a quickie. I’ll wait. that the other group is too weak-spirited to laugh at itself, or too stupid even to know it’s happening? Permission to laugh What the politically correct’s Nervous Nancys don’t understand is how humor takes fear’s power. What they think are jokes about race or other differences often poke fun not at differences but bigotry. The Canadian comedian Russell Peters endlessly jokes to highly diverse audiences about race, culture, religion, and accents, in a country where accusations of racism are more shameful than actual racism. “I want to see white people preserved. If white people go missing, who the f**k are we gonna blame?” Audiences know it’s okay to laugh because his targets are laughing along with him. The outsider shows us what’s funny about our tribe. Like stereotypes. We know they’re harmful, but they originate from a place of observed commonality. Laughing at stereotypes isn’t the same as laughing at people, but the intent of the humorist makes a difference. ‘Russell Peters can make fun of white people because he’s a member of the oppressed minority,’ the Humor Not-zis inform us, referring to the comedian’s Indian roots. Peters’s pedigree is a valid point. Humor punches up (at those in power) and sideways (at those on your own level), but when you punch down it’s cruelty pretending to be ‘just a joke’. A white comedian can’t get away with the Spanish accent imitation or celebratory salsa steps Peters dances to illustrate someone mistaking him for a fellow Latino. Peters jokes about addressing a Hispanic guy who doesn’t speak much English and imitates the slower mental process the other guy goes through to respond. ‘Hello,’ translate it into his head — ‘Hello — — equals — — ¡Hola! — — reply with — — ‘Hello!’ I laugh not because I think he’s making the Spanish guy look stupid, but because it’s the exact same process — and likely facial expression — I go through when someone speaks French to me. Slow down, Jeanne-Marie! My brain ain’t Google Translate! I feel a kinship with the Hispanic guy — a fellow human who also speaks a second language poorly. One of us! One of us! I love Bad Translation humor sites like Engrish.com. Why are so many of them Chinese-to-English? Chinese is the most complex language, spoken for millennia, with thousands of pictogram characters backed by an ancient culture. Greater mistranslations with far more modern English are bound to occur, especially by a translator not as fluent in the target language, or a poor machine translation. I regret I can’t see the Chinese versions of Engrish.com making fun of English translations of Asian languages. I’ll bet they’re hilarious! What’s their own equivalent of All your base are belong to us ? Apparently they’ve got too much as it is. By Wright — Own work, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 Can white people ever make fun of out-groups? Maybe targeting hypocrisy, which is like privilege: When you have it, you can’t see it, and you need others to call it out. Not everyone has privilege, but we’ve all got hypocrisy! So I think it’s possible, but I’m not sure any white comedians are doing it, at least well. Those who argue hypocrisy-busting humor is an excuse to put others down are often just embarrassed when some of their own designated ‘untouchables’ get called out. Or even worse, themselves. If I laugh, am I racist? The Canadian author, humorist, and First Nations playwright Drew Hayden Taylor noted Canadian whites’ need for ‘permission’ to laugh at ethnic humor. In one of his Funny, You Don’t Look Like One: Observations From A Blue-Eyed Ojibway books, he describes what happened when his Indigenous-focused comedy Bootlegger Blues played to an audience of First Nations and white people. As the play unfolded, no one laughed except for the Indigenes. Then a few whites carefully laughed, and then a few more, and then everyone laughed, once they understood they weren’t ‘racist’. In the months and early years after 9/11, when tensions between Americans and Muslims were bowstring-taut, Muslim comedians mocked it all — the terrorists from their own cultures, the hypocritical imams, the ignorant Americans who didn’t know a turban from a derby, who jumped out of their skin every time a brown guy belched. Nothing quite like calling out the stupidest American foibles: Terrorist bigotry and the victims’ bigoted response. Canadian Muslim Zarqa Nawaz responded to mid-oughts Islamophobia with her hilarious sitcom Little Mosque On The Prairie , about a small Saskatchewan community of Muslims with a mosque in the basement of a Christian church. Racism and Islamophobia looked pretty damn silly, and Muslims much less scary when, in the fine tradition of Key & Peele, they made fun of everything, including themselves. Their multicolored lampoon included a Rush Limbaugh-caricature radio host; a redneck farmer always on the lookout for terrorist activity; a retired imam with conservative extremist views; and, quite sweetly, a warm friendship between a younger imam and a Christian minister. Babar from Little Mosque On The Prairie: Islamic extremism never looked sillier! When we’re laughing with each other we’re not laughing at each other, which leads to fewer cave slaughters. Being a part of the tribe means protection; fundamental to survival. No human punishment is worse than ostracism. Audience members want to be included when Mexican comedian Fluffy riffs on everybody. Fluffy describes Germans who aggressively demanded he include them in his riff on people from differing countries and what they like to drink. His answer’s really pushing it! Starts at 5:24. Properly and vigilantly wielded, humor unites, rather than divides. What we can laugh at makes us stronger, not weaker. Let’s make humans funny again The overly-humorless make me wonder: What are they trying to hide? What are they afraid people will see? The right terrorizes with violence, but the left’s terrorism is professional and personal destruction on social media when they don’t like a joke, or even a thought. Righteousness is the mighty fortress of the cyberbully. Making others cower before your world-class hissy fit over an ill-considered tweet distracts from one’s own personal bigotries. If people see you thundering against someone you’ve identified as ‘transphobic’, then you can pretend to yourself that while you’re personally okay with transfolk, you wouldn’t want your kid to marry one. You keep them safely Over There where they can’t actually harm you. Because, you know, transgenders might try to steal your mammoth meat or your mate or something. We live in dark times with an uncertain future, and far-left gelotophobia prevents us from blurring our differences and bonding in the camaraderie of knowing fark it, we’re hilarious! Not everyone will find it so but what makes us laugh won’t kill us. Or more importantly, each other. You don’t have to be French or speak French to get the humor, but it helps! I love this. He nails us. This first appeared on Medium in February 2021.

And no, her name isn’t Ghislaine Maxwell. Image by Ibrahim Asad’s Photography on Flickr She’s been bothering me since I read her story on social media a few weeks ago, detailing vicious abuse by a narcissistic psychopath. I wish I could feel unadulterated compassion for her, but there’s an ugly underlying message I can’t stop thinking about. Her tacit admission she aided and abetted child porn and the global trafficking supporting it. She didn’t report him, of course. Because abuse. I won’t fault her for not allowing police to charge him with assault and attempted murder when he pushed her down his staircase and broke her arm in several places. Nor, I guess, will I fault her for staying with him for a few years after. It’s her life. It was her choice. But she allowed him to keep consuming kiddie porn, plus other highly questionable content with technically legal, even clearly adult women who may have been no more consensual. Now it’s no longer about the writer, but all the children and adults forced into the pornography slave trade for sick, vicious bastards like her former ‘Mr. Perfect’ to wank off over. If she bore no responsibility for herself, she did for the children she knew were being victimized, however indirectly, through his voracious appetite for what she described as the very worst, most abased, most destructive pornography. Not all of it depicting children but some, she said, almost certainly illegal. I can’t make excuses for her. She chose to stay, and she proved it was a choice when she chose to leave. The victims of his sick wank material, including the ones who were of legal age but possibly also just as enslaved, didn’t have choice. The woman aided and abetted the ugly world of child pornography and sexual enslavement, even after she left the filthy sonofabitch. The ugly truth a lot of women aren’t going to like: Women contribute to child trafficking too, when they refuse to turn in those they know support it. There’s no getting around it. This woman enabled the child trafficking industry by never reporting. Period. If she can choose to leave, she can choose to report it. Was she afraid of post-breakup violence? I’m not sure she was, considering she posted under her real name, and gave his real name. I don’t know why she stuck with Mr. Perfect given he could only be more loathsome if she’d found him sneaking young bodies into his bedroom or discovered a few in the basement. He only had sex with her for about a year, ending when she refused to allow him to do the repulsive things he wanted to do to her, or the equally repulsive things he wanted her to do to him. She went sexless after that. I’ll bet he didn’t. She didn’t describe the details, but claimed she’d seen content she could never unsee. She begged him to stop, to seek help, even vomited a few times at what she saw, to no avail. I’m not sure what she ever got out of this relationship after he removed his human skinsuit. He was good-looking, I guess, and of course charming while they courted. He was well off, as she described a really beautiful mansion with a gorgeous Italian marble staircase when she moved in with him. Then, in accordance with countless abuse case studies, he revealed his true self. The doctors told her she’s lucky she didn’t die from the fall, that it was fortunate she fell on her hand, even though they initially considered she might lose part of it. (She didn’t.) After Mr. Perfect drove her home, stopped at the drugstore to get her prescription Percocet, and kept the pills for himself so he could get high while wanking off to filth, leaving her alone with Tylenol, she didn’t leave him. Years later, she finally did. It had something to do with the fact that the doctors had to cut off two precious, meaningful bracelets to treat her arm. That’s what drove her to leave, not the victims of Mr. Perfect’s sick obsession. And she still has yet to report him. I wonder who he’s f**king now. I wonder how old they are. I wonder how consensual it is. I wonder what he’s doing to them before, during, and after. She let him get away with it. All of it. Image by Ruslan Gilmanshin from Pixabay People don’t like when I ask embarrassing questions about abuse, like why it persists. You know, like when women reward abusive behavior. What If Women Refused To Fuck Abusive Men? Would they die with their bike grip-shaped dick in their hand? Here’s another infuriating one: Why do we not hold women to the same high standards to which we hold men? We ask why Donald Trump and Bill Clinton rode Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express, but not why Trump’s baby mamas or Hillary Clinton tolerated their husbands’ friendship with the monster. We’re forty years past The Battered Woman and The Burning Bed . We’re graduating more from higher education than men. We’re earning more money, we’re more independent, we’re showing up more at the head of the boardroom table. I get tired of reciting this. Yadda yadda yadda. If there’s any woman who’s not a helpless little victim, it’s Hillary Clinton. We’ve got more power, we’re not as reliant on men, we more often have the financial ability to walk away. But many don’t. For the same old talking points as days of yore. Yadda yadda yadda. The problem clearly isn’t only men. Women allow this. Feminists don’t challenge it, nearly enough. Not when it comes to holding women accountable. We’ve got to do a better job than we’ve been doing. We’ve got to raise the standards for ourselves, and other women. We need to talk more about the way tolerating abuse affects others. Like the friends and family whose lives she might put in danger if she leaves Mr. Perfect, especially if she moves back in with them. Like the co-workers whose lives she might be endangering if Mr. Perfect shows up at the office with a gun. (This almost happened to a former employer before I began working there. The guy didn’t show up, but the office went into lockdown when their employee reported he was looking for her and considered dangerous. And this was in Canada .) Like the children she has, since the best way to hurt a woman is to harm or kill her children. Whether Mr. Perfect contributed his seed or not. Or, you know, the children and young women he’s been indirectly victimizing (maybe directly too, depending on what he does outside the home), by not allowing the police to arrest him for trying to kill her and then mentioning, ‘Oh, by the way, take a gander at the shit on his computer.’ I’m tired of the excuses. The writer left Mr. Perfect to continue feeding the international sex trafficking/child pornography industry and, I suspect, possibly rape/sexually abuse adults and children of legal or illegal age. If Jeffrey Epstein were still alive, he’d thank her for her support. Maybe Donald Trump and Bill Clinton can do that for him. Even though she named Mr. Perfect in her article, he still owes her a huge debt of gratitude for protecting him from the law and for enabling him to continue victimizing the utterly powerless. We can make all the excuses we like, and people can excoriate me for saying this but this woman will die knowing one thing. She aided and abetted child pornography. She let him get away with it. But, maybe she can still be proud of herself for, you know, ‘finally leaving him’. What a hero. This story first appeared on Medium in February 2021.

Why is there a dearth of research on the psychology of female victimhood? Photo by Anete Lusina from Pexels A high school friend took decades to learn how to not be abused. I’m not sure she’s yet worked it all out, but her Facebook posts are a helluva lot more take-no-shit than I remember her at seventeen. She was a year younger than I, and I saw her life laid out after my first semester in college. We shared an invisible coat of Boy Repellent. Neither of us had dates, fantasizing about guys who’d never notice us. What I didn’t share was her firmly entrenched low self-esteem. She married it. I never understood where it came from. She appeared to come from a genuinely Christian household — the good, decent kind, not what passes for it today. Of course, you never know what goes on behind closed doors. I graduated high school, then stepped onto a college campus in the fall. Total reset! I made new friends, stat. I turned out to be attractive to guys (who knew?). My life turned around in one semester. It was a new world. With dates! It’ll be different for Caroline too, I realized. Way, way different. With lots more abuse. Caroline wouldn’t go to college. She would likely stay in our insular, socially constipated small town, meet new people who didn’t know or remember her from high school. She’d discover she, too, was attractive to guys. But — the wrong ones. Nailed it. There’s a wall in many feminist brains when it comes to taking the next step toward eliminating Intimate Partner Violence (IPV): The holy mantra Don’t Blame The Victim. It served its purpose years ago when we began truly addressing IPV. Women possessed a lot less personal and political power, less money, less education. It was easier to fall into and get stuck in a bad relationship with nowhere to go, surrounded by people who didn’t understand what it was like. A woman was especially vulnerable to IPV if she suffered from, as many women did back then, the pre-feminist hangover solution to all her problems, I want to marry a rich man. Many asked, Why did it take you so long to leave? It was an unconsciously cruel question at the time. A lot of women didn’t know any better. I might have been one, but I was blessed with a mother who was feminist before it was cool. She taught me at a young age never to tolerate an abusive man. I get a lot of flak for scaling the Feminist Wall. I know why. What most women really mean when they recite the mantra Don’t blame the victim is don’t unintentionally cause the victim to blame herself. When women learn from their mistakes, many engage in a common but unhealthy side response — intentional, avoidable, or otherwise. They start blaming and beating themselves up. Why didn’t I do/leave/learn this sooner? Why did I put up with this for so long? What if I’d learned this when I was [earlier age]? Why did I let him treat me like that? Idiot! Moron! Shit-For-Brains! I get it. I do it too. Not regarding abusive relationships, since I’ve never walked down that staircase. I do it as I review my life and ask myself why I never went farther than I did professionally. Woulda-shoulda-coulda destroys one’s spirit. This is why women stubbornly resist re-examining Don’t Blame The Victim. I acknowledge the dirty little secret they’d rather not. Women have more power than they admit, or even know. Including the ability to Just Say No to abusive men. Nicole Chardenet focuses more on women’s contribution to patriarchy. She’s got some truly blistering pieces. She could grow more into pieces from a problem solving perspective too, maybe she will rather than only screaming into the void that women need to grow some labia. — SC on Medium SC made a killer point, although I’d been questioning it myself for several months. When will I stop shouting, “Grow some labia!” and offer solutions? There’s a dearth of knowledge of the female sense of victimhood and in particular the role of victims in abusive relationships. This particular field of research appears lacking. I investigate female resistance to personal power. I’ve explored it for awhile already on Medium, a motherlode of information on abusive men, but fairly anorexic on the subject of female victimhood psychology. Not surprisingly, it seems fairly scant off Medium, too. Public domain photo from Piqsels Feminism has gone as far as it can go dissecting and blaming men and ‘patriarchy’ for its ills. I watch too many women hold themselves back, yet blame it on ‘the patriarchy’. We don’t speak up; we’re afraid of what others will think. We don’t push ourselves. We don’t try harder. We don’t challenge ‘patriarchy’ so much as complain about it. I’m more curious about the dense patriarchy between our ears than I am about the Big P in the world at large. My interest in preventing IPV, despite never being a victim myself, is wondering, as my forward-thinking mother wondered many decades ago, Why doesn’t she leave? It was an uncompassionate view grounded in an era of ignorance about the female experience, but it’s a question we need to ask our sisters as well as ourselves, and a helluva lot sooner. Why do I (or you) put up with it? Because 2021, sisters. I’ve searched Amazon, the library, and the Internet for research on female IPV psychology. The only real source of information I’ve found is this article by Dr. Ofer Zur, writer and psychotherapist at the Zur Institute : Psychology of Victimhood, Don't Blame the Victim - Article by Ofer Zur, Ph.D. Victimhood psychology, on the individual and collective group level, are one of his multiple fields of study. He breaks down the stages of victim complicity in negative experiences spanning zero to 100% accountability, measured by the power to control, prevent, or affect situations: Non-guilty/innocent victim — There’s no way they could have foreseen or stopped the abuse — children, the mentally disabled, surprise attacks by complete strangers (rape, rampage shootings, corporate greed, etc.) Victims with minor guilt — Those who ‘could or should have known better’ with a little forethought, planning and consideration of their actions. Like getting raped after passing out in a drunken stupor at a party or repeated domestic violence after a few incidents. Sharing equal responsibility with the perpetrator — A man who gets an STD from a prostitute or instigates a fight in a bar. Playing chicken or Russian roulette. Victims who share more guilt than the offender — Being an active participant in an event in which one is likely to get hurt. Like drunks who harass others, people who voluntarily join cults, or an abusive husband killed by his battered wife. Or partaking in government insurrection. Those who are 100% responsible for their outcome — Assaulters killed by their complete stranger victims in self-defense, people who get lung cancer from smoking, mercenaries wounded or killed. I have issues with a few of his examples — he includes under #2 Jews who suffered under the Holocaust, castigating them for ‘not fighting back enough’, and under #5, ‘Citizens who collude by passivity in their country’s atrocious acts and get hurt by other countries’ armies (i.e. politically inactive German civilians who did not fight the Nazi regime and got killed by the Allied army attacks).’ The Jews were far outnumbered by the anti-Semitic Germans, along with the ‘politically inactive’ Germans. I’m not sure what they truly could have done. As Dr. Zur points out, “Do not blame the victim has been translated into: do not explore the role of the victim.” Women make choices; the descent to the Seventh Level of Relationship Hell isn’t a fall down a rabbit hole, it’s a slow descent down a spiral staircase. Those who say, “But not all women CAN leave!” are describing only the smaller subset who’ve descended to the bottom, and forget the many women who can. Those who believe abused women lack choice at every step are refuted every time an abused woman ‘finally’ leaves her batterer. It’s best, of course, to do it sooner rather than later, as the earlier you get out the less risky it is. Victims have choice unless they’ve been kidnapped at gunpoint. Why women stay is a highly complex issue. Some resist acknowledging their own power. My high school friend clung tenaciously to her low self-image, rejecting with a snarky remark any suggestion she was attractive or worthy of consideration. My parents commented on how she always slouched, embarrassed by her height. I believe we, as human beings , collude heavily in holding ourselves back, and often we oppress ourselves better than any third party or parties can. Sometimes they truly can’t leave, and sometimes it’s simply that they won’t . I want to make something clear to anyone who’s made it this far without leaving in a fury after dropping an angry comment bomb: And I want feminists to stop lying to women by teaching them they have no accountability — power! — after enough shit has dropped. I want women to stop and consider what they’re doing, and who they’re doing it with. I want to stop them before they step too far down that nasty staircase. I want them to educate themselves before they ever get into an ugly relationship, or after they get out of their first (hopefully last) one. I want them to stop blaming themselves , and to know the difference between making an empowered decision to no longer tolerate crappy humans in their lives. I want them to stop beating themselves up for woulda-shoulda-coulda. My ideas are highly controversial ideal for some women, even though the crux is I DON’T WANT ANYONE TO BE ABUSED. Life is a long journey with no user’s manual. We have to make a lot of mistakes along the way. Learning from them makes us better humans and inoculates us against future mistakes. We may still make all-new mistakes but the more we learn the smarter we’ll be. When ‘feminists’ teach women not to learn from their mistakes, they harm women. They teach them to stay victimized. Worst of all, they enable abusers. I want women to take back their power and decide to no longer allow others to abuse them. Working on the solutions, as SC wished. Beginning with growing some labia, as I put it. I don’t have the answers, but I’m looking for them. Have you got the labia to listen? This first appeared on Medium in 2020.

Sometimes it works when he has something to lose, too Image by Martha M/Feminism India , Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 on Wikimedia Commons We drove toward the lot where I’d parked my for an early-morning pickup by John, my boss. I felt no trepidation as we approached; we’d enjoyed a perfectly great day together at a tech expo in New York City. John didn’t mind driving in Manhattan like I did. As we pulled up to the curb he put his arm around my neck. “How about a kiss goodbye?” I pulled away. It wasn’t the WTF moment you might imagine. “No, no, that’s not appropriate!” I stammered. “We need to keep it professional.” “Oh, come on!” he said. “Just a little kiss!” “No, no, John, that’s going too far. Thanks for the ride, I’ll see you Monday.” I scrambled out. I drove back to my Connecticut apartment in emotional dishevelment. Goddamn him! He’d now crossed a boundary I’d be forced to address. John and I had a boomerang employer relationship. I met him through a temp agency as I’d begun contemplating a career in computer sales. After a few months, pleased with my work prospecting new business, he hired me. A few months later, he let me go when business took a downturn. A few months after he called me back. He’d needed time to revamp business efficiency. It went well, until I became dissatisfied with the way he’d managed sales. I left. I held other jobs for a few years; then got laid off and threw the boomerang. We met for lunch. I spoke plainly about the problems with his sales management before. He responded to all of them and described the changes he’d made. I came on board a few weeks later. I fell right back into the groove, and my old co-workers were used to seeing me show up periodically by now. At some point, things got weird. John and I knew each other well. We’d gone on sales prospecting jaunts together in the car, and once or twice a year we went to New York City together for big technology shows at the Javits Center. Of course, you talk in the car. Back then, office relations were more fluid than in larger, more button-down corporations, with a lot of jokes and laughter and teasing. By today’s standards, any IT office I’ve worked in would give HR the vapors; back then it forged a sense of camaraderie and teamwork when you could be comfortable with your co-workers; some even grew close. I don’t remember exactly when or how John launched the first trial balloon, but I think the harassment started with little comments here and there. A bit inappropriate, perhaps, but I let them slide. Once he put his hand on my thigh in the car. I don’t think I said anything, but it made me uncomfortable. Like any woman, I didn’t want to rock the boat or create an uncomfortable silence in an enclosed space. I made excuses in my head: He was just being overly-familiar. He didn’t mean anything by it. I knew he should know better, but I let it slide. In retrospect, I wish I’d spoken up but I didn’t; I was younger and in a bit of shock. Little things built up to the New York curbside moment. Sometimes he suggested we go out for dinner. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said. “Not as a date. I know some great restaurants I could introduce you to. You’d love them. One serves terrific dim sum. I know how much you like Chinese food.” “It’s not a good idea,” I said. “Diane [his wife] wouldn’t like the optics.” He dropped it. Once, I was in the office with him and the general manager. We were all standing, talking. John held a rolled-up paper and he lightly hit me on the rump with it. The general manager sort of chortled nervously and I said something like, “Okay, ha ha, that’s enough!” My stomach twinged uneasily. Between the thigh touch and the comments and the dinner suggestion and now this, I wondered if something was escalating. John wasn’t really trying to start an affair with me, was he? Was he insane? I’ve spent a lifetime making excuses to myself for men. Whether it’s boyfriends, partners, family, or employers, when conflict arises I try to avoid scenes. I look at things differently, make sure I’m not overreacting. Am I misinterpreting? Am I being oversensitive? Did he not call because he’s not interested, or is he busy with work? (It would be years before I figured out it was manspeak for I’m just not that into you. ) Maybe that’s why I got in the car with John again, for another two-and-a-half-hour trip to New York City. Plus I really wanted to see the tech show. The ones in the Big Apple blew the smaller New England shows out of the harbor. I don’t remember anything untoward about the day; nothing inappropriate, nor weird conversations coming back. Just his bizarre attempt to kiss me, and driving home in a state of fear and fury. Fear because I’d now be forced to deal with this, and fury he’d put me in this stressful, difficult position. I had to figure something out, because I didn’t have the usual address avenues. Too small for an HR department, there was only one person above John, and I couldn’t take this to the company president. He was married to her. I got home, got really stinking drunk, and emailed a close male friend in San Francisco. “Tell someone else at the company,” he advised. “So it’s not your word against his if he fires you and you take legal action.” The general manager. I was on good terms with him, and I’d bet John’s inappropriate rolled-up paper tap hadn’t sat well with him. Otherwise, I’d have to handle this myself. His wife couldn’t find out. We got along well, but I wasn’t sure she wouldn’t fire me. Yes, he was that dumb . He pursued someone in an office in which his wife worked, and outranked him. I spent most of the weekend, as you’d might guess, weighing my options and strategizing. I told the general manager Monday morning what happened. I outlined three things I wanted to keep the peace for everyone: I wanted the harassment to stop I wanted to keep my job I didn’t want John non-sexually harassing me to make me quit He’d been known to do that. If he wanted to be rid of someone, usually a woman he couldn’t fire legally, he’d harass her to departure. “I don’t want you to do anything for now,” I told the general manager. “I need to handle this myself. I’m going to confront John this afternoon. If he starts treating me poorly to get me to quit, I’ll need you to step in and say I’ve threatened legal action if that happens. Don’t say anything unless I tell you. I want him to save face. I want this to end and get back to normal.” Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay Over the weekend, I’d realized John, too, had something to lose if he responded poorly. His wife worked down the hall. She’d find out. How ugly would things get on the homefront? Nor would he want to feed the lawyers. His wife wouldn’t appreciate it, either. He also risked something else: Losing a damn good employee, who would never again return. We’d been on and off for nearly ten years. I knew next to nothing about the computer industry when I’d started, but he’d trained me, and I’d become quite knowledgeable, from the days of Lantastic and Novell to the rise of Microsoft peer-to-peer-networking and Novell’s self-destruction, with some help from Windows NT. John and I worked together through the exciting rise of the Internet and I’d been an early adopter in the office. My role became a ‘hub’ for inside sales, customer service problems and light tech support. I handled the returns and allowances and occasionally dunned old accounts for unpaid invoices. Replacing me, especially with my level of sales experience and product knowledge, wouldn’t be easy. So, I concluded, John had some serious skin in the game too. I made a risky decision. It’s what worked for me, and Gentle Reader now understands how I arrived at my decision. Your mileage may vary. Monday morning arrived with a strategic plan. I stayed in my office to avoid John. We said good morning as he passed by en route to his own. When he stepped out in the morning, I spoke with the GM. The afternoon presented a lucky perfect confrontational opportunity. John’s sales calls were usually close to the office, but on this day he’d be driving down to the shoreline for an afternoon appointment. He wouldn’t return until evening. I wouldn’t see him until the following morning; he’d have plenty of time to think and consider his actions. Good luck with your appointment after this , I thought, heart pounding, as I entered his office about fifteen minutes before his departure. Goddammit, he deserved it. I shut the door behind me. He looked up. “Listen up, because I’m only going to say this once,” I said, speaking up strongly and firmly but not loud enough for anyone to overhear. “Don’t you EVER touch me again like you did Friday night!” I let my anger build, only enough to give me juice without going overboard and saying something unplanned. I’d put some effort into the script, reworking it and running it past my friends. “This is a PROFESSIONAL relationship and it will STAY that way!” I informed him. “You will NEVER touch my thigh like you did once in the car. You will NEVER try to hug or kiss me. You will not make any more inappropriate suggestions about dinner. This is between you and I and no one else needs to know. I expect you and I will NEVER need to have this conversation again. Understand?” He did. He didn’t have much response. The entire rant lasted twenty, thirty seconds. No threats, nothing about my job, no mention of feeding the lawyers. Just a tacit suggestion that if he keeps his mouth shut and goes back to being a good boy no one gets hurt. I turned and went back to my office. I shook as I sat down to my computer, relieved when he left a few minutes later. The happy ending is, “And the lawyers all starved to death.” He met my unspoken demands. The sexual harassment stopped, and no new fresh hell began. John and I never spoke of it again. I didn’t lose my job until John laid me off again a year later, with the country in recession and a dramatic drop in business. We’d all done too good a job prepping everyone for the Year 2000 Techpocalypse, because no one wanted to upgrade. When John let me go again, we both knew it wasn’t forever. I started a new job but it was high-pressure and I’d sunk deep into a years-long personal depression. I caught the boomerang when it returned. “I’m ready to take you back,” John said. “Business has picked up and I’ve made some more changes. This time, Nicole, it can be forever. I have a place for you to grow and move into different roles if you want. You can retire here. There will be no more breaks.” I agreed to return, although I privately knew it might not be forever. I’d begun making plans to immigrate to Canada, but I didn’t mention it. We spent our last two years together drama-free. We even took occasional car trips together, but only to the big tech shows. He never stepped out of line again. There are many different ways to handle workplace harassment, few of them really good ones. Even the official advice to take it up with HR or the offender’s boss can backfire badly, even when he’s not married to her. I was forced to deal with John myself. Hardly an unusual situation for women. But I am, as I’ve stated in an earlier article, a proponent of taking up an offense — any one, really, not only workplace harassment — with the offender first, if possible. It’s not always doable. Like with Andrew Cuomo. He possesses all the power and his hapless female employees — and bullied male employees — have none. Photo by cottonbro from Pexels But some harassers have skin in the game . This is the tale of one such. I believe it’s why I ‘won’ this one. John put his marriage, a good employee, and the company coffers at risk, via a needless lawsuit. He wasn’t a monster; but a great boss in other ways — one of the most creative problem-solvers I’ve ever worked with. He helped launch my IT sales career when I was thirty and still trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. Computer sales, trust me, was the last thing I’d have ever selected, but it caught my fire and I ran with it. My backup was the general manager. If John began acting aggressively to make me quit, perhaps a conversation with the general manager and the threat of lawyers might have ended it. I offer my story as one way to handle this . I don’t suggest others should do what I did. In fact, I offer only one universal takeaway: Each situation is unique. Analyze it, talk to friends, including trusted male friends. Consider all the ways you can handle this and choose the one least likely to get you fired. Especially consider what he has to lose if you make a fuss. Consider whether you’re ready to drag lawyers into it. All these elements will play into your ultimate decision, which may be not to confront him at all. Maybe you’ll stay away from him when possible. Or find another job. You have to decide for yourself. I wish I could offer a magic recipe for my happy ending, but I can’t. Your boss isn’t John. I gambled and I won. I took a risk. I don’t know how else I could have handled it. I didn’t want to continue working in a stressful environment wondering what he’d do next. I didn’t stop the thigh touching. I didn’t stopped the rump-swatting. I stopped his behavior when I felt he’d forced my hand. I did, however, enjoy a jolt of new confidence, knowing I’d stood up to a male harasser and beaten him. I knew I didn’t have to tolerate it, that the outcome didn’t always end badly for the woman. It’s one way to handle it; perhaps not the best. What would you have done? This originally appeared on Medium in March 2021.

When people are jerks, do we increase our own suffering with our own layered mis/interpretations? “If you put that picture of me on the Internet I’ll call my lawyer!” So of course that’s exactly where it wound up. Read the funny story behind this photo by Thomas Hawk on Flickr I read many of stories about crappy male and/or white behavior, some threatening, some anger-provoking, some seemingly banal like the woman who was stopped by a creepy guy who wanted her to see his cute puppy. I guess it would have made more impact if she’d been, like, twelve, but she was a grown-up in no danger. Some days you just don’t have much to write about! Another pedestrian story detailed a woman accosted in a largely non-threatening manner by middle-aged drunk guys on a subway. They got off at her stop and followed her for a bit, catcalling and in general being obnoxious boors as drunk people are wont to do. She shut down the comments for being vile and hateful, as you might expect, although it looked as though at least a few of her critics simply called her out for overreacting and overgeneralizing, which is what I wanted to comment, with less snark. Not because she felt unsafe and took precautions to ward off what might turn violent, but I did wonder why she wouldn’t ever wear that same dress again (they never touched her), or why she interpreted it as a personal assault on herself and everything she’d accomplished in life, how it meant nothing now. Seriously? A few drunken assholes on a subway sitting opposite a pretty woman showing a little cleavage acted thoughtlessly in the moment, not mounting a full-on patriarchal assault on female workplace success and progress. She’s thinking, “Everything I’ve ever worked for means nothing. They’ve reduced me down to a mere object and completely dehumanized me. They’re threatened by everything I stand for and they clearly hate women. It’s just another example of how entitled male privilege works together to keep women oppressed and in their place as convenient sperm receptacles.” And they’re thinking, “Yeah! Tits!” Incidents like this happen to women all the time, and sometimes they sound genuinely threatening. Other times it reads like a slow morning on Medium. They’ve happened to me too. But I can’t remember most of them. Unless they were particularly memorable or threatening, I pretty much forget about them. I’m not thinking They’re dehumanizing me! as much as The world is full of assholes seeking to make someone’s life miserable today. Hey, Nicole, here you are, you’ll do! I’m quite sure I’ve experienced a lot more street harassment than the few incidents I can recount. It’s entirely possible I missed a lot of them. I don’t pay much attention to others around me, to the point where I almost got hit by a bus when I first moved to Toronto. When I’m on the subway I read. Zen feminist koan: If a man ogles a woman and she doesn’t notice, has she been harassed? I wonder if any of my ghost harassers hoped to intimidate me and I disappointed by not even noticing their existence. Once I looked up to find a man staring directly at me. He didn’t, as many Toronto men do, look away immediately, terrified they’ll be subjected to a feminist rant. I went back to my book and gave him no further thought. Well, maybe one. Bloody immigrant! He was from one of those countries and hadn’t yet learned you can’t treat women in Canada the way you do back home. But I didn’t care enough to say anything. He wasn’t worthy of my attention. My book engrossed me. I suppose another woman would have gone home in high dudgeon and posted an angry Facebook rant or, if she felt especially like being abused by anonymous misogynists, on Twitter. Or she might have felt genuinely threatened and hurried home, heart pounding. I can’t fault her. My life, and my world aren’t as traumatized as other women’s have been. The ogler posed no threat to me, and I don’t know why he stared. Likely he was some random clueless noob who didn’t know any better, or maybe he hoped to intimidate me, or see if he could get away with more (making me wonder what he might have done had I acted scared or nervous under his gaze — i.e., a potential victim). Last summer someone told me they’d seen me walk down the street many times and men’s heads turned to watch. I never noticed. I’m usually staring at the sidewalk, lost in thought or, more pointlessly, worrying about silly crap. Now that I know it happens — I still don’t look around to see who might be ogling me, as I have a lot of pointless worrying to do. Or I might be laser-focused on feeding the ducks in the park. Is it harassment if you don’t notice? Sometimes we find ways to make incidents worse. We layer our own interpretations and narratives on top of it. We especially do this when we mentally impugn someone’s character or imagine we can read their minds and intentions, like with subway drunks. How did mildly lecherous assholes turn into a Patriarchal Hit Squad? What would I have done? Depending on my mood, I might have engaged with them a bit. “So, you boys look like you were out having fun tonight. Where did you go?” I’d have had my nose in the book. Might have looked up, said, “Hey, I’ve had a long night too, I want to read my book, ‘kay, guys?” Maybe they would have continued being unpleasant and I too would have hurried off the car and done my best to disappear into the night. But, I would have arrived home mildly annoyed and I might, at most, post a funny Facebook rant about drunken idjits on the subway. I’d have forgotten about it by the weekend. Here’s the thing: The world really is full of assholes and you only think you know why they’re being an asshole to you: They hate wo/men They hate your race They hate your (obvious) religious affiliation You look like their ex-spouse/evil mother/father/asshole boss They’re having a really bad day but their response is to give some random passing schmuck (hey, it’s your unlucky day!) some extraneous crap rather than go home and watch funny YouTube videos They suffer from genuine mental health problems They’re up to their ass in pandemic-related unemployment, depression and stress and their brains aren’t functioning properly. Assholes come in many varieties. Photo by cottonbro from Pexels None of these are good reasons to give an innocent stranger crap, but their mysterious reason for harassing you could be any of these things, and utterly unrelated to you, your life, or whatever you’ve interpreted it to mean. There’s uncalled-for suffering, and then there’s cranking up your response worse with cognitive distortions and misinterpretations. We aren’t mind-readers. We need to remember this. The writer on the subway was white, as were, I assume, her inebriated fan club. What if she’d been black and they hadn’t said anything specifically racial? She might interpret it as racist nevertheless, which she might not have done if her harassers were black. It’s why I dislike debates about ‘microaggressions’. Sure, they’re real and they happen — but perhaps not as much as we think. Another Zen koan: If the other person didn’t intend to ‘microaggress’ against you, and didn’t even know they upset you, were you truly microaggressed? We take a bad, or a mildly annoying situation, and make it worse speculating what the other person was doing/thinking/believing/seeing. I wonder if the ‘offense’ we think we incurred is against ourselves. Our thoughts are real, but our beliefs aren’t. — Tara Brach, Buddhist teacher I’ve been creating stress and drama for myself obsessing over how much I think I’m screwing up on the job. I work with various clients for a freelance sales agency and I’m forever convinced I’m screwing up, I’m a pain in the ass to everyone, I’m not doing right by the clients, they hate me and think I’m doing an awful job and will ask I be removed forthwith so someone who knows what the hell they’re doing can get some real shit done. And every damn time I’m in a meeting with the folks who run the business, without my asking like a neurotic insecure mess, they tell me how much the clients love me and how they wish they had more freelancers like me. How they stick me on campaigns someone else got removed from at the client’s request. Why do I think everyone thinks I do a lousy job? I asked myself. It didn’t take too long to identify the culprit. There’s only one person who really thinks I’m an idiot. Imposter Syndrome, big-time. I create a lot of my own suffering. I tell myself toxic stories and I believe them. I’ve been at war with myself for at least twenty years, and even before, I was my own worst frenemy. Often I felt good about myself but never too good. Some nasty person in the back of my head told me I suck. I’m an idiot. I’m not worthy. I call the bitch ‘The Terminator’. I tell myself toxic stories about others, too, but less about random strangers. If some guy gives me crap on the street, I shrug it off and throw him in the Asshole container in my brain. It doesn’t do me any good to take it personally. I can choose not to. I can choose not to add to some uncalled-for drama by telling myself the person was misogynist, or racist, or jealous of me. I sure as shit don’t need to be telling myself they’ve negated everything I’ve ever worked for. It’s bullshit. It’s oppression I created by myself, for myself. Even if they do say something misogynist, or racist, or otherwise nasty, I can choose to say The hell with him or her, s/he’s just a stupid misogynist/racist/hater, etc. The best revenge can be to totally not give a fuck. I don’t always do it, of course. Sometimes assholes strike a nerve and I react. I get mad. I obsess about it, nagging it like a dog with a bone — and it’s how I make it worse. S/he accomplished their goal, to make my life worse, with my help. What I should have said. What I should have done. Woulda-shoulda-coulda. Sometimes I have to consciously put it behind me and think, “Nicole, you have more important things to do than worry what some jerk said or did. What do you care what s/he thinks?” Buddhism teacher Tara Brach says, “Our thoughts are real, but our beliefs aren’t.” Put this on when you’re doing mindless chores. Tara Brach rocks!!! The lady on the subway’s experience with drunks was real, along with her fearful reaction. What wasn’t was the interpretation she layered over it, increasing her suffering. Really, how did this become a patriarchal commentary on everything she’s accomplished in life? She made that shit up. Maybe it’s what those guys thought, but I doubt it, and I’m quite certain she’s not a mindreader. We want to make sense of our environment and why things happen to us. The human brain forever looks for meaning in patterns — in clouds, onion buns, personal interactions. The ancients believed the gods gave them messages via animal entrails, tea dregs, the way the birds flew. More often than not, it means far less than we think. The grill accidentally created an image of Jesus. The serpent cloud isn’t an evil omen. I’m reading the leaves at the bottom of your cup and prophesying you’re ready for a refill. The clients don’t think I’m an idiot. My friends don’t think I’m a loser. My family doesn’t think I’m not good enough. Only one person thinks all those toxic thoughts about me, and she’s a real superbitch. I’ve begun challenging her. I’ve begun stopping her from her favorite thought, “Nicole, you idiot…” The problem is she’s said it so often, and for so long, I believe her. Often, the stories we tell in our heads are more indicative of the storyteller than the person who caused our grief. Who’s the real microaggressor in our lives? This first appeared on Medium in March 2021.

Too many preach misogyny and teach victimhood. Tolerance for religious toxicity ENDS NOW. Image by Pilar Molina from Pixabay A sexually twisted white Atlanta churchgoer murdered Asian employees at spas targeted repeatedly by police for prostitution stings. The accused, claiming to have a sex addiction, frequented two of the places before his deadly attack. Racism may well have played a role, but largely overlooked is the Christian evangelical obsession with unauthorized sexual pleasure. It’s about the worst sin anyone can commit, and the one evangelicals struggle with the most. The shooter was a Baptist , a notoriously misogynist and sexually repressed religious ‘brand’, and himself a member of a particular church so lacking in Christian compassion they’ve expelled him. Because nothing says ‘Christian’ like hating the sinner, right? Which bothers them more? That he killed alleged prostitutes, or that he may have fornicated with some of them? Women: Can’t live with ’em, but you can kill ‘em. Especially if you can’t keep your dick out of them. After all, it’s our fault for tempting them with our faces and bodies. Men have been passing the buck to women since Adam blamed Eve. Why do we tolerate these toxic human constructs? If we condemn what incels and men’s-righters spew in their frustrated forums, why do we fall silent and look the other way when some guy in a collar or a funny cap spews similar dehumanizing nonsense against women? It’s not just certain Christian faiths. Many other religions could do with less tolerance from us unwashed, heathen, apostate and feminist masses. Especially from us Jezebels, Rahabs, Liliths and Magdalenes. If we’re serious about wanting to end patriarchy’s female abuse and victimization, we’ve got to woman up and call out the source: Patriarchy’s religions. And now we name names. Growing up spiritual…and rational I’ve written much about women’s empowerment, encouraging us to claim our power, take it back, not give it away in the first place. I encourage women to be more, stand up more, speak out more, no matter what they say about or to us. It’s hard; I know. Me too. I took an online assertiveness class last fall even though I’m no shrinking violet. I give away my power too, for a multiplicity of reasons. Fortunately, I can’t blame childhood toxic religious indoctrination. I might have suffered the horror of a repressed, misogynist Catholic upbringing but my future Pépé left the Church in nineteenth-century France after witnessing ‘things’ as an altarboy. You can guess. Dad and his siblings grew up non-religious. When he married my mother, they agreed she could raise the children Lutheran but not to look down on or judge Dad for not going to church. So, my mainstream religious upbringing was boring, in fine staid German Lutheran tradition, but it didn’t teach me to ‘know my proper place’ and prime me for abuse . After the last four years of Trumpy hell and his fake Christian supporters, it’s time to cap tolerance for toxic faith-based constructs. Everyone has a right to their beliefs, but we needn’t tolerate those which denigrate and degrade our tribe and others’. The problem with bad ideas is they spread and mutate, like a killer virus. Creative Commons 2.0 image by Mark Dixon on Wikimedia Commons Politics and religion: Where anti-intellectualism meets and metastasizes Unchallenged religious anti-intellectualism has allowed secular agenda-oriented groups to adopt, consciously or not, the Christian evangelical framework . QAnon’s complex crazy-sounding Satanism and pedophilia conspiracy theories borrow older evangelical hysterics about alleged networks of child-abusing Satanists in late 20th-century America. The mental framework remains the same: Apocalyptic thinking, for predicting the ‘end times’ seeded by ‘drops’ (‘Q’s’ anonymous posts) for the faithful with clues. Secular believers can ‘connect the dots’ the way evangelicals have long combed the Bible looking for prophecies connected to current events. ‘Q’ is presumed to be closer to The Truth, like a religious leader, and followers must put their faith in him (it must be a him). The human mind finds patterns anywhere, from clouds and sacred grilled cheese sandwiches to pizza pedophiles. Anti-intellectual religion trains human brains to ignore facts and the evidence, or lack thereof, of their own lying eyes. How hard is it, then, to train these primed gullibles to believe increasingly outrageous, unverifiable ‘data’? Similarities to the Christian evangelical model have been observed by others in the current antiracism movement. Black intellectual John McWhorter finds a religious element in some corners of ‘Third Wave’ civil rights. It includes ‘original sin’ (white skin = white supremacy), a hazy futuristic ‘Judgment Day’ (‘Coming to terms about race’), ‘witch hunts’ against ‘heretics’, and excommunication thereof (‘Cancel culture’), including the medieval vicious mob and no court of appeal nor any forgiveness for sincere repentance. Not to mention religion’s most cherished requirement: Suspension of disbelief. Or as the Queen of Hearts said to Alice, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” McWhorter lists ten impossible, or at least highly contradictory things one is required to believe in some quarters of antiracism. Not unlike a certain highly contradictory holy book. One finds almost exactly McWhorter’s same list in critical gender theory feminism, beginning with penile ‘original sin’. The bad ideas in traditionalist religions spawned a new bad idea — QAnon — and infected two good ideas — antiracism and feminism. Now some activists sound every bit as bigoted as the racial and gender bigots they claim to fight. Not exactly conducive to encouraging allyship. Is it any surprise, then, that Americans of all faiths, secular or not, find it increasingly difficult to differentiate between fantasy and reality, especially when the fantasy serves their own interests? Gender and politics Religion’s greatest crime against women has been to lay down the foundations of ‘patriarchy’ by enshrining men’s rights, wants, and needs as primary, with women to serve as the implementers based on their lordly commands — a useful mentality extended to other slaves too. The Agricultural Revolution birthed income inequality, social hierarchy and slavery, but religion ensured its unquestioned acceptance and dominance because ‘God(s) decreed it, we believe it, and heretics will be dealt with accordingly and painfully lest they cause the slaves to question their leaders too much. Especially our wives.’ How and why women came to be so dominated by men is a matter of debate but our brains are primed for it and we may never resolve the question, Were we this submissive 12,000 years ago or did we de/evolve that way because of the new hierarchies? Here we are, twelve millennia later, raised in spiritual and religious belief systems still designed by men, for men, to suit men. Photo by Chester Ho on Unsplash Unquestioned religious constructs and an overcompensating modern desire to honor freedom of belief after a history of horrible cruelties inflicted on those who didn’t share official opinion preserves a dangerous ability to conflate and mistake belief for reality. We need to demand more adherence to reality than religious constructs in our political candidates. Sixty years ago it was considered ‘anti-Catholic’ to question whether presidential candidate John F. Kennedy’s primary loyalty would be to his country or his Pope. I want to know a wannabe’s religion, if any. Is s/he a member of a progressive, liberal-minded faith (a ‘heretic’ even) or do they adhere to a more traditionalist brand? Does the Christian or Jewish candidate still hew to archaic Biblical beliefs about a woman’s place ‘in the home’? How seriously do they take rape, domestic violence and sexual assault, and, given the level of rabid anti-intellectualism among ‘Christian’ Republicans, do they actually understand female physiology, and do they agree she has agency over whatever that thing is she’s living in? Does the Muslim candidate respect women’s equality, both within their family and without? Some women from ‘progressive’ Muslim families claim women’s equality often stops at their front door. Muslim candidates get extra scrutiny from me because of the religion’s traditional hostility to women’s rights, however uncharacteristically female-positive The Prophet was (and he was) for his time. What does the Mormon candidate think about women’s rights? About child marriage? Is s/he willing to go after their fundamentalist brethren in their cult-y compounds and rescue illegal brides from child rapists ? Speaking of child rapists, the Pope and the Catholic Church’s influence have waned mightily, but I demand to know: Does the Catholic candidate support a woman’s right to choose abortion? Are they against domestic violence, and are they willing to support stronger laws against abusers? How much are they willing to fight child abuse, particularly their own you-know-whos? And what do any of them think about gay rights? Homophobia, juiced by ancient holy texts from old men living in deserts, is closely linked to misogyny. Ergo, a homophobic candidate will likely fear women and equality. Photo by Steve Damron on Flickr Leash your dogma It’s no wonder the world is drowning in secular conspiracy theories and fantasy-based belief systems, considering their enshrined, sacred roots in traditional religions. Who are we to preach science to a QAnon cultist that flu vaccines don’t increase your risk of getting COVID-19, if we believe a religious founder made water flow from his hands or another turned water into wine ? How can we argue there’s no ‘plandemic’ when we believe a dying child is somehow ‘God’s plan’? The ‘plandemic’ virologist has been thoroughly discredited by responsible adults, but too many, and especially many Americans, lack critical thinking skills and don’t understand the importance of checking one’s sources, comparing them for factualism and bias. Media Bias Fact Check Snopes The age-old problem for women is unquestioned, unchallenged male-created religious belief systems, attributed to deities no one can see but others are entirely certain are there, teaching women to be and remain submissive to authority and to keep their pretty little mouths shut when that (male) authority abuses their body or mind. Legion are the tales of women escaping abusive religious systems, who then speak out about what happened and why. We need to critically and publicly dissect the toxic fact-free religious beliefs training them — and us — to be patriarchal tools from birth. It’s time to put toxic masculinist religion back in its place. Religion belongs at home and in their holy places, and it needs to respect human rights. Enforced if required. Questions for challenging religious women today Does your religious organization allow female leaders? Are there female elders? How supportive are your members for women escaping domestic abuse? Do they blame the woman rather than the childishly impulsive man? Are victims told to go back and tolerate it for some damn reason? God says no divorce, this is God’s test for you, you need to submit to your husband and be a better wife and mother? What’s your response for the male abuser in your religious body? Does anyone have a hard discussion or several about the importance of applying the Golden Rule to one’s partner? What if the accused is your clergyman? Does your religion insist on sexual purity for women but wink and look the other way for men? Do they fetishize female virginity? Was your husband a virgin when he married you? Does your religion mandate the mutilation of female genitals to prevent future enjoyment of sex and/or to keep a girl ‘pure’ until her wedding day? Is your religious tribe unnaturally preoccupied with women’s bodies and dictate what she must wear with special micromanagement for a woman’s most ‘problematic’ body parts? Are women’s presence or behavior curtailed because it might give men unholy thoughts or ‘ideas’? Is there a tacit ‘understanding’ men are little boys who can’t control their thoughts and actions? Have they sanctified old men’s lust for teenage or pre-teenage brides? Do they have ugly words for women who act sexually like men? Women must stop tolerating toxic, patriarchal masculinity masquerading as some god’s word. Even Buddhism is less misogyny-free than advertised. If the women within can’t or won’t do anything to stop it, it’s our job as heretics, apostates, and freethinkers to publicly condemn women who defend religiously sanctioned misogyny and unequal treatment and to pressure not just religious leaders, but also the faithful themselves. Pressuring Catholic followers to do something about their priests hobbled the Church’s influence. The Believers always hold the real power : To diminish the flock by leaving and even worse, taking their money with them. Lawyers are expensive, you know. And a leader without followers is just some asshole shouting into the wind. Time to call the believers to account I believe, still, in religion, spirituality and ‘faith’. We all have faith in something . You know where I have a LOT of faith? Quantum physics. I don’t understand that shit. I trust the physicists who say they can’t prove what they theorize, but everyone agrees the math supports it. And you know what, Pastor, Rabbi, or Imam, if you want to waggle your finger at me and laugh like a banshee because I naively believe physics leaders on their bugshit crazy theories like quantum entanglement — I don’t blame you. Quantum entanglement is some seriously fucked up shit. Look, I understand why saviours born of virgins and burning bushes and talking snakes are more appealing. Frankly, they make more sense than this. A call to action for more female-friendly religions Facts must come first. We shall know them by their verifiable evidence. Here’s what we need to make religion safe for women again: ‘My god’ or ‘my holy book says so’ can no longer be an acceptable reason for religious bigotry against women. If we can all agree holy books were wrong about the acceptability of human slavery, we can agree they’re wrong about women’s rights, too. Abuses against women and children in religious compounds and groups must be taken seriously by authorities. No looking the other way for fear of being called a religious bigot. Freedom of religion does NOT include physical, mental, emotional, or sexual abuse of adults or children. End tax breaks for religious organizations. Or, they MUST adhere to secular equality laws for tax breaks. A return to and healthy respect for secularism and logical thinking overall. Various gods’ opinions are irrelevant. DON’T VOTE FOR PATRIARCHY. Every woman, regardless of color, who voted for Donald Trump or other candidates with previously established sexual misconduct allegations against them or anti-women policy support needs to be challenged, and now. Intolerance for misogynist politicians starts with their female lapdogs. More women in STEM, fewer in religious study. Photo by Chester Ho on Unsplash The hell with the ‘offense’ to the faithful. If we can call out Donald Trump and Congressional misogynists, we can call out the toxic culprits in Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Shintoism, Hinduism and Sikkhism , not to mention weirdo cults like NXIVM . There’s nothing wrong with religion, religious belief, or even in believing six impossible things before breakfast. But religion should make the world a better place — for everybody . If others have to suffer, it’s useless. Creative Commons 3 — CC BY-SA 3.0 by Nick Youngson This first appeared on Medium in April 2021

How much better would Twitter be without the Toxic Left? Scenes from next week: Twitter prepares to punish J.K. Rowling for tweeting ‘Women suckle babies with their breasts’. Photo by Den on Unsplash If you’re even a little active on Twitter, the sudden toxicity drop last year after the platform removed right-wing QAnon-connected accounts following the Trump-fuelled terrorist attack on Washington was nothing short of breathtaking. One day, you saw the usual trending hashtags from trolls, cyberbullies, and bots from both ideological sides: #TrumpIsNotWell #TrumpSavesAmerica #TrumpForever #TrumpTrainWreck #Trump2020 #DestroyTrump #TrumpsMyBabyDaddy. (Okay I made that last one up. Ha ha! No one has sex with Donald Trump anymore!) The next day, you clicked your Twitter button, and trending topics spanned the sublime to the ridiculous: The latest news on the pandemic and public vaccines progress; politics involving people not named Trump; the never-ending British Royals; vacuous celebrity gossip; some musician’s or band’s latest album or video. And of course, who’s getting cancelled for petty stupid crap, blown out of proportion mostly by younger generations riddled with depression, stress, anxiety, and dim prospects for their future; and that was before the pandemic. Now they’re forced to stay home, with even more time to take out their hostilities on anyone and anything. With real villains like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Derek Chauvin, and Jake Angeli in jail, and Donald Trump cowering in Mar-A-Lago, Generation Self-Esteem consoles itself for its unfortunate unspecial averageness by attacking others over perceived slights and insults, desperately seeking a holier-than-thou narcissism supply fix. As Rowan Atkinson famously described cancel culture, it’s a ‘medieval mob looking for someone to burn.’ After enduring years of criticism for allowing too much fake news, conspiracy theories, disinformation and extremist views, not to mention having enabled the 2016 election to swing to a narcissistic manchild with troubling signs of dementia, social media responded by banning the right’s Great Orange God. Or now, officially, their Golden God. Moses is about to lose his shit all over again. Photo screenshotted from video by News 360 TV on Wikimedia Commons , Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Twitter banned over 70,000 QAnon-connected accounts, and the next morning, you could almost hear the birds singing and feel the sun shining down on Twitter. Almost. Then Gina Carano and Chris Harrison got ‘cancelled’ for saying things that upset unemployed children. The grand irony about Carano is she got cancelled for making a ridiculous overblown comparison, of Republicans to Jews in Nazi Germany, by people who committed the same error, with an overblown comparison to Nazis, leaving actual Nazis to wonder, “Which side is ours?” Harrison’s unforgivable crime? To defend someone whose old photos of her attending an Antebellum South party surfaced. In the court of self-righteous, ‘social justice’ warriors’ opinion, the fifty shades of grey harm don’t exist. It’s Pass/Fail, and the punishment for failure is career and reputation execution. For those of us in the Murky Middle, the Toxic Left reminds us that with the worst of the Orange God’s cult banished to the underground, now they were Masters of the Twitterverse. Twitter makes me feel like a pre-9/11 Afghan caught between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban. No matter who’s in charge, it’s going not going to be good. The good, the bad and the ugly of cancel culture Cancel culture isn’t all evil. It plays an important role — sometimes — in addressing important grievances like sexual assault and racism. When people are guilty of genuine crimes or put others’ lives in danger, like ‘Karens’ with itchy 911 fingers, cancel culture serves the public interest by removing dangerous people from the public sphere and giving them something else to worry about than black birdwatchers. Digging up someone’s hidden past is fair game for the same reasons, like with now-notorious celebrity sexual predators. Not so much for ancient grievances not quite on the same level as Bill Cosby. Like going to an Antebellum South party fifteen minutes before white people got ‘woke’ about slavery or being an un-woke mid-twentieth-century movie star like John Wayne. Wayne was a product of his time; we all are. Many of us will find our views, values, and practices quite ‘unwoke’ for 2071. As for minor grievances like antebellum parties or blackface, sure, they’re offensive and we can call them out but no one needs to lose their job over it. Not even if they do it today. Not everyone who offends the Toxic Left gets ‘cancelled’. They may get called out and shamed a bit but still keep their job and career. Sometimes, even, public shaming reveals ‘good to know’ information. Like Armie Hammer’s violent and cannibalistic sexual fantasies. He hasn’t, to anyone’s knowledge, committed any actual crimes but it’s valuable for women to know this about a guy if the information’s available. Not many of us mortals are likely to get asked out by Hammer, but if I was a female celebrity with a brain and concern for my personal safety, I’d want to know. Female celebrities don’t always draw warnings from important celebrity public service announcements, but whatever. Ya makes yer choices. When does cancel culture cross the line? Is cancel culture censorship? Was banning QAnon-addled Trumpers associated with the January 6th terrorist attack censorship? I won’t address that debate here. Mostly because the Trump era pushed my lifelong support for the First Amendment to acknowledging we may need more limits on free speech than public safety and treason. I haven’t made up my mind yet, but part of why I waver is this: Twitter is more delightfully boring than before the terrorist attack. It’s less triggering to check in without 70,000 deplorable ‘conservatives’ and their bots pushing the most execrable views on the rest of us in a forum without the filters and controls of Facebook and Instagram. Now, I find myself wishing, if only we could get rid of the thousands of deplorable ‘progressives’ and their bots looking for ever-stupider excuses to destroy other peoples’ lives over hyper-exaggerated harms. Today, all you have to do is be seen at an anti-Black Lives Matter protest listening , not participating, to lose your job. Sorry, but if it’s lawful and legal to stage a protest, however unpopular, you shouldn’t lose your job for attending. Forbes Magazine: Cancel Culture Is Only Getting Worse Imagine if those professors lost their jobs for ‘being seen’ at a pro-choice rally by students from their conservative Christian school. Which would the über-lefty torches ’n’ pitchforks set cancel? The onlookers or their school? Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported image from Topher Harless Let’s remember: You can still voice unpopular opinions on Twitter. Trump’s fanboys and fangirls are still there, tweeting hateful comments and opinions, but that’s perfectly fair when the Toxic Left’s misogynist deplorables call J.K. Rowling a ‘transphobic cunt’ for daring to stand for women’s rights. If destroying lives and property during a physical terrorist attack is good enough reason to ‘censor’ someone, then maybe it’s okay to do the same for those who would destroy lives and careers for middling reasons. Us Murky Middlers are as tired of the Toxic Left’s moral Purity Police as we are of the sexually-repressed Christian Right’s crusades against female orgasms. Where do we set cancel culture’s limits? How about ‘truth’ over ‘opinions’? After the last four years and its inevitable conclusion at the Capitol, it’s become clear to rational minds that we need to return to ancient standards of journalism, factualism and truth-telling. (You know, like, the 1960s and ‘70s). Nearly 600,000 Americans have died in the past fourteen months because a dangerously incompetent ‘President’ daily tweeted lies, dis/misinformation, conspiracy theories, and insanely credulous faith in medical quackery while discrediting genuine experts with real science to distract from the fact that he had no idea what to do in the middle of a global public health crisis, nor did he care. Not only is the Orange God responsible for this travesty of compassion, but so are every single supporter and voter, including the ones with ‘voter’s remorse.’ Cancel culture’s limits should be at how factual something is (Harvey Weinstein is a dangerous sexual predator) versus opinions (JK Rowling is a horrible person even though her claims about gender are supported with research and hard science). We need to hold mainstream journalists, bloggers, social media and its users to a higher standard of factualism and truth-telling. And not just for the Right. Can Twitter cancel toxic cancel culture? Genuine social justice is still alive in cancel culture; it’s not all cyberbullies and morally narcissistic trolls, the online equivalent of losers walking into a bar spoiling for a fight. Twitter temporarily suspends problematic accounts and labels or removes false or misleading information about COVID-19 or the 2020 election. It implements ‘hash technology’ to remove content like child porn, ISIS recruitment, and white nationalist propaganda. It’s outright banned notorious personalities like Alex Jones, Trump fanboys Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, and even Donald Trump himself before he left the White House, but after the terrorist attack. And of course, QAnon is now QA-Gone. What can Twitter do to remove cancel culture cancer without killing the body politic? There needs to be a greater public will for starters. Twitter’s policy on hate speech is this: You may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease. We also do not allow accounts whose primary purpose is inciting harm towards others on the basis of these categories. Shouldn’t trying to get someone fired or their contract cancelled fall under the ‘direct attack’ proviso? It’s a fuzzy area, but the last four years have illustrated we may need to implement more controls on ‘free speech’ than we’re used to. After all, the Founding Fathers couldn’t have conceived of Twitter or other social media platforms, and even if we could ask them, I’d not trust their 18th-century opinions anyway. This rolls outside the First Amendment’s wheelhouse. I don’t have any of the answers but I want to start the conversation. If we’re serious about eliminating ‘hate speech’, we’ve got to go after all of it, and no one has yet ‘cleaned house’ with the Toxic Left. What would Twitter look like without the Toxic Left? Canceling the Toxic Left can’t happen overnight. Here’s why: ‘Acceptable trade-offs’. Let’s return to the Toxic Right for a moment. Twitter has been slower to ban white nationalists for a sticky-wicket reason: It might disproportionately affect Republicans. Some may accept the inconvenience for some accounts accidentally swept into the fight against ISIS terrorists as a small enough price to pay, but Twitter believes banning politicians may not be regarded by the public as an acceptable trade-off to rid the platform of white supremacy content. They may have a point. Trump critics called for him to be permanently banned in 2017 and Twitter held off, fearing the repercussions of banning a sitting President at least until he pushed it too far inciting violence. What’s an acceptable trade-off for innocent, or somewhat more innocent accounts caught in a cancel culture dragnet? It would likely affect mostly private citizens. What would the public’s appetite be if Twitter banned 70,000 hateful ‘wokies’? A more judicious response might be to put a set of policy limits in place and temporarily suspend accounts who attack others and encourage tweeters to get them fired. Later, flat-out ban them, as they did to QAnon, which resulted in a 70% drop in election misinformation on the platform. In conclusion We need cancel culture. Like many well-meaning social justice practices, it’s been used and abused, arguably by millions. I can’t argue we should cancel it entirely when it’s brought down piggy-eyed Harvey Weinstein and mass rapist Bill Cosby and made it harder for Andrew Cuomo to get a date. I favor reforming rather than eliminating it, forcing the Left to confront its own toxic elements as we now force men, white people, religious evangelicals and Trumpers themselves to confront their own toxic beliefs and practices. I’d like to see cancel culture take itself seriously and view itself more like Black Lives Matter: A serious force for justice addressing critical systemic issues that will demonstrably improve the world for everybody, rather than what it is today: A movement more akin to an egomaniacal National Enquirer on steroids, destroying careers and even lives. More George Floyd and less Meghan Markle, kids. You know it’s true. This first appeared on Medium in May 2021.

How can we be sure she was raped if she doesn’t understand the difference between ‘consent’ and ‘rape’? Victim feminists. They’re so cute when they play at being grownups, less so when they’re infantilizing women. CC0 image from Pxhere Have you seen the movie where George Clooney’s character gets raped by a woman? Up In The Air (2009) is the story of a corporate ‘downsizer’ (Clooney) hired to fire people by companies too wussy to do it themselves. His character begins an affair with a fellow uber-traveler and later learns she’s married. She rejects him, calling what they had merely ‘an escape’. Some feminist intellectuals now argue that if a man lies to a woman to get sex, he’s committing ‘sexual fraud’ and that it may constitute rape; can she truly consent if he lies to her? Well… That means Clooney’s character, and his real-world counterparts, were raped, since women also lie about marital status and other ‘sexual fraud’ details to get what they want out of men. Do we agree these women are, therefore, rapists? How badly do we want these ‘rapists’ punished? “It’s not really rape!” I read an article here by a woman considering the opinions of these feminist intellectuals, musing that perhaps she’d been ‘raped’ by a guy who lied about not having a girlfriend. She gave sexual consent believing he was fully single. She fell for him, and got hurt. In the olden days we recognized you had to be careful because sometimes men lie to get laid. In certain legal eagle minds, I guess, it now constitutes ‘rape’. To be fair, the writer wrote from the perspective of not having made up her mind, and she considered alternative views offered in some of the comments she received. I was gratified to see a woman willing to consider challenges to her opinion without getting defensive, by agreeing that this or that response was food for thought. Yay for rational feminism! But the idea that ‘rape by deception’ ( a genuine legal issue ) can now include minor lies is troubling. The justice system handles ‘rape by deception’ where real lasting damage occurs — an STD, an unwanted pregnancy, or what happened to a very close friend of mine — death by AIDS, when his partner ‘stealthed’ him by removing the condom. But ‘rape by deception’ because s/he lied about their singlehood status? I find it deeply troubling. The damage was she got hurt. Not her fault but part of growing up romantically and equal risk for all. I thought, “Every incel, MRA, Trumper, and sexual predator can point to this and say, “See? Women don’t even know the difference between consent and rape! How many women are calling what’s nothing more than a bad sexual experience rape?” That’s exactly how it looks. To