Humor speaks truth to power. Trump fears it. Musk fears it. Dictators fear it. So do the 'woke'. Suggested new Twitter title for Elon Musk: Bertinelli's Bitch! After Twitter's new 'free speech' fanboy rendered 'blue checks' available to everyone for eight Washingtons a month (no verification required), the adorable little blue-checked 'Barbara' from the 1970s sitcom One Day At A Time 'pwned' the richest man in the world. The Barbie Badass led an army of copytrolls against the Head Twit by changing her account name to his, tweeting and retweeting pre-midterms pro-Democrat vote-blue messages. Other blue-checkers followed suit and the 'real' Musk, who said he's voting Republican for the first time in his life (I guess he's finally rich enough), pitched a twitfit and began suspending anyone impersonating him. Starting with comedian Kathy Griffin, and including Sarah Silverman, who proved Musk to be a lying sack of--well, she Musk-tweeted, "I am a freedom of speech absolutist and I eat doody for breakfast every day". Bertinelli was not suspended and no one knows why. Maybe Musk had a crush on her when he was a kid. Maybe he suspended Kathy Griffin because she once tweeted a photo of herself holding Trump's bloody, decapitated head (Spoiler alert: It wasn't really his). Musk and Trump have an uneven relationship with each other - mega-narcissists can't stand rivals - but Trump is sorta-kinda-maybe-potentially- not-really-sure-after-Tuesday the putative head of the Republican party, but more importantly, he's permanently devoted to protecting the rights of billionaires to ruin the environment while pursuing obscene amounts of money, even Elon Musk. And who knows, Musk might be Kathy G's next bloody head. For 24 hours Bertinelli made Elon Musk the laughingstock of the Internet who says he doesn't want 'impersonation' on Twitter. The guy who nailed the truth about power “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” Who said it? Incorrectly attributed to Voltaire, who's probably rolling over in his crypt for not thinking of it before this bozo, the oft-quoted truism is actually the 1993 brainchild of Kevin Alfred Strom, a white nationalist and neo-Nazi later convicted of possessing kiddie porn and trying to coerce a 10-year-old girl into a relationship with him. While a neo-Nazi pedophile likely isn't right as often as a broken clock, he still penned one of the most inarguable truisms of the modern era. Those with the real power today shut down those they can. And nothing scares the powerful quite like humor. Trump only holds power - for now - over members of his party. He can't do a thing to stop the memes, jokes, and Baby Trump air balloons. But his followers have power. They're better-armed than the left, which is why we shouldn't rest easy just because Michael Moore was more right about the midterms than the pollsters warning of a 'Red Wave'. The MAGA set famously shuts down speech with stunts like the voter intimidation tactics of armed, armoured men stationed as close to ballot boxes as legally permitted, or the guy who put Nancy Pelosi's 82-year-old husband in critical condition when he came to their house armed with zip ties, demanding to know where she was. Politicians, journalists, celebrities and female gamers regularly get death and rape threats when they express or support policies angry entitled men or white people don't like, especially if it comes from 'uppity women' criticizing male hegemony. The right's 'lone wolf' mass shooters are comparable to Islamic single-cell terrorists. The left's top powermongers are trans-activists. Critics have observed how incel forum language and opinions often weave trans-activist discourse with white nationalism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and of course traditional misogyny, and how 'incel' vocabulary has suffused trans social justice language on social media. Perhaps the right has managed to infiltrate the too-tolerant left. And masquerading misogynists have now consensually penetrated feminist brains saturated with idiot compassion. But this summer, the edges began to fray around misogynist drag power with Mr. Menna's release of a Village People-inspired parody around the incontrovertible biological facts of gender/sex, and the influence of 'sissy porn': Y Chromosome! The 'free speech absolutist' at the helm of a twithole Titanic may return the hate speech banned after January 6, but also what should have been acceptable speech to begin with - criticizing gender ideologists. #TERFs and #JKRowling are trending more and with much more support from women than was safe before. A newer regular trending term is #WomanFace, accusing many in the trans movement of gender 'blackface'. For several years now, criticizing or making fun of the trans movement in any way has been a risky proposition. These guys have had real power, dick-tating what is and isn't 'transphobic', quick to complain and get anyone banned, especially any biological woman, who challenges their power. Their Twitter Reign of (T)Error might be over. Dictators fear nothing more than humor. Mr. Menna's outrageously gay parody, incorporating real videos from transgender women, took Twitter by storm and signaled to women, gays, and lesbians that angry male Misses' power was wilting like an autogynephile's ladydick in Army shorts. Comedy is THE most power-reclaiming protest there is. If people are laughing at you, they don't fear you. They might fear laughing publicly, but every time they laugh behind your back it erodes your power, where you can't see it. You'll miss the signals they no longer fear you, which is when they rebel. Perhaps even overthrow a government, as happened to Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia. Why the woke fear humor For all its faults the left still remains the truly embrasive bloc that mostly wants to see equality for all, regardless of how one 'identifies' or dresses. It wasn't wrong in making the world less safe for genuinely divisive 'jokes'. But the more seriously you take yourself, the more humorless you become, and risk becoming the absolute power you fight absolutely. America's humophobia reflects the unstable, uncertain times we live in exemplified by the unstable, uncertain leaders we elect. It's hard to be funny when you're worried about everything, like the price of everything shooting higher than Elon Musk's SpaceX. Nobody feels like laughing when they exist in a chronic state of depression, stress, anxiety and fear, and that describes most of America. Even for the rich, who worry about losing it all, and what retaliation they'll eventually face for their crimes against humanity. If someone does feel like cracking a joke, it's as likely he'll be incinerated by an online mob rather than be told, "LOL! That's a good one!" We come to fear the pain relief we seek. The left's suffering cultural paleontologists dig deep to uncover ancient grievances so they may torture others to relieve their own pain. They've become so super-sensitive to perceived slights against marginalized groups they fail to recognize a so-called marginalized group has been hijacked by the most powerful human beings on the planet - men - and it's lost sight of when humor makes fun not of people, but of bigotry. The Most Politically Incorrect Offices Ever Were My Best Bonding Experiences You destroy the power of ugly ideology by holding it up to the light and making fun of it. Laughter diminishes wrong power. Real social justice lies in the courage to call out power's hypocrisies, extremism, its oh-so-serious self-importance even as you support its real grievances. Yes, people DO have the right to dress and identify how they want. Trans rights aren't a problem for anyone who holds a 'live and let live' approach. It's no skin off anyone's nose how you see yourself, but know that not everyone will validate you. That's life, for all of us. Just ask the most aggrieved man in America why he still can't get over half the country to validate his self-image that he won the last presidential election. "I used to do business with a transgender in Hollywood. Man everybody would be scared of her in the boardroom. She'd walk in there, newly-minted woman, high heels, purse, wouldn't say anything just walk around lookin' mean and shit, and then she'd walk to the head of the conference table, stare at us all, reach into her purse and pull her old dick out and throw it on the table. "Let's talk business, gentlemen!" "AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!" - Dave Chappelle Somehow, we're supposed to believe that transwomen are the most put-upon, suicidal, abused, marginalized, oppressed people ever. So when Dave Chappelle cracks a joke like the above, people laughed because they got his point: Some transwomen are still a lot more male than advertised. No transwoman could slam her ex-manmeat down like that, but one can certainly laugh at the entitled grievance of angry men for whom the dress and makeup fail to cover their aggressive, traditionally dominant, phallocentric behavior, along with their five o'clock shadow. Dave Chappelle doesn't 'punch down on transpeople', he speaks truth to power, i.e, men , some of whom have adopted the trappings of a real marginalized group - women - to gain sympathy and acceptable grievance from otherwise anti-patriarchal feminists. The problem with transwomen marginalization is that underneath them all are powerful biological men who made a choice , most of whom still possess their 'original equipment', not to mention their sense of aggrieved entitlement. Women fighting to keep transwomen out of women-only spaces aren't 'transphobic', they're afraid of the very real potential predator underneath who looks exactly like a man in the ladies' shower room. Everyone hates hypocrisy, except their own "Our population has split into two camps. On one hand there are those who support Putin; on the other, there are those who can read, write, and reach logical conclusions." - 25-year-old Russian comedian Aleksandr Dolgopolov Donald Trump hated how every member of his Cabinet was portrayed by the biggest fuck-you to his hyper-masculine view of himself and the world, by women portraying men on Saturday Night Liv e. Some antiracists can't stand jokes calling out black racism. Some feminists can't stand jokes making fun of their misandry and 'patriarchy' obsession that borders on QAnon conspiracy theory. Hyper-he-man Putin has forced a comedian to flee Russia and cancelled the popular Russian TV show Puppets which regularly made fun of the new President. His big burn back at G7 leaders who joked about his shirtless photos was, "I don't know how they wanted to get undressed, above or below the waist. But I think it would be a disgusting sight in any case." The Turkish government couldn't stand a pop star who joked about the 'perversion' one can learn in a religious school. The oppressive Myanmar government fears and loathes comedian Zarganar , whom they forbade to perform any sort of comedy in the country. "I wonder why they never said that you normalize transgenders by telling jokes about us." - Transwoman Daphne Dorman to Dave Chappelle Normalization brings equality, but it also eliminates 'coolness' and claim to victimhood. Celebrities no longer 'come out' about being gay; it's boring. You can't even get a podcast interview for that anymore. Now everyone comes out as 'trans' until they find some new, probably invented, 'marginalized' identity. Narcissists require a constant stream of validation and professional victims have to invent oppression when they no longer shock their audience or punk the far right. We need sharp, incisive comedy more than ever now, when the world looks so dark. Humour holds power to account. Now more than ever we need to speak truth to that power while we still can. Humor can harm, but it can also bring about a real equality that brings to those oh-so-special little snowflakes - professional dictators or the wokenati - what they fear. Normalcy. And irrelevancy. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Why do we not hold them equally accountable for the human beings they co-created? I pissed off some LinkedIn Elon Musk fanboys a few weeks ago. It started with a news story about Musk's new Twitter diktat that everyone who hadn't yet been fired be prepared to work "long hours at high intensity" and in the office, since Musk doesn't believe in remote work. Okay Grandpa! His unreasonable demands in a world where work/life balance is something office drones are embracing and Musk devalues sparked a mass exodus of highly qualified Twitter executives and managers similar to an earlier Tesla So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night . Tesla's Burnout Brigade left a leader who couldn't stay focused on its mission - to make electric cars - and demanded work and innovation outside Tesla's scope, like over-automating the factory and the car itself. Who insisted the new EV must have 'Falcon Wing' flat car handles that magically expanded when its owner approached, introducing additional layers of complexity which exponentially increased the number of elements that can fail. And they did, repeatedly. Demanding Twitter employees drop everything to devote their lives to fixing Musk's problems after firing people on a whim without having the foggiest clue what any of them do demonstrated his continuing monolithic cluelessness. LinkedIn comments to the original story - almost all from men - supported the tired old complaint that 'No one wants to work anymore,' as though only corporate leaders do any work, and that they deserve unfettered access to everyone else's time. I pushed back in a comment. The next day I checked LinkedIn to find an editor had featured my comment in a news story. It generated some interesting resistance from, once again, men. One commenter complained my feminism threatened masculinity and another accused me of 'womansplaining' manhood to men. Which I might half-agree with, since I'm commenting on an experience I've never had, but also, people accuse others of 'splaining when they feel threatened by criticism. One nurse validated my statement about deathbed confessions. Why do we only judge successful people like Musk by how much money they and their shareholders make, and allow them to get away with neglecting work/life balance, especially spending more time with one's family? Why do we slag off the importance of raising human beings? They're so damn important the U.S. Supreme Court recently declared states have the right to eliminate abortion choice if they want, but we can't hold family failures like Elon Musk and many other manly successes responsible for the human beings they seed but can't be bothered with, except to pay occasional lip service to them? Where does Musk fail? Elon Musk is the father of ten surviving children. His first died from SIDS at two and a half months. He has, at this time, three baby mamas and believes humanity's problem isn't overpopulation, but underpopulation. A Wired magazine article detailed the ideological history of population concerns - whether over or under - and speculated Musk likely wants a ready labor pool suppl y to do the grunt work for long hours and low pay. Interestingly, the new Republican is pro-immigration in a way Republican non-entrepreneurial politicians are not. It's easy for Musk to call on people (read: Women, who've been less inclined to breed since they found freedom and feminism and seats on the Board) because he's not the one who carries them for nine months, and expects to do daddy duties only when it's convenient. By necessity, as CEO of three large companies - Tesla, SpaceX and now Twitter - who sometimes, but not always, puts in the long hours he regularly demands of others, Musk must necessarily neglect his families. The Head Twit can't even serve all his companies properly. Tesla's stock is down by 49% as of a month ago. At least one of his children has disavowed her father. Vivian Jenna Wilson, the daughter formerly known as Xavier, has changed her gender as well as her last name, explicitly to sever all ties to her bio-dad: "Gender identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form." Musk has claimed he supports his new daughter's decision, and any 'transphobia' accusations lobbed against him merely stem from his complaint that transgender pronouns are a pain in the ass. No one knows what the story is behind Vivian's desire to remove her father from her life, but it's probably not pronouns. In the meantime, his numerous children have and are being raised by their mothers, au pairs, and the occasional visit from their otherwise preoccupied father. At the core of Musk's sneer is the unconscious assumption that raising children is still 'wimmin's work', and if women want to work outside the home, they'll have to figure it out on their own. Dreaming cool shit and making it real is the purview of overly-fecund visionaries who don't have time for their progeny. A two-year on-and-off pandemic lockdown, though, has changed many male minds. Once the wrinkles were smoothed out, the initial inconvenience of working from home became less stressful, especially without the hassles of traffic, parking rate robbery, public transportation, or being stuck in a cubicle or 'open concept' office fishbowl. Who knew families were cool? You could spend more time with your children, at lunch and on breaks and after work, without a long, messy commute home. While the pandemic spiked the divorce rate for some, it introduced a new family dynamic many have been unwilling to give up, especially for a dictator who's clearly outside his wheelhouse, and wants everyone else to put in triple time to clean up his messes after unintentionally introducing fraud, imposterization, rising hate speech and driving out his advertisers. It's impossible to slag off Musk's true genius and vision, and easy to understand why he has so many admirers and fans. But what about the ten human beings he's co-created? Why do we allow men off the hook with their families, when female leaders and office workers are still made to feel guilty if their family life suffers? Women don't get pregnant by themselves. Elon Musk is a hugely successful entrepreneur, but a failure as a husband and father. There's no other way to describe him. Is Elon Musk worth his compensation? The resistance I found on LinkedIn struck some nerves. Some of my critics may be aware of their own failures as husbands and fathers. Especially if they're divorced. Or they still define themselves primarily by their jobs, linking their masculinity to their breadwinning capabilities. One wonders: Do CEOs like Musk need to earn as much money as they do? Are they even worth it? Do they add the outsize value to their outsized paychecks and compensation? From 1978 to 2018, average work wages grew by slightly under 12%. CEO compensation grew by 1,007.5%. Last year, S&P 500 CEOs made 324 times more than their median workers. In the first year of a pandemic that ground the U.S. economy to a halt, with 25 million Americans laid off in the first two months alone and thousands of businesses folding, 2020 was beddy beddy good to American CEOs, whose compensation increased 16%. Canada's CEOs didn't exactly go hungry either, as their 100 top-paid CEOs' compensation reached $10.9 million , about $95,000 more than their 2019 average pay. While CEOs were popping French champagne, the pandemic may have boosted men's long-lagging participation with their families, and it was gratifying to see many LinkedIn men supporting work/life balance. One can be a successful businessperson, entrepreneur and parent, although I don't believe any Fortune 500 CEO can be as successful as Musk without sacrificing the parental role. Do companies need to be that big, requiring too much time (Tesla's employees complained how demanding their jobs were when Musk was still showing up at the office) when CEO kids are going daddy-less? Maybe North America's top-paid CEOs need granular, deep-dive performance reviews. If Elon Musk's pay and compensation is 324 times greater than his median employees' wages, shouldn't he be expected to demonstrate he's earning his keep by delivering equivalent value? Which should be determined not only by how much money the shareholders are making, or the stock price, but also whether he's adequately compensating the people that keep his factories or platform running, and giving them enough time to spend with their families. If he's not delivering equivalent value himself, it's time to reduce his workload along with his compensation. Tesla, SpaceX or even Twitter might be greater with a focused leader at the helm, rather than one-third of a celebrity CEO preaching the benefits of hard work he can't even master himself. Like father, like son Musk's fatherhood shortcomings may be rooted in his own father's. Like daughter Vivian, Musk is estranged from his own father, Errol Musk, for unclear reasons. Musk has vaguely slagged off his father as being 'evil', saying, "My dad will have a carefully thought-out evil plan. He will plan evil. Almost every crime you can imagine, he's committed. Almost every bad thing you can imagine, he's done. It's so terrible you can't believe it." Sounds like the kind of vague exaggeration Donald Trump would say. And Musk is right, it's hard to believe since Errol Musk isn't in jail for burying bodies on his property, raping children, committing genocide or defrauding old people as a Nigerian prince. One might suspect just a touch of exaggeration on the part of a son who once accused a hero of being a pedophile . Errol Musk once supposedly (unverified) shot and killed some burglars who entered his home, successfully arguing he did it in self-defense. There's definitely one verifiable super-cringeworthy act: He had two babies with his 42-years-younger stepdaughter from a previous marriage. If you're keeping track, that's seven children total for Daddy Musk by multiple baby mamas, one of whom he met when she was four. Yes, ewww , but not illegal, not even in violation of the incest taboo, and not jailworthy. Elon's daddy denies being the terrible human being his son describes and claims he was a good father, but also exhibits perhaps a touch of defensive jealousy about Baby Boy's accomplishments when he claims the entire Musk family, not just Elon, has done "a lot of things for a long time. It's not as though we suddenly started doing something." Errol was a strict father who raised his children with 'discipline and austerity', although he still had plenty of time for mistresses. A Musk biography describes Elon's childhood as 'excruciating' with schoolyard bullying and whose father was 'emotionally abusive and tough' and subjected his children to sitting still and quiet for four hours at a time while he lectured them. So, an exemplary paternal role model he wasn't. The truth is somewhere in the middle. It's questionable whether Errol Musk is as bad as his son makes him out to be, without exactly qualifying for Father of the Year. Daddies who care Musk and his fanboys have to stop work-shaming the most overworked workforce in the world. American workers' productivity has increased by 430% since 1950 and only Chile, Mexico, Israel, Korea, and Costa Rica work more hours. Forget the 40-hour workweek; the average full-time employed female works 8.33 hours a week and the FT employed male 9.09. The U.S. is the only country in all the Americas without national paid parental leave. A hundred and thirty-four countries have set a maximum work week length, but not the U.S. There's no federal law requiring paid sick days, and we rank at the bottom for average paid vacation days. Today, 70% of American children live in a home with two working parents, while Elon Musk and others dare to call Americans lazy. Being a father means more than hopping on and off and moving on to the next womb. It's not just about bringing home the bacon, especially when a sizeable number of employees at Musk's companies are women. Overcompensated CEOs aren't the only barriers to work/life balance; men face a variety of invisible barriers to taking paternity leave - the rolling eyes of their colleagues who wonder why they'd bother, or fears of job and promotion discrimination for not being 'dedicated enough'. American workers are 'dedicated enough', but some have shifted their priorities to their families, which may be more gratifying than working for a suspiciously overvalued and ungrateful taskmaster. So as not to be the failure Elon Musk's father has been. And Elon. I wonder what Musk's kids will say when he's on his deathbed. Or even if they'll be there at all. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

What if a reboot truly committed itself to 'diversity', with merit, opportunity equality, and broader ideas and points of view? A----DEI 2.0? Today I come to praise DEI, not to bury it. Or, more to the point, the idea of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion rather than the current iteration of DEI, which is quickly becoming a widely-acknowledged failure. DEI isn’t a failure because it’s a bad idea—it’s because it’s an early version, 1.0 of a social justice project, implemented by the wrong damn team which lacked the proper education for the job and didn’t source enough outside knowledge to correct all its mistakes. It never even acknowledged their project had more bugs than a Brooklyn housing project. DEI needs a reboot—a 2.0. The reboot won’t be perfect either, but it’ll be less imperfect than 1.0. Every project, technology-focused or human, needs to evolve, change, upgrade and fix. DEI’s hubris, not unlike the Democratic Party’s, was that it had all the answers and didn’t need to fix anything and brought about its own demise. Its biggest failure is with its first initial: Diversity. It ain’t gone none. Equity: Let’s replace it with ‘equal opportunity,’ based on merit. Then there’s ‘inclusion’—criminy, that may be a whole ‘nother article on its own. But I’ll be brief. Let’s start from the beginning. Diversity: Let’s add some Angry racist black women and self-hating white progressives, here’s your pink slip. Go burn a cop car or oppress a gay kid or something. DEI hews to a common but laughably false narrative: Critical ‘everything’ theory, but primarily Critical Race Theory. It’s pretty damn racist to all but state that white skin is a racial Mark of the Beast, when black skin used to be the Mark of the Beast of Burden. DEI 2.0 needs more white people, but not those pandering, self-flagellating pale-faced virtue signallers, so admirably skewered in Matt Walsh’s recent Am I Racist? DEI 1.0 teaches that all you need to know about white people is that they’re evil, part of a ‘white supremacist’ network, and should just shut up and let black people and others spew racist hate speech unchallenged. DEI 2.0 needs more people of all colors who challenge this sick dogma. It needs those who get that we’re all 99% genetically alike under the evolutionary adaptations from whence our particular people came. That there’s virtually no difference in our cognitive abilities, our IQs, or our ability to accomplish what we want given our own personal resilience, motivation, ambition, and equal opportunity. The first three are within our own internal locus of control. The last is external, which is where genuine social justice’s job lies. You have to change you . The systemic rest, that which is truly beyond the individual’s ability to overcome, we can fix. DEI 2.0 absolutely needs more Jews, since antisemitism has become the leading fave of ‘progressive’ racists in North America and it’s particularly virulent in black communities . Maybe a DEI class on antisemitism can begin by showing students a map where Israel is located in the Middle East, rather than the center of Wall Street or Hollywood as they imagine. Equity: Stop putting okra in the fruit salad We don’t need to ‘diversify’ fruit salad by giving vegetables equal opportunity. Vegetables work beautifully in traditional salad, but fruit salad is for fruits, not okra. No one puts okra in fruit salad. It doesn’t belong. It doesn’t work well in that position. But people aren’t vegetables (well, at least not in my circles), and there’s no group of people who ‘don’t belong’ in a particular profession except those who simply aren’t qualified to do what some numbnuts administrators need to check off their diversity list. The human okra aren’t black people, Jews, Indians, queerfolk or women. They’re people who aren’t suited for the job. White-boy astronaut John Glenn didn’t give a rat’s patoot that the best mathematician to send him on a life-threatening mission into space was a ‘colored woman’. He trusted Katherine Johnson’s brain above all others, and that was in 1962, when the civil rights movement was barely out of diapers. While the dramatic scene in the movie Hidden Figures never happened—Glenn on the phone saying, “Get the girl to check the numbers,” he did entrust Johnson—and only Johnson—with his life. The West Virginian Johnson was born into a somewhat privileged family in 1918. It wasn’t abject poverty. She showed an early proficiency in math as a small child. Also critically, Johnson was eager to go to school and learn. She was selected as one of three African Americans to attend West Virginia State College and graduated at age 18 summa cum laude, with not one but two degrees, in math and French. Not many black people, especially women, pulled that off in 1937, but Johnson did, partly because of her mild economic privilege, but also thanks to her natural talent and relentless education drive . She and her NASA compatriots were fruit in the fruit salad, not okra. Inclusion: It needs boundaries ‘Inclusion’ is a great idea that, like everything else in the hands of those who gild lilies as a hobby, turned from a progressive ideal into an oppressive bludgeon. To paraphrase Rodney King, a respectable new DEI framework should be simply about understanding how to get along with— include each other. To look for the good and laudable, rather than seeing skin color or sex or rainbow hair and making assumptions based on a group rather than an individual. Which is just bigoted. It’s not hard to include others, if you train yourself to accept others, not to mention yourself, as human, and people, rather than inextricably bound to an arbitrary collection of ultimately irrelevant identities. One area of inclusion that will be tricky to negotiate is ‘trans inclusion’. Transactivists are pretty famously aggressive about pushing themselves in places resisted by women, and women’s rights, needs, concerns, and safety are, as always, thrown under the bus by ‘progressives’ and the DEI 1.0 set. I’ve extensively critiqued the trans movement and transactivists in other articles (you can find them under ‘ Transreality ’ on my navigation bar) so I won’t get into it here. DEI 2.0 will need to balance transfolk’s right to live how they want, but train them to understand that others’ concerns matter too (which is such a ‘woman’ thing to do!), and also that fairly pedestrian problems like how some can get the pronouns wrong due to visual and audio cues (a manly jaw or voice) that don’t sync with what humans associate as ‘male’ and ‘female’ is a First World problem, not a violent ‘microaggression’. Let’s keep it in perspective. Oh no! Include even CONSERVATIVES?!?! DEI 1.0’s most desperate diversity need is for what happens between the ears: Ideas, narratives, values, beliefs, political positions, and points of view. No group of people, biological or ideological, should ever run everything. It's just too tribally human to favor your own. DEI 2.0 must especially guard against marginalizing opinions and points of view. It should incorporate liberal, conservative, libertarian, and other viewpoints. It should acknowledge and respond to all sides in any given conflict, whether it’s two people of different races in disagreement about a comment, or offering an opinion on a complex topic like nations at war. Its understanding of history must embrace a much more diversified and nuanced understanding of the world and human peoples, recognize the contributions others have made to civilization, and stop defining whole groups of people by only their bad traits or actions. It has to stop giving a free pass to miscreants and nasties of other races and cultures too. It has to recognize that almost every single culture has engaged in slavery, colonization, imperialism, genocide and horrifying torture. Yes, even Indigenous North Americans . Especially them. The Iroquois: The Lords of Pre-Contact Genocide. DEI must purge itself of people who seem rather mentally and emotionally disturbed, actually. Diversity dearth of thought in the academic world has created the dogmatic, authoritarian woke hellhole from which students emerge today, fit for little better than tapping away on their mobile in a coffee shop, raging against the reality that challenges everything they’ve been taught about history, science, art, literature, and sociology. It almost completely ignores human psychology. DEI ‘whitenizes’ every new scapegoat—most recently, Asians and Jews—and teaches impressionable young people that they’re helpless against the evils of colonialism/capitalism/ white supremacy/patriarchy (take your pick) and that men, along with white people, are responsible for all the world’s evils. It keeps young people carefully sheltered from different points of view and differing ways of seeing things by denying the legacy of white Western contributions to the world and labeling anything they don’t want to learn about as ‘racist’. (I’m pointing at you, Claudine Gay, the okra at Harvard U!) 1.0 is an abject failure but the idea is a good one and properly implemented, it could enjoy widespread appeal. The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) noted recently that, believe it or not, most Republicans and Democrats agreed on basic core values. "Roughly 90 percent of the people in the survey, Republicans and Democrats alike, said that personal responsibility, fair enforcement of the law, compassion, and respect across differences were important to them." That’s when you’re not asking them about anything related to politics, I imagine. ‘A mind is a terrible thing to waste,’ as an old PSA once encouraged us to think. DEI’s objective of creating a more just society is laudable, and diversity starts with talking to the people you don’t like, or just don’t think you like. It must bring about diversity of thought, diversity of races and cultures and replace ‘equity’ with merit-based equal opportunity. It can be inclusive, but not trample on others’ rights. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. DEI is a good idea; we just need to take it out of the hands of the hopelessly incompetent. Wokeness just got dealt a likely deathblow in the United States with the anything-but-Democrats election. This is our opportunity, kids! Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

Emma Watson only reads about misogyny. J.K. Rowling lives it. "I have been directed by male directors 17 times and only twice by women," [and] "of the producers I’ve worked with 13 have been male and only one has been a woman." Emma Watson is no feminist. Once unfairly criticized for being a ‘white feminist’ (white isn’t a choice, people) who didn’t understand the ‘intersectionality’ of other women’s perspectives (duh, neither do those other women) there’s nothing to indicate she has much of a clue about any real challenges most women face when they’re not born to two legal-eagle lawyer parents watching out for their nine-year-old budding thespian at every step of her career. The preppy British plum claims she suffered the ‘full spectrum’ of sexual harassment at the 2018 Golden Globe awards. I somehow doubt that, as being a less-protected actress in Hollywood means suffering bun burns from the casting couch or being able to describe Harvey Weinstein’s disgusting genitals to a jury. If Watson’s ever experienced any of that, she’s never mentioned it. I tried to find what Hollywood sexism she personally experienced beyond a bunch of likely fart jokes at dinner or the worst one could say about a director is—he’s a man, but I found nothing. Perhaps, quite rightly, she fears damaging her acting career while she’s still a hot ticket. Maybe she’ll ‘fess up after she retires. In the meantime, I damn her pseudo-feminism not because she’s clearly as privileged as her detractors claim, even rich privileged people have their stories and experiences, but because having once shown real promise to take feminism beyond its tired perma-victimized narrative to a new level, she instead chose to de-volve, becoming a good little handmaid, doing, saying and thinking whatever certain misogynist men tell her to. The former feminist used to stand up for women’s rights, and would never have tolerated male abuse of women. Today, mum’s the word for angry transactivists who viciously abuse, threaten, and call filthy names J.K. Rowling, the woman whose phenomenally successful children’s books and subsequent movies are the reason why anyone even knows Watson’s name. J.K. Rowling has been dragged all over Twitter for having the labia to stand up to gynophobic transvestites, starting with supporting a woman who lost her job who dared to speak truth to those who see biology as heresy: Maya Forstater was fired from her job for stating the glaringly obvious scientific fact that no one can change their biological sex. J.K. Rowling knows a thing or two about abusive men, having divorced one before becoming one of the most successful children’s authors ever, while the worst the ridiculously privileged Watson’s ever alluded to is some Hollywood sexualization, some of which, like most young actresses, she’s encouraged herself. Instead of standing up for a fellow woman, abused and vilified by hateful misogynists, Watson chose to side with the boys, turning her back on a woman desperately in need of her feminist sisters’ support. For Watson, ‘feminism’ is a meaningless word. Rather a lot like ‘transphobic’. To further demonstrate how little she understands the feminist challenge of recognizing bold misogyny, Watson also shared she donates to a highly questionable charity: Mermaids is a controversial British pro-trans charity who for years has communicated with many young people, including those not of legal age, sending them ‘breast binders’ to flatten their breasts, even when kids email them admitting their parents won’t let them buy one. Mermaids also pushed ‘same day’ cross-sex hormone treatments for children, behind parents’ backs of course, despite many scientists and medical professionals warning there’s no certainty yet on the potential for irreversible health effects, like permanent infertility and lifelong health problems. Funny, when adult men communicate with children in email on the sly and send them free stuff, people get upset about it. Worst of all, a pedophile apologist resigned from the Mermaids board when it was revealed he’d given a speech to an advocacy group for pedophiles to which he referred to them as the ‘minor attracted’. He’s compared masturbating with and ‘cumming on a shoe’ to ‘cumming on a child’. Commented J.K. Rowling after the pedophile row: England’s National Health Service ordered Tavistock, the country’s only gender identity clinic for kids and young people, to shut down by the spring of 2023 for being “not a safe or viable long-term option” for the young gender-confused, an independent report finding they were put “at considerable risk” from an “unquestioning affirmative approach.” The predictable class-action lawsuit soon followed on behalf of a a thousand families with post-transitional regret. If Emma Watson has anything to say about her support for Mermaids, or an opinion on L’Affaire Tavistock, I can’t find it. Other prominent Mermaids supporters include Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle, brother Prince William and his wife Kate, and U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. How to gaslight feminists “I went out for a work dinner recently. It was 7 men… and me." (2015) In the olden days, feminists fought for women’s rights, and until very recently, no one had to spell out exactly what a woman is: An adult human female, regardless of how she feels, acts or is privileged enough to identify. Women became a protected class as a result of the feminist movement, and fought long and hard for the same rights as men. Those rights have always been under attack by conservatives, who prefer to see women by more traditional, masculine definitions, and it was taken as a given that the left was the pro-feminist, anti-misogyny crowd. Except the same level of toxic masculinity was always there, just better camouflaged. Manipulative men, always so good at gaslighting and persuading vulnerable female minds, particularly young and inexperienced ones, struggled for a long time to figure out how to manipulate those bossy, strident, demanding feminists who insisted on better behavior from men than they were ever expected before that bitch Friedan upended the apple cart. They finally figured out the Achilles’s heel of the left: Inclusivity. The left, to its credit, has always striven to provide a ‘big tent’ for the marginalized, those who were not born into apex privilege. Inclusivity became a tool with which they might finally conquer the world for true progressivism. Progressives patted themselves on the back for being so inclusive, and striving to eliminate bigotry and prejudice from within their souls. It became hard to avoid the moral smugness derived from looking over the political fence at t’other side, with their racism, misogyny, and homophobia on display like trans-identified male Darren Merager’s genitals in a San Francisco spa . The left self-righteously addressed the moral failings of fundamentalist religion and the privileged politics of the super-rich, and the way these groups gaslit their uneducated, working-class base into voting against their own interests over, and over, and over again. The left’s smugness grew, and moral superiority turned downright insipid with the rise of Donald Trump, a human lance who unleashed the ugly boil on the conservative, Republican soul. All the very worst spewed forth: Unbridled white supremacy, accompanied by Confederate flags; Hitler fanboys carting swastika banners and chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” in Charlottesville; an accused rapist on the Supreme