me, too. Why it’s still so hard to ‘believe the woman’ I must wonder where all those high ‘rape statistics’ come from. I’m serious. This is how feminist intellectual abrogation of female responsibility casts doubt on rape claims. We make almost glacial progress attempting to treat rape and sexual assault as seriously as they merit, and certain feminists aren’t helping. In fact, they’re hurting the effort. Holding it back. Historically, women subjected to rape or sexual assault haven’t been believed, or worse, blamed. Twentieth-century feminism challenged this, beginning with Susan Brownmiller’s seminal work Against Our Will, which dragged rape out of the back alley and into our dinner party conversations. At some point in the late ’80s and early ’90s, overeager feminists, working to remove the ‘blame the victim’ stigma, began treating women as though they had little agency and were never responsible for their decisions. Some explicitly said activist efforts needed to keep the focus completely on men, the gender overwhelmingly responsible for rape. The unfortunate consequence has been to ignore the woman’s role, assuming near-helplessness, and work toward a feminist fantasy utopia where somehow, magically, men stop raping. Some good came out of it: We debate consent, and how it’s given, and whether it’s given. An unconscious woman didn’t consent just because she didn’t struggle or say no. Even if fully conscious, she didn’t necessarily consent if a man was pushing himself on her, and she feared what would happen if she did say no (‘grey rape’). Consent debate resulted in a more fine-tuned legal environment and clearer restrictions for loophole-seeking sexual predators. Women’s perceived helplessness accelerated when some suggested there should be regular ‘check-ins’ even throughout whatever act participants engage in. Although the conversation regularly framed around ‘partners’, without specifying who should be asking who, one wonders for whom these sexual Best Practices were for. It’s hard to imagine they were meant for men who might change their mind in the middle of a blowjob, afraid to tell the woman to stop. It suggested women were so prone to changing their mind, so easily intimidated while a man is pumping above them in an originally 100% consensual act, that she can’t speak up and say stop if she’s really feeling uncomfortable. Which kind of makes you wonder whether a man can suddenly turn into a ‘rapist’ because the woman changed her mind and didn’t say so. Or explicitly. That said, men have abused the consent concept, without question. A friend once told me his brother bragged he’d anally raped two separate women and gotten away with it. It started out with consensual vaginal sex and turned into something else. He did it knowing how it would sound in court. Arguing a new level of consent, where the woman can claim she was ‘raped’ because the guy lied about something, may discourage women from becoming sexually responsible adults. If women have ‘agency’, they also have responsibility, including being quite clear before the clothes come off what they want, who they want, when they want, and how they want it. Denying this infantilizes women and their choices far more effectively than any ‘patriarchy’. Muddying the consent waters with frivolous ever-broadened rape definitions make it more difficult to ‘believe women’ when they ‘tell their truths’. Rape is about real force or threat , not a woman who got played by a guy, or who made a simple mistake. Instead of beating herself up over it, she can learn from it. She can date more wisely. “Nuh-uh. I’ve seen this movie before, I know how it ends.” Photo by Keira Burton from Pexels Did he force her or did she just get played? We pay a lot of lip service to ‘female agency’ but don’t like it so much when it backfires. A woman’s agency is sacred when she decides what to do about her accidental pregnancy, but flies from certain feminist minds when she exhibits poor judgment in sexual partners, perhaps due understandably to youth and inexperience. We’ve come to a point in our First World privileged lives where we believe every wrong done to us must be legally addressed. The legal definition of consent broadens as victim feminists, perhaps in denial of their own fear of female power , self-determination, and sexual responsibility, not to mention that much vaunted personal agency , play directly into traditional patriarchal notions that women are just silly little dears who don’t know their own heads. It plays right into misogynist legislators’ hands who seek to return control of female sexuality back to men, like it was back in the good old days. ‘Sexual fraud’ by lying paints women as somehow mentally deficient, incapable of making conscious, informed decisions about their sexuality. Both sexes make plenty of mistakes and bad decisions early in their romantic experience: Discovering you can’t always trust others, particularly when hormones are bubbling like a shaken can of beer. It’s harder to ‘believe women’ when REAL rape is diluted by denying women’s inconvenient choices . Did he force her or did she just get played? The law is NOT there to address hurt feelings, which is the real consequence. You can argue about the many shades of legal consent, but what it comes down to is this: You got played. You got hurt. You learn your lesson and move on, hopefully wiser and better-armed against the next player. Women afraid of their agency It’s easier to tell yourself you got raped than that you got duped. We beat ourselves up over our decisions and victimhood-centered feminism rides to the rescue, encouraging us to point fingers at the man, or men, or ‘patriarchy’. They tell us it’s not our fault and anyone who says otherwise is ‘blaming the victim’. It’s not in their interests to note that big girls old enough to have sex are old enough to learn from their mistakes and not blame only others. Photo by Misha Voguel from Pexels When it comes to sex, victim feminists don’t do self-actualization. They don’t do self-awareness. They don’t spend nearly as much time examining themselves and women’s psychological and emotional weaknesses as they do ‘the patriarchy’s’. They don’t, on some level, want other women to claim their agency and power either. It raises too many doubts about their own complicity in past mistakes. Too many questions about what they might have learned earlier if only . They’d rather not consider women’s psychological vulnerabilities because then they might have to address their own. And take ownership. And change. When we examine ourselves, when we honestly question our contributions, we often have to face personal truths we don’t like. Like that we ignored warning flags or an underlying feeling something wasn’t right with his story. But we went ahead and shagged him anyway because we listened to our vagina rather than our brain. And we got hurt. It’s his fault he lied, and yes, I can see how it’s ‘sexual fraud’, but it’s a buzzword, not a legal definition unless a real crime has occurred, and more importantly a real rape. If you fear the words ‘real rape’ (versus, say, ‘false rape’), you should. Because victim feminism encourages the distinction. Not outright rape lies, which occur far less than men think, but ‘false rape’ when she thinks she was raped even though she fully consented , even if without all the data. ‘I’m on something’ Just imagine what the notion of ‘sexual fraud as rape’ will do to the most time-honored words for the following: ‘I love you’. Or, ‘I want to marry you.’ Or, ‘I’m a very rich man.’ Now let’s turn around what ‘sexual fraud’ looks when the man is the recipient: She said, ‘I love you/want to marry you.’ Or, ‘I’m still a virgin.’ Or, ‘You’re the only man I’m sleeping with.’ Once again — hurt feelings, and sexual fraud , but how is it the justice system’s responsibility to avenge someone’s poorly-considered consent? So, she believed him when he said he intended to marry her. And he believed her when she said there was only one other man before him and that was her ex-fiance. Throw them both in jail! Now, consider this, legal eagles: Does a man now have a legal right to charge a woman with ‘sexual fraud’ if she claims (not he assumes ) she’s using birth control, and gets pregnant? Lots and lots of women have done this. I’ve watched it unfold. I’ve watched a friend walk blithely into a pregnancy trap with a girlfriend who’d heavily pressured him to marry her. It was so predictable. The world’s most common sexual fraud whine: “She said she was oooonnnnn something!” I didn’t feel the slightest bit sorry for him, he got down on his knees and begged for it. How stupid could he have been? (Nicole! Don’t blame the victim! ) Lucky for him she miscarried shortly after. She might have said she was on something when she wasn’t. Who knew women could lie? Some ‘men’s rights’ activists argue they shouldn’t have to pay for abortions or support babies ‘fraudulently’ conceived. ‘Sexual fraud’ as a legal defense just got a helluva lot less attractive, I’m guessing. ‘Patriarchy’ is real and has infantilized women for millennia. Feminists obsessed with women’s victimhood, who can’t let go of historical grievances, ignore the very real power and agency women have today we didn’t have even fifty years ago. They aid and abet the very ‘patriarchy’ they rail against. Image by Alexander Krivitskiy from Pixabay How can we be trusted with the right to vote when we can’t even be trusted to know what we want sexually? When we’re so easily duped by sweet-talkin’ lyin’ cheaters and scam artists? When we go running, ironically, to the ‘patriarchal government and justice system’ to salve our hurt feelings and avenge us like men were expected to do in days of yore? “Roger delivering Angelica”, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Note the hairless little-girl pubic area. Public domain photo from Wikimedia Commons Some feminists are afraid of female power and genuine empowerment, but the rest of us don’t have to be. We can choose to be grownups, to self-actualize, to take responsibility for our role in the romantic/sexual dance. Sometimes, even, we should blame ourselves for really stupid decisions. Like my male buddy who blithely allowed a woman to ‘play him’. Women still face real obstacles and challenges to ‘being believed’ and it’s to many men’s benefit to cast doubt on rape and sexual assault claims. The baby-girl feminist set doesn’t help when they make women sound like easily-played little featherbrains. How supremely patriarchal, mesdames. This story first appeared on Medium in May 2021.

No violence required: ‘ Every Republican An Incel!’ This is how God intended Republicans to be: Subject to women’s sexual decisions. And that decision should be: Never to have sex with, or even date, Republicans. Image by Lothar Dieterich from Pixabay Another platform reader was onto something. Seems she wrote an article some years ago about why she won’t date Republicans and, big surprise, she got a lot of flack from Trump fanboys. Seems they took it a leeeeetle personally and she got to wondering why. She Googled and discovered no one wants to date a Trump voter, except his fangirls, and without the rallies — the OKStupid for horny double-digit IQ Nazis I guess, it’s harder to meet them. Otherwise, once dating app strangers Google your name and find you wearing a MAGAt hat and a Guns Don’t Kill People, Abortions Do T-shirt in a selfie with Rudy Giuliani, it’s game over. A lovelorn Trumper might be better off admitting they used to bar brawl or be a crack whore. You know, something less embarrassing. According to a Pew Research report, around 70% of Democrats of either gender overall are far less likely to date Republicans, and especially Trump voters than vice versa. Around half of Republicans would date a Clinton voter and almost three-quarters would date a Democrat. Why is this? Is it because Republicans are actually more open-minded than Democrats? Or is it that some guys will shag anything that consents? Like, for example, Queen Amina of Zazzua, the human Praying Mantis of African conquerors, famous for killing her partners after having sex with them — which they knew would happen. The unwillingness of ‘libtardettes’ to date Trump fanboys might be because being partnered with these guys ain’t exactly easy. Considering how pig-bitin’ mad these guys get at the name ‘Hillary Clinton’, it must not take long for the romance bloom to wilt and the misogyny to set up shop as soon as she gets a promotion at the office. It must be easier for Trump fangirls with Democrat men, who merely have to adjust to a life without non-consensual genital groping. When I Googled, ‘Did Donald Trump ruin marriages?’ the first several results were about exactly that, including a Time magazine headline urging one to ‘dump that Trump supporter’. When I Googled ‘Did Joe Biden ruin marriages?’ the results were about Joe and Jill Biden’s happy marriage and lives. So it seems Donald Trump is bad for wedded bliss. Go figger, considering he’s on his third baby mama and I’m not sure there’s not another one in his future before he either dies or descends fully into dementia. I mean, Melania’s trophy wife expiry date is so ancient I’m beginning to wonder if she smells of sour milk. So here’s the thing, Luscious Libtards: We have the power! We have the power to truly MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! We can kill off the Republican Party with our Mighty Muffs. (No no no! I don’t mean like Queen Amina of Zazzua! EWWWW! What we’d have to do BEFORE we killed them! I promised no violence, and I meant it. We don’t need to go to jail for this.) Public domain photo by Marc Nozell on Wikimedia Commons: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. We need to convince the 30% of Democrats who are willing to date a Trump voter and the nearly 40% who’ll date Republicans to STOP. We need to convince these Democrats to Just Say No to Republican sex. Our motto should be, ‘Every Republican an incel!’ Think of all the energy saved not having to explain to them what a clitoris is! Like the Brontosaur, these people need to die out. It’s the best thing they can do for their country. When you date and shag Republicans you run the risk of creating baby Republicans. The kid could take after you but it’s a 50/50 chance — are you willing to potentially sell out your country just because he looks like a young hot Scott Baio? Oh wait, that *is* a young Scott Baio…no, wait, that’s old and conservaturd Scott Baio with a LOT of plastic surgery because he can’t get a date. Incelibacy: It’s coming for you. Public domain image from Pixabay Image by 12222786 from Pixabay Having sex with Republicans gives them no incentive to grow up and care about something other than their investment asset allocation and Georgian ballots. No more action until they watch a few science documentaries, or read a book not written by Ann Coulter. Republican ladies will have to make do with their Trump dildoes and butt plugs. I’m not making this up. You can buy them. (Although I’m guessing it’s not the Republican ladies who buy the butt plugs.) I don’t believe we need to trawl out all conservatives. There’s more nuance to the folks who didn’t vote for Trump and no longer support the Republican Party. I wouldn’t hold their unseemly past against them. We all have times in our lives when, frankly, we sucked as human beings. Shouldn’t we give these folks credit for wising up, wo/manning up, and growing up? Think of it like an addiction. I have loads of respect for people who kick a lifelong street drugs/alcohol/food/ shopping or whatever addiction. Think of being Feh, already incel. Public domain by The Unseen 011101 on Flickr a Republican as a bad habit they’ve finally kicked. Give her a one-year medallion! And like some addictions, the practices were okay at one time but now they’re out of control. I’ve never been a fan of the Republican Party but when I was younger I wouldn’t call them evil. Mostly hopelessly square and out of touch with the modern world. Many former Republicans have had their come-to-Jesus moment about the party, whether they believe in Jesus or not. It’s especially laudable if they do believe in Jesus and looked around and said, “Dude, that’s just not Christian. I’m outta here.” #NotAllConservatives are selfish, toxic masculine, white supremacist assholes. Trump voters and a lot of Republicans are, and this description includes Trumpgirls since any chick who votes for a sexual predator has some internalized misogyny she needs to address before she walks blithely into a potentially future Handmaid’s Tale. Trump voters, Republicans, and their Canadian fanboys are completely off the menu for me. Support Trump, and you’re too toxic and stupid for my attention. Once, there were many shades of Republican. Now, Republican = Nazis, misogynists, homophobes, racists, and other assorted bigots, not to mention science deniers, conspiracy theorists, and Faux News cultists. The Wrong Side Of History. The Good Little Germans. #YesAllRepublicans. The Far Left’s extremists fight their blanket villains (white people, male people, white male people) and embrace their own science-denying ideologies (anti-vaxx, gender genetics). Political beliefs span a wide spectrum; not every liberal melts down over some word Twitter decided fifteen minutes ago is bad, and not every conservative is immune to compassion. When you’ve moved closer to the Murky Middle like I have in recent years thanks to mutual pushing from both sides, men just t’other side of center aren’t much different. I had an on-again-off-again relationship with a conservative years ago. In the early ’90s, it was still permissible in the Republican Party to have a brain, as long as you didn’t use it too much. He was a good egg, back then. Today he’s mired in conspiracy theories and has swung far more to the right, but doesn’t post racist or misogynist content. Childhood-rooted psychological problems he had begun to manifest decades ago have clearly gotten worse, so I cut him some slack. He’s always been challenged differentiating between fantasy and reality. Still, he’s also posted a lot less about Trump in recent months, as have some of my other few conservative Facebook friends. Trump is slowly bleeding identified Republicans. It remains to be seen whether there are enough undecideds yet to relegate the party to fringie wackadoo status. Democrats and liberals willing to cross the political divide, you need to stop at ‘Republican’ and ‘Trump voter’. These people need to die out. We don’t want to hurt them. We won’t hunt them like The Most Dangerous Game. (Besides, unlike endangered animals, Republicans can shoot back.) Let’s all agree to vote with our crotches. Lips that kiss Trump’s ring (or something else) shall never touch ours. The United States will become ‘minority white’ by 2045; we can make it markedly more BLUE by agreeing to Just Say No To Sex With Republicans! Joe Biden has gotten more shit done in his first hundred days than the Orange Menace pulled off in four years. Say what you like about him being a pre-Boomer Another Old White Man, but seriously, would you like the other guy back? If you said yes, please raise your hand so the rest of us can remember what you look like. This first appeared on Medium in May 2021.

If I was inclined toward victimhood rather than personal power I could have made myself suffer more than ‘The Patriarchy’ Image by PourquoiPas from Pixabay Life isn’t perfect, and neither are people. If you spend enough time in some quarters you learn the most imperfect people of all are men. White men are the worst, but really, all men are, like, phallocentric devils incarnate. Or something. As women in a world set up by men and for men, it’s inevitable we’re going to have some run-ins. How bad it is depends not only on the intention of the actor (usually a man) but how we interpret it. For all the suffering some women complain about from bad male behavior, they sure do seem to work hard to increase their own suffering by layering on some fairly narcissist narratives. You can blow off minor incidents and forget about them, or you can detonate nuclear blasts of oppression. Why be annoyed for only three minutes when you can engineer an eyebrow lift on the street to ruin your entire weekend? Obviously we’re not talking about serious incidents like overt sexual assault. But, to paraphrase Matt Damon, there’s a world of difference between a rape and a butt grab. After reading so many overblown victim-centered narratives of alleged bad male behavior, I considered minor incidents that had happened to me over the years. How could I have made them worse than they actually were? Scenario 1: John Revolta I’m out with some gal pals at a notorious pickup bar. A man asks me to dance, mostly by gesturing. He doesn’t speak English. Suspiciously from one of those countries where access to women is far more restricted, he proceeds to pull me close on the dance floor and jam one of his thighs between mine. I keep pushing him away and shaking my head No. He keeps doing it and I eventually give up, grab my purse, and head for the ladies’ room where I take like ten minutes to fix my face and comb my hair. The victim feminist narrative: It’s disgusting how in this day and age men STILL think we are nothing more than SPERM RECEPTACLES! That we’re good for nothing more than jacking off into, forcing us to hide from sexual aggression as women have done for thousands of years! His toxic masculine male entitlement depersonalized me as he violated my body and made me feel like nothing I’ve accomplished in my life matters, I’m nothing but a TOY!!! What I did: “Hey, did you see that bozo I was dancing with?” I laughed. “Speaks no English, fresh off the boat and hopes to bed a Canadian He looked like this, too, except shorter, stouter, darker, balder, and more poorly dressed, and with less smooth dance moves. Photo by Thank You on Flickr slut tonight. You know how those Canadian girls are!” “He waited for you by the bathroom for several minutes before he gave up,” one of my friends giggled. “What’s the first thing you do when you move to a foreign country?” I said. “Do you apply for a Social Insurance Number? A bank account? A mobile phone? Learn to speak English? Get a job? No, you try to GET LAID!!” We proceeded to laugh at him behind his back for the rest of the evening as he struck out with every woman at the bar. Scenario 2: I’ve fallen in love with you Shortly after I move to Canada I meet a guy in a shopping mall. He’s cute and I’ll admit his come-on line was unusual — he did a double take and claimed I looked like his dead friend. Okay, that’s original, at least. Takes me to lunch, love-bombs me and tells me after two hours he’s in love with me. (I wrote the full story awhile back.) The victim feminist narrative: He was a narcissist trying to charm and groom me for future abuse, mind games and gaslighting with early false promises of romantic love. He marginalized my need for emotional safety by flat-out lying to me to get what he wants. He had no respect for me as a person, he saw me as an object to be won by any means necessary, mostly to feed his overblown ego and excessive need for validation supply. What I did: I told him he was full of shit and that no one falls in love in two hours. “I did,” he says. His answers are so pat. I sit back, thinking to myself, This isn’t off to a good start and I tell him honesty is very important to me and that bullshit artists get nowhere. Scenario 3: Giving ‘puppies’ the slip Some men just don’t know when to give up. When I was much younger I was a belly dancer in the medieval re-creation group The Society for Creative Anachronism. I was highly flirtatious at any time but during the summer, at campout events, medievalist standards slipped and many of us wore American-style ‘cabaret’ outfits. I.e., body-revealing. It wasn’t uncommon for a ‘puppy’ to attach himself and follow me around, even after I gave off signals that the conversation has moved on. Puppies were harmless, and we called them that because, like baby doggos, they nagged you for attention. The victim feminist narrative: It is NOT acceptable to stalk a woman. It illustrates just how many entitled men delegitimize women’s agency with a pre-existing societal power paradigm that prioritizes their obsessive need for attention over a woman’s right to feel safe. They think they can use their ‘natural-born’ dominance to harass a woman until she agrees to whatever he wants. The fact that we were always in a huge crowd of people with a near-zero chance of my getting murdered DOESN’T REDUCE THE OPPRESSIVE SUBORDINATION OF THE FEMALE PERSON! This is rape culture at its most reductionist! What I did: I learned to give them the slip at events, melting into the crowd or behind a door until they found something to distract them. We laughed about them later and giggled as we warned other women that the new guy, Sir William von Wagsalot, is a ‘puppy’. Scenario 4: Subway Casanovas I can’t fault a guy for trying. Sometimes I think women should have their own ‘Handkerchief Code’ similar to gay men’s. One color could mean, “I’m okay with meeting strange guys,” and another could mean, “I don’t give dates to strangers.” I probably miss a lot because I always have my nose in a book, but a few times I’ve caught Subway Casanovas staring at me in a manner that would make some women uncomfortable. And I understand that. I don’t frighten as easily as some but I also live in a relatively safe city (Toronto) and I’ve never been seriously sexually assaulted or stalked. I’m also older and less inclined to put up with male persistence. The victim feminist narrative: This patriarchal penis monster completely objectified me, subjecting me to his male gaze, How dare you stare at my breasts, you patriarchal monster! Image by Claudio_Scott from Pixabay manspreading and taking up like three subway seats to show me his big ol’ entitled phallus so that I can, I guess, hop aboard as soon as I’d like, as though I was there merely for him to fantasize about and later wank off over. He had zero respect for me as a human being, thinking he had every right to just stare at me as though I was the Mona Lisa! What I do: Look up, meet his eyes, and dismissively return to my book. Or, in one case, just as I was about to get off the subway some guy caught my eye and lifted his eyebrows meaningfully as if to say, I like you. I shook my head a little and got off the stop. So did he. I was alert for being followed but he didn’t. That just doesn’t happen to me. Not even when I was younger. Except at medieval events. Scenario 5: Drive-by compliments So I’m in the grocery store last year and this guy walks up to me and says, “I just want to tell you you are a very beautiful woman,” and walks away. Drive-by compliment. My friend Thom said he’s done this. He tells a strange woman she looks outstanding and then turns around and walks away, making it clear he’s not hitting on her or wants anything from her. It’s perhaps the purest compliment you can get from a man. But some women, I know, are horrendously offended to be told they look beautiful, especially if they put a consummate amount of time into looking like they just stepped off the carpet at the Golden Globes. The victim feminist narrative: This was illocutionary silencing of my right to shop the frozen foods section without confronting the encoded male worldview that a man possesses the hegemonic right to devalue a strange woman by commenting on her appearance. Did he really think it was ‘okay’ just because he walked away? He merely refused to confront the consequences of his boorish, entitled behavior. He invalidated my life and that of every woman who ever existed to remind me that we exist inauthentically as nothing more than eye candy. What I did: I smiled under my mask, said, “Thank you, you’re very kind,” and went back to the truly important work of my life at that moment, finding the chicken burgers. Not everything is all about making you feel like crap because you were born with a vagina. But with a little extra effort and a lot of critical gender theory crapola, you can make every interaction with a man all about you you you and your obsessive need for a steady narcissistic supply for male oppression. Victimhood becomes you. Because otherwise, if you can’t blame The Patriarchy for every failure in life, who can you blame? Stop shaming me with your objectifying male gaze, you penis-preoccupied, testosterone-poisoned patriarchal piece of poop! Photo by Jernej Graj on Unsplash This post first appeared on Medium in June 2021.