Court; a submissive, religious cult handmaid joining them. Progressives were so morally superior. Yet right under our pretty little noses, angry misogynists were gaslighting progressive brains, figuring out that ‘inclusiveness’ was the key to persuading certain feminists to admit men who didn’t have their best interests at heart, and enabling our so-called ‘feminist’ men to get in touch with their Inner Misogynist. The men’s rights gang figured out that by appropriating the costume and culture of female victimization and marginalization, they, too, could join the club, with feminists’ blessings. The farther progressives were down the left side of the political spectrum, the easier they were to gaslight. ‘Woke’, which started with the best of intentions, ‘waking up’ to the systematic discrimination and inequality of so many marginalized tribes, descended into an ugly far-left, cult-like version of the MAGA movement: Rigidly dogmatic, bigoted and prejudiced (white people, male people), and ideologically extremist. There were no shades of transgression; every sin was a mortal sin. Your life could be destroyed as much for having done blackface at a college frat party forty years ago as for having drugged and raped dozens of women. While the ‘woke’ laughed and pointed fingers at ‘those stupid QAnon-loving MAGAs’, believing the pandemic was fake and that Trump won the 2020 election, it cultivated its own equal disinformation campaigns to fool those on their own side who lacked proper critical thinking faculties. Some far-left gullibles pioneered the modern-day vaccines-are-evil cause, while others opened their minds to psychological, political, emotional, and ideological manipulation. Certain men realized the burgeoning trans movement offered an entrance into progressive, and particularly feminist, brains. Gaslighting: What it isn’t, and what it is We women - all of us, no matter where we come from - suffer certain psychological elements which make us all vulnerable to gaslighting and other forms of manipulation. ‘Gaslighting’ is a word particularly vulnerable to lingual abuse. It means manipulating someone to doubt their own sanity, yet gets used and abused by those who confuse their opinion or point of view with factual evidence to the contrary. When I Googled it awhile back I found an article warning about ‘racial gaslighting’, some of which included white comments like, “Are you sure that’s what they meant?” or, “Are you sure it was that bad?” I can understand how some racists might downplay someone’s racial harassment or discrimination experience, but with the far-left’s habit of hyper-exaggerating every little alleged ‘microaggression’, I can see how some anti-racists’ views can be skewed by their own partisan, hyper-victimized, or even racially bigoted perspective. I’ve read countless articles by women who hyper-exaggerated their experiences of ‘misogyny’ and ‘patriarchy’ and male entitlement. Minor transgressions turned into world-class MeToo moments. Like a guy who touched a brooch pinned to a woman’s bosom. Or an untoward comment in an office. (Whatever happened to just trying to work it out with the offender first, before dragging the boss, HR, lawyers, or the Supreme Court into it?) ‘Lived experience’ isn’t evidence. It’s opinion . It’s subject to what may well be a highly-skewed, even prejudiced interpretation by the experiencer. So no, challenging someone else’s suspiciously performative ‘lived experience’ isn’t necessarily gaslighting, although it can be. Gaslighting does occur when we’re told to accept something clearly wrong. Like that you can change sex when you can’t. No matter what you do to your body, no matter how sincerely you ‘identify’ as the opposite sex, your biology speaks the truth. Male bodies will never menstruate and even if they could somehow get pregnant, male hips are too narrow to pass a baby between them. Their birth would have to be Caesarean. Why? Because they’re males. And ‘transmen’ still bleed monthly unless they take menstruation suppressors which they have to do to eliminate periods because they’re females. It’s not ‘gaslighting’ to say so. It’s gaslighting to say your biology doesn’t ultimately define you. It’s gaslighting to call them ‘people with a penis’ or ‘people with ovaries’ when the reason why they have these organs, or did, is because they’re males or females. No one should be forced to lie in public and claim transwomen are the same as women, or that transmen are the same as men, when the latter’s reality is that they’re just as vulnerable to rape as they were when they identified with their true selves. Their weaker, vulnerable bodies can still be raped and abused by men, regardless of how they dress. I’m both mystified and horrified at how many so-called ‘progressive’ women, particularly women like Emma Watson who holds herself up as a global spokesperson for feminism, are so easily gaslit to believe that transpeople are ‘the most marginalized people ever’. We’re talking mostly about transwomen, far more vocal than transmen. Hyper-aggressive and in-your-face just like traditional, abusive, heterosexual men. Rose McGowan tells a male bully in a dress to sit down and shut the fuck up. Somehow, shit like this evades Emma Watson’s notice. Instead, she sweetly abandons an abused author who has suffered the most vicious abuse by so-called ‘transactivists’ who subject J.K. Rowling to vile threats, names, and abuse that Watson would quickly condemn if they dressed as the men they are, rather than in little better than ‘womanface’. Funny how condemnatory The Patriarchy’s pretty little handmaids are when the abusers are Donald Trump, Matt Gaetz, and Harvey Weinstein, but keep their adorable little mouths closed like good little girls when the abusers are not-very-persuasive ‘women’. Anyone who’s delved into J.K. Rowling’s expository opinions on transpeople and the trans movement will find gender ideology criticism, but no actual threats, abuse, or ‘transphobia’, a Loony Left catchphrase meaning, “Anyone who dares to challenge TiM authority.” I’m not sure if ‘transphobia’ is even real. Why would anyone be afraid of men who are, in essence, transvestites? It’s not the costume women fear, but the entitled, potentially violent, abusive males underneath. ‘Transphobia’ looks an awful lot like perfectly understandable fear of abusive men, and ye shall know them by their traditionally male violent language and actions. Putting aside the clear reasons why violent, abusive transwoMEN hate J.K. Rowling and adore Emma Watson, let’s try to identify what’s in it for feminists who ignore or defend misogyny. Let’s start asking them the hard questions (assuming they can stick around long enough for an adult conversation rather than blocking, defriending, or running screaming about ‘transphobia’ out of the coffee shop). Let’s start pointing out the misogyny they miss and ask them: Whether they approve of the filthy language and names transactivists call women and whether they’d be as tolerant if it was MAGA men; Why they think transgenders who chose their marginalization are more marginalized than women born into hostile sexism; Why they think people who grew up male and came to transgender as adults can possibly understand what it’s like to be a real woman with a weaker, more vulnerable body; Whether they support allowing male prisoners to identify as women so they can get into women’s prisons, and why the majority of them are convicted sex offenders; And, the ‘money shot’ question: #BelieveTheWoman: When a woman says she was raped by a transwoman with a penis and the transwoman says she didn’t do it, which woman should we believe? It says something about the state of feminism that we actually have to ask these questions of ‘progressive’ women who submissively accept stereotyped male definitions of womanhood they’d never tolerate from conservatives. At a time when women’s rights are under attack all over the world and far-rightism is rising not just in North America, it’s terrifying that women’s worst, most fearful enemies might not be from the Trumpanzees and the new Republican majority, but from women carrying signs saying ‘Transwomen are women’ and who claim ignorance or right-wing propaganda for the documentation of the rising number of traditional sexual predators in a movement that’s so easy to take advantage of, maybe because so many so-called social justice warriors are women. Emma Watson is still young enough to judge J.K. Rowling with the wisdumb of her privileged roots. Many are afraid to challenge the Watsonites, fearing life-destroying cancellation for daring to speak truth to trans-identified male authority and its good little handmaids. Even if J.K. Rowling was a complete stranger to Watson, her failure to defend a fellow high-profile woman from being called a ‘cunt’, a ‘TERF’, a ‘bitch’, and targeted for violent male fantasies about how they’d like to degrade and murder Rowling, utterly repudiates any claim Watson has to being a feminist. Let’s just call Watson what she is: A men’s rights advocate for whom men’s delicate fragile feelings and pronouns are more important than women’s safety. It says something about the maddening crowd too, that Watson has so many ‘feminist’ defenders who parrot their masters. But I know what a feminist is. Feminists defend and protect women, they don’t turn their heads and hum to themselves and donate to child-abusive charities when violent men degrade, humiliate, and threaten women who challenge male authority online. They know real misogyny when they see it. They don’t just read about it in People magazine. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Let's ponder a world in which woke social justice advocates experience limited employment opportunities because they can't pass the Grownups test. What??? These guys were targets of an unsuccessful cancelling campaign? They had my attention. Lately, with the post-October 7th woke watermelon kersplat and Donald Trump’s wall resonating even with some level-headed liberals , I’ve been wondering if it’s now possible to stand up to the left’s psychopathic cyberbullies, perhaps, even, if there might one day be a way to monetize it, make it work for you, a larval idea definitely still curled up in my mental honeycomb somewhere. Either option will require the balls or labia to handle it, and I don’t know what the successful recipe looks like. But here was a company in Connecticut, my old stomping grounds, in fact in the same town where I used to visit friends, melting the ‘flakes. Their website claims that self-appointed ‘social justice warriors’ slammed them on social media, calling them out for supporting ‘pigs and killers’. Bet you can guess who that means. Not surprisingly, this agency has a firm conservative mission statement and values. Surprisingly, it’s a marketing and PR agency. I say that because after nearly thirty years of visiting commercial and business websites, the folks who own and work for marketing agencies customarily don’t vote red in great numbers. What I’ll just call The Agency greets you with a pop-message on their home page: “We’re not staying silent any longer.” Interest piqued at Grow Some Labia—who were these Mad Men who challenged the Woke Swarm—and survived? I couldn’t find any details about the cancel mob’s alleged attack but the CEO did mention their pet programs for the police and military veterans. “If you don’t support our first responders, get out,” he says. Pretty sure there’s no DEI program at The Agency. Not sure how diverse it is either as it seems pretty white and he-man, although in one Fox interview they feature a black man he hired. I did note a few women. The most interesting thing about his agency is his ‘Snowflake Test’. It’s questions job applicants must answer to be considered, and he says it eliminates 60% who drop out before finishing. It’s not the SAT; it doesn’t take two or three hours. I’m guessing 15-20 minutes unless you’re a novelist. He says it’s not about political beliefs, but rather a mindset. He notes there are conservative snowflakes too (let’s remember, they’re responsible for about 40% of academic professor firings in the U.S.!) He’s okay with coming across as a ‘kooky nationalist’. He complains they were getting deluged with job applications, from people who couldn’t spell, didn’t know ‘you’re’ from ‘your’, and most of all were ridiculously entitled. They didn’t even know what The Agency did. Many made the common delusional Millennial/Zoomer assumption that coming out of school, they deserved to start at $100,000. When his Snowflake Test went viral, he was deluged with more job applicants—presumably those who thought they’d pass, or knew they’d pass if they’d found it on Da Internetz, and about 20,000 emails both for and against. Many CEOs expressed a wish to be able to require it for their own companies, but they ‘can’t’. In one YouTube video The CEO talks hard turkey to Millennials, of which he acknowledges he’s one himself. It’s peppered with quick glimpses of movie quotes from Braveheart , pro wrestling, Donald Trump and what I suspect is a scene from the remake of The Hills Have Eyes , a guy being burned alive in the desert while tied to a tree (in the original, which I’ve seen, he’s tied to a cactus). The CEO is fond of the green-screen background of hypermasculine alcoholic beverages—not a bottle of Merlot anywhere! One sees that background frequently in other videos. I know I could pass his Snowflake Test but I wouldn’t want to work for The Agency. I respect what they’re doing and I appreciate the CEO has his own solid values, not all of which I agree with—or perhaps to his extent—but he’s standing up to whiny weakass snowflakery and we remaining Real Liberals are fed up with them too. I won’t argue with his commitment to family, country and patriotism, values worth supporting if they don’t degenerate into rah-rah January 6th conspiratorial lunacy, but I’ll note that America’s biggest snowflake is on the right and angling to be president in between criminal trials. Conservative thought isn’t any more evil than is liberal thought; it’s all in how logical and rational it is and how it’s applied. People who think neither side has anything valuable to offer are dangerous extremists. Or just morons. The best of all possible worlds combines multiple good ideas from various political camps and leaves the crap behind. When I debate conservatives on the benefits of marriage and the need to return to it, I state up front: I agree, but gay marriage stays. It’s not up for debate. Homosexuality is real, and there’s no logical, rational reason to prohibit it; critics inevitably turn to the dictates of a holy book written by shepherds and smelly lunatics screaming to no one in the desert thousands of years ago the way one of their descendants screams on the street outside my apartment complex today. Although it’s unrecorded whether any of the Biblical prophets ever yelled, “I want to suck your dick! Why won’t you let me suck your dick?” Some of the CEO’s other videos depict himself and other staff members engaging in he-man Feats of Strength like training with Navy Seals. I wonder what The Agency’s workplace is like for women and whether sexual harassment is dealt with properly. Do they even have an HR manager? I don’t see one on their company LinkedIn profile. Are women expected to ‘suck it up’, and what happens if the CEO himself is the harasser? It’s the core weakness of HR: No authority above the man on top, who signs everyone else’s paycheck. Their tough-talking Joe Rogan suspiciously doesn’t ever want to hear anything about feelings, which are real and need to be respected even when one isn’t a snowflake. A review on GlassDoor notes that he likes to walk around ‘strapped’, I assume with a gun, not a dildo. Forty years ago I had a co-worker who brought a legal gun to the office every day and I didn’t care; today I’d care a fuckuva lot since right-wingers commit the bulk of mass shootings. What if it’s The Agency’s Dirty Harry who goes off the deep end? It seems the CEO himself is capable of getting butthurt. Another GlassDoor reviewer had this to say: From the CEO down, leadership is extremely toxic; luckily this company is still tiny, so with a change of leadership, the toxic culture could be easily amended. I also happened to notice in a previous post from the CEO which makes me a bit concerned even after leaving SPM "60% of our staff is actually not conservative". This would imply that there was some type of party tracking happening at my place of employment, which needless to say, is very unsettling. The CEO responded unconvincingly, accusing the poster of a fake review and threatening to sue for ‘slander’ (Pro tip, Rambo: Written falsehoods are ‘libel’, and this was an opinion on an opinion site ). He offered no valid reasons for thinking it was fake, apart from claiming they’d had no one who only worked there for six months. A few other responses indicate that what triggers this guy is critical reviews. Snowflakes: Sometimes they’re red-white-and-blue! He sets off my own red flags; I’d rather have a beer with him than work for him, but I like his Snowflake Test and I’d love to see it more widely adopted in the corporate and especially the academic world. He’s the CEO many wish they were: The guy who’s not too pussy to stand up to spoiled snowflakes, who calls them out and doesn’t cave like a little bitch when a bunch of anonymous losers with grey heads or eighteen different Pride flags in their profile call for someone to get fired because someone ‘depersonalized’ them on X. I deliberately use misogynist language here: America’s CEOs are a manly bunch, but the quickest castration is by cancel campaign; I suspect the reason they issue written apologies after these events is because if they tried to speak, only dogs could hear their voices. Millennials, and now Zoomers, earned their reputation for snowflakery. The stereotype doesn’t fit all members of these generations, but many electrons have been spilled over the younger generations’ disinterest in working; Jody Foster complained about young work colleagues who can’t spell or express themselves properly in email and who don’t come in for work if ‘they’re not feeling it’ that morning. The Snowflake Test filters for grownups and ensures the HR manager’s time will mostly be spent hiring and managing the company insurance plan, rather than sorting out conflicts between adult children who suffered the cruelest microaggression this morning: Some racist asshole said he didn’t like black coffee! Or who get mad because the rest of the staff isn’t keeping up with their hourly pronoun changes. The Agency’s CEO makes some great points about the need to work, to come into the office on time, every morning, and you’re out the door if you can’t hack it; I’m reminded of a roommate I had thirty-seven years ago whose boss called her every morning to wake her up so she could make it to work on time; she was a waitress at Friendly’s and apparently she’d never heard of the ‘alarm clock’, which my boss would have fired me for if I didn’t have one. Snowflakes’ parents didn’t do their jobs raising their li’l chilluns to be good citizens, conscientious workers, or to be resilient to adversity; these modern Peter Pans are destined to be supported by their parents in perpetuity. The ‘Snowflake Test’ calls out the strong stench of corrupted ‘social justice’ that permeates DEI-infected corporate and academic North America to nag, harass, bully and hector employees who should only be expected to come in every day to do a job, whether it’s to reconcile the financial reports, build a new product, code the next killer app, book some demos, support the customers or manage the operations. ‘Social justice’ has no place in the workplace unless you work for a social justice non-profit; employers and employees otherwise are not there to save the world, but to make the shit you want, need, and buy. Part of what will make them successful is learning how to work with people they might not want to hang out with in the lunchroom, or even sit next to at the after-hours company gathering at a local waterhole. The Christian conservative and the feminist need to respect each other enough to keep their differences out of the office; the Black Lives Matter guy and the white Republican must do the same. And the whateverthefuck with the pink hair, the nose ring and the flag du jour on their desk needs to realize that most people don’t do bespoke pronouns but don’t much care how they dress or present themselves as long as they get their work done. Snowflake tests aren’t just for rah-rah conservatives like the red-office-in-a-blue-state Agency. They’re for all of us who simply want to come to work without a morning wasted on a Zoom call with a hateful bigot force-feeding us the latest Kendi-fueled innovations in anti-white racism and blindness to antisemitism. Of course, I realize replacing DEI with a Snowflake Test will put a lot of DEI ‘trainers’ out of work. I’m good with that. Hopefully their parents haven’t sold the family home and moved to Fort Lauderdale, but if they have, I hope they’ll have fun living in DeSantisworld. But don’t expect any ‘gay days’! Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing!

Screw the social just-us warriors. Where you hail from is as much a part of your genuine 'identity' as which pronouns du jour you appropriate! Newton Crosby : Where are you from, anyway? Ben Jabituya : Bakersfield, originally. Newton Crosby : No, I mean your ancestors. Ben Jabituya : Oh, them. Pittsburgh. — Short Circuit, 1986 movie “Where you from?” I asked the dude with the accent who’d just shown up. “Me and Dennis are from the U.S.!” I was in Montreal a few weeks ago, at the Mont Royal drumming scene where a bunch of hippie Montrealers gather every Sunday afternoon to whack the skins into the evening, with a dance pit for anyone stupid enough to dance in 27C weather. (I’m stupid enough.) I hung out out with a vendor named Dennis from Miami (Hey! I’m from Orlando!) and we chatted for like an hour and a half before this other guy showed up. Without pitching a hissy fit about microaggressive marginalization, he simply answered. “Columbia!” I cried. “I understand it’s a great place to retire. A friend of mine is learning Spanish for it.” Antiracist pro tip: When you ask someone where they’re from, find something good to say about their country, no matter how politically unpopular. “Saudi Arabia! Birthplace of the famous Caliph Haroun al-Rashid!” “Russia! Home of Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote one of the most beautifully-written books ever!” “Sudan! The Kingdom of Kush!” [Dear Goddess don’t let him ask me what I know about the Kingdom of Kush, which I think is like weed or something!] And if you don’t know anything about the person’s country, just smile and go, “Wakanda! Awesome!” and then Google it later. There’s definitely a wrong way and many better ways to ask the Unquestionable, with bad reasons and good reasons for asking, too. A painfully funny lesson on how not to ask people where they’re from. Also, it’s pretty obnoxious to just walk up to someone and ask them. An underway conversation is better. But damn, is this a funny (if slightly immature) way to handle it! Every American I told I was moving to Toronto informed me how marvelously wonderfully multicultural, diverse, and cosmopolitan the city is. I got tired of hearing about it. But it’s one of Toronto’s biggest appeals: It’s not perfect, but diverse people get along here better than Americans. I like to joke that if I wanted to be a racist it would be difficult because then I’d have to hang out with ‘my own kind’, and I didn’t know enough white people to do that. We’re the New York City of Canada, with just about every culture imaginable with over 140 languages spoken. When you’re more relaxed about differences they become less noticeable, less important, and we come together rather than self-segregate. We no longer walk on eggshells worrying about saying or doing the wrong thing. Or worse yet, engage in embarrassing virtue-signaling. “Thank God my laundry detergent isn’t racist!” But wait, yes it is! It promotes segregation! The ‘woke’ deem it racist to ask where people come from, but it’s racist to hierarchize people by their skin color, religion, ethnicity or culture as the wokenazis do every damn day, arbitrarily assigning ‘oppression’ and ‘victimhood’ status, the way right-wing identitarians hierarchize people by assigning biological inferiority. Where you’re from is as intrinsic to your personality and existence and identity as what you do for a living. As I’m fond of saying, you can take the American out of America but you can never take America out of the American. One’s birth country is a part of us that binds us forever to the mother country the way you can never truly deny your birth family no matter how much you cut them out of your life. Unless you emigrate to a foreign country as a very young child, I don’t know that you ever feel ‘truly’ part of your adopted culture. Some people don’t like talking about their culture, and some do. “It’s not my job to educate you,” some sneer, and they’re right. But others love talking about their culture and will happily answer questions and ask questions of yours, too. They’re the ones you’ll make friends with. We’ll bring about racial equity before the ‘woke’ ever will. Despite the woke. Mutual education brings us to greater comfort, then to laughing together, comparing our cultures, and there’s no greater bond than shared humor. Not racist humor, shared humor over the silliness inherent in all cultures. Human beings: When we look at ourselves a certain way, and especially if we’ve had a few beers and squint a little, we’re a hilarious species! This is actually what woke social justice warriors fear: That we will come together and lose our fear of each other and those silly-ass differences. They thrive on difference and perceived threat, just like the far right. They merely differ on who to hate. SJWs hate white people, and ‘whitenize’ others in their ever-devolving and increasingly racist view of humanity. Jews are the new white people despite being not uniformly white; Asians are getting whiteneized as a consequence of being too successful. The social just-us warriors (because they only want justice for themselves, not for all) derive their racism from lack of skin color, as the far right derives it from darker shades. I’m coming to associate racist political extremism with mental illness, not because political ideology is crazy, but because political extremism is almost always expressed as a sublimated reaction or resistance to something else entirely. Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation speaks of how the people reporting the highest degree of mental health problems are young liberal, progressive women, which begs various questions: Is liberalism a mental illness or are people with mental illness encouraged to express their unrelated, pre-existing, sublimated anger via ‘social justice’ causes? Or do various political ideologies work well enough until others take good ideas too far and turn them into bad ideas? It’s very chicken-or-egg. I can make as much of an argument for MAGA as an expression of mental illness as I can for wokeness. Like, supporting limited but intelligent immigration is fine until it turns into a fearful Well some Muslims commit terrorist attacks so we need to ban ALL Muslims, or, Guns are needed for protection of family and property, and THERE’S NO GREATER THREAT TO EITHER THAN—EVERYONE! And, the George Floyd riots were bad but January 6th was just a fractious Capitol Hill tour! Hang the black guys, free the white ones, especially that gay cutie in the fur and horns! Why we need to ask The Question a lot more Asking people where they’re from is how interesting conversations start. One of the first things I did in Canada was to join social group MeetIn Toronto to make new friends. The others were there for the same reason. One of the first questions we asked, because like 90% of the people there hadn’t been born in Toronto, and a fair chunk of us not in Canada either was, “Where are you from? Oh really? How long have you been here?” Or I’d start chatting with someone at the bus stop or in the mall and I’d share I’m from the U.S. Sometimes they’d share where they were from, sometimes I’d ask, usually if they had an accent. Once another immigrant and I share where we’re from, we start laughing about what a pain in the ass moving to Canada is, and ask about each other’s citizenship. One Egyptian guy asked me which policy I liked better: American assimilation or Canadian multiculturalism. We had a really interesting exchange about it. The hysterics from the social just-us set is all for fear that somewhere in North America, there are two or three people who are super-racist and only want to know where you’re from so they can ruin your day by micro-aggressing you or something. According to the Harvard Business Review , (yeah, we should totally take anything Harvard says about racism seriously!), asking where someone is from—are you ready for this?—quickly turns into a microaggression and “…reduces someone’s identity to a social group, a city, or a culture, and that can trigger feelings of alienation. Microaggressions can also reinforce differences and magnify unequal power structures.” As opposed to, say, reducing someone’s identity to skin color, sexual or gender preference, quantified bloodline blend to identify distasteful white blood, and other social just-us reinforced differences correlating to woke construct power rankings? It’s an assumed microaggression to ask someone where they’re from, but not for their pronouns or for their students to stand on the campus green and call for the elimination of another group of people they don’t like before the first body on the side they’re on falls, which absolutely positively does NOT NOT NOT reduce someone’s identity to an imagined group color or political position. But what if you’re white? It’s dicier to ask The Question. I understand why . There truly can be an uglier, racist assumption that if you’re not white, you’re not ‘really’ a Canadian or an American. My reason for asking is to connect with my fellow immigrants. We all have a story to tell as to how we came to Canada. Or America. It can be a microaggression, for sure, and I understand how it can alienate or offend others. I don’t like, either, the sort of anti-immigrant rants that are just about how “My neighborhood doesn’t look like me anymore.” I’m not an obvious immigrant with my skin color or my accent, so my response is usually something like an icy, “I’m an immigrant. So bite me!” There are good ways to ask The Question, even when you’re white. How about a big smile and offering where you’re from first? As soon as you react positively to whatever the other person responds, the conversation never goes awry. And it can be beneficial, too. An Indian woman I got friendly with on the train ride home shared an Uber with me since it turned out we were headed for the same neighborhood. I asked the driver where he was from after we chatted for a few minutes. “I’m from the United States, she’s from India,” I volunteered. “Where are you from? Oh, Jordan? Wow, that’s awesome, have you ever been to the ruins of Petra? It’s on my bucket list to visit before I die!” The driver was happy to share more about his culture and asked me to connect with him on LinkedIn so he could offer advice whenever I decided to go. And, he was a business marketing major who had trouble finding a job, and I know freelance agencies where he might get that critical experience everyone wants before they hire you. So it’s a good thing I asked, and that we chatted. Knowing he was an immigrant gave both my new Indian friend and I some perspective on how challenging it can be to get a real job when you’re an immigrant. I ran into discrimination when I first moved to Canada too, as an American. Canadians can be weird. I had the same conversation with another Indian Lyft driver just last week. He needs help finding a job, too. Immigrants always need help finding a job here, since I moved here nineteen years ago. La plus ça change. I’ll bet he’s glad I asked Da Question. He asked for even more advice. The woke left is the other half of our ugly racial division problem. Those of us who are non-hardcore on either side of the political divide can reach out to our fellow humans and bond with them. We have to reject the political extremisms that ruin our countries. We have to fight ugly identity politics. The blinders have fallen; everyone’s side has a wing of Deplorables. Not everyone can afford to travel to other countries and experience different cultures. So let’s ask questions. We can tear down woke-constructed barriers and learn to be less afraid of each other by learning about other parts of the world whether we ever go there or not. It’s Not Your Job To Educate Others, But Do It Anyway The ‘woke’ are psychologically damaged people forever seeking channels for their outrage. It’s one thing to fight racism, and another to be disappointed when you can’t find it. Social just-us has a vested interest in never ‘achieving victory’, even when they have: If they acknowledge we’ve won a lot of major battles, if they admit America and Canada aren’t as segregated and hateful as they once were, what have they got to live for? Here’s one suggestion: How about climate change, which affects everyone, regardless of social condition? The world leader recently abandoned it to become an antisemitic Regressive Left Hamas groupie. Believe me, climate change will keep any SJWs out of trouble for a good century or more. Tell me where you’re from in the comments! But only if you feel comfortable. Hey, I might be able to help you find a job….! Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing!

At least, it won't likely get a mention in the Pentagon Report The aliens may be here already, but it’s cool. They brought weed! Image by Anja from Pixabay I used to know someone who believed aliens kidnapped her and her young daughter at night. She was a good friend, but, I privately thought, someone with a Fantasy-Prone Personality. FPPs have a fuzzier intellectual boundary between what’s real and possible and what’s not, and prefer, in my experience, supernatural explanations to rational ones. She wasn’t the only one I knew. We were Pagans with New Age overlap and while not all spiritual people are FPPs, you’ll find a fair amount in religious cultures. I won’t claim anyone with a belief in divinities or afterlives is an FPP, since the human race shows an amazing capacity for self-delusion, and if you dig deep enough, you’ll find even atheists believe in something far-fetched, sans divinities. My favorite faith-based belief system is the widespread multi-partisan political belief in the mythical Bottomless Well of Operational Efficiencies. It holds that if we only cut government ‘waste’ enough, we can have whatever ridiculously expensive projects, upgrades, treats and glorious prizes our little hearts desire without raising taxes a penny. Personally, I don’t believe anyone’s been kidnapped by aliens, particularly the ones fascinated by our buttholes and sexual organs. It was a ‘thing’ from the sexually repressed 1970s through the ’90s and now it either gets less attention or that particular delusion has moved aside for QAnon. Carl Sagan once noted that aliens observing us because we invented something new is akin to us being fascinated with the Andaman Islanders because someone invented fishnets. How interested are any of us in sticking butt probes up, say, salamanders, to, what, learn more about how they poop? Or as the alien Paul put it in the movie of the same name, “What am I doing here? Harvesting farts?” With 36 intelligent alien civilizations Out There , not even including theoretical parallel universes and mini-universes or sub-universes hypothesized by scientists, what I do believe in — as any self-respecting critical thinker would — is the existence of extraterrestrial, and likely intelligent life, Somewhere. Just not here. Are we about to learn The X-Files Truth? Are aliens actually visiting? Walking among us? Buying kiwifruit on sale, the requisite six feet away from us in the Stop & Shop? The kind that can scale any wall by, like, walking through it if they wanted, or touristing in from the Big Three Dozen ? It’s June, the month in which the Pentagon must release a longstanding report on UFOs and the weird shit military and aviation personnel have reported for years, especially the last few with several so-called provocative videos. UFOlogists await breathlessly on tenterhooks while some of us wait with bored facial expressions for the Google news alert indicating where we can download the report, which we’ll promptly do before we forget about it, so we can read it when we have time, and promptly forget about it. Or where we put it. Who needs to read it anyway? It will headline and summarize everywhere, and probably be more boring than the Mueller Report. Especially if there are no juicy bits — no butthole porn, no alien collusion with the Russians, no extraterrestrial golden showers. And especially no aliens. The final evidential answer may still be, ‘We ain’t got none.’ Here are a few reasons why I don’t give much of a rat’s patoot beyond mild interest: Video photography clearly hasn’t evolved since the 1950s I’d embed a few of the more ‘provocative’ videos if any were even remotely interesting, but I can’t tell the difference between the ones shot last year and the ones from 1955. The camera on my new Android is higher-resolution than anything the military has. No wonder the Russians bought our last President so easily. The U.S. military wouldn’t have recognized Vladimir Putin marching into the White House with the Russian Army behind him until Trump fell to his knees and buried his face in Vladdy’s crotch. When UFO debunkers like Mick West can still offer easy this-worldly explanations for the most recent shitty videos, I have to wonder whether we should be arming our armed forces with Androids and iPhones rather than my dad’s old Super 8 movie camera. Stunningly convincing photo of sophisticated alien intelligence — or maybe a low-flying bird — by Assnogholeo on Wikimedia Commons If the U.S. government had anything new on aliens, the Republicans would have scared us into voting for dictatorship last year Maybe it’s because The Orange Menace was already so divorced from reality he couldn’t conceive of losing the 2020 election, but get real: If the American government possessed any evidence of aliens, Donald Trump would have trotted them out of their meat freezer in Dayton or pulled out the Pentagon equivalent of Anthony Fauci to give a press conference to warn we were under imminent attack. “If you elect Joe Biden and KaMAHla? Camly? Camellia? Campbell’s Soup? Harris they’d turn your teenage daughters over to their tentacled terror and U.S borders would be overrun by aliens the likes of which would make you long for the days of Mexicans and Dominicans!” Notably less demented former President Barack Obama received no interesting response from the government on the evidence for alien visitation. That’s either evidence of the Deep State at work, or the aliens have more important things to do than fuck with our farm fields. Yeah, there’s just no way this could have been created by humans. We don’t have the sort of advanced technology required. Hell, we can’t even get our iCrap to stop pushing annoying notifications on us. Photo by Hansueli Krapf on Wikimedia Commons Even if those ARE aliens, they’re probably really tiny and too damn cute The videos of some tiny little object ( the GOFAST ) speeding over water, we’re assured, moves too fast for any similar human object, unless you’re familiar with some of the world’s fastest drones, clocking in speeds of 200km per second or more. Anything small enough to be in those will have all the nightmare-inducing terror potential of a newborn kitten. We imagine aliens will be like us. One camp holds that aliens are Jesus-like Klaatus come to save us from our evil selves. Another holds the aliens show up to ass-rape the earth and raid its people, rather a lot like conquerors from foreign lands or the tribe beyond the hill over the course of human history. The Judaeo-Christian undertone is unmistakable. Either Alien Jesus scolds us and tries to get us to stop sinning, whether it’s killing each other or preparing for nuclear war, or Extraterrestrial Yahweh goes all Biblical lasers-postal on the human race’s collective ass for reasons we’re initially unclear. In the Tom Cruise version of War of the Worlds the aliens harvested human blood and tissue as fertilizer for their terraforming project. In Independence Day , they were after our natural resources. In 1979’s long-forgotten trash-horror Phantasm , an alien mortician kidnapped humans and turned them into dwarf zombie slaves for his planet. In one Twilight Zone episode aliens came To Serve Man — literally. Armie Hammer is smacking his lips in anticippppppppation. How much like us, or not, will eventual First Contact aliens be? They won’t likely be humanoid, especially not with oversized heads and big puppy manga eyes. Carl Sagan noted the extreme unlikelihood that life will have evolved as it did on earth and Stephen Jay Gould has noted that if you rewound the Earth ‘tape of life’ and let it evolve all over again, evolution would likely take a radically different path. There are no guarantees humans would evolve again. According to the Kardashev scale devised by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in the early 1960s, it measures (theoretically, of course) the different levels of intelligent civilization. It’s theorized no life has advanced to Type IV, although we wouldn’t likely detect it anyway. Type <1 — That’s us, kids. We’re estimated to be around .73 on the scale now, expected to reach Type I in 100–200 years. Type I — We can harness all the energy from a nearby star, and be able to harness all the available energy on Earth. We’re not even close to either. Type II — We can control, not just transform a star, and exploit nearby gas stars, siphoning off the hydrogen. If we mastered fusion power we could build a giant reactor for all our needs, and bonus! Nothing currently known to science could waste our superlatively clever asses! Some place way cooler than where you live right now. The chicks are always hot, and naked. Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay Type III — Now we get to do some exploring. We travel the galaxies and are masters of energy knowledge. We might be cyborgs after many hundred thousand years of human evolution, and regard the Homo Sapiens of today with the same sort of casual dismissal with which we regard our earliest human ancestors. We’re likely colonizing as much of the universe as we can reach. Of course, we don’t know what the repercussions of any of this will be. What happens when we deplete a gas giant? What if we did harness the Sun’s energy for ourselves? What would be the consequences? And of course, most of all, can we stop killing each other and cooperate enough to pull any of this off? Good questions all, and I doubt any aliens will provide the answers. We confront the same problem Christians do if they’re honest with themselves: No one’s coming to save us from ourselves. Not Jesus, King Arthur, the Overlords, Godzilla, Maitreya, Quetzalcoatl, the Jedi or even Harry Potter. We got ourselves into this mess, and we must pull ourselves out of it. Maybe the real reason we’re hoping for alien visitations is we’ll have someone new to hang out with who’s perhaps immune to Earth virii and haven’t yet annoyed us to the point of divorce. The good news is despite reports to the contrary, things are getting better, not worse — at least in some ways. We still have the capacity to destroy ourselves and we might. But cognitive psychologist and popular science author Steven Pinker painstakingly notes how the world today is far less violent than even a hundred years ago. His brick-thick tome The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is tough but fascinating reading. Some parts you might want to skim, like the descriptions of medieval torture of humans and animals, for ‘fun’ and punishment, but it’s un-put-downable. As for the aliens, I don’t expect much out of the Pentagon’s forthcoming Pinker-rivalling doorstop. On the other hand, if they surprise me, I’d be happy to foster a temporary pandemic support alien, as long as it’s furry. And cute. What the hell is that thing? As long as it’s not actually the size of an 18-wheeler and doesn’t try to poke anything up my butt, I’ll take one off your hands for a few months. Image by Andrew on Flickr This first appeared on Medium in June 2021.

It would have been a truly impressive epic battle had my enemies not possessed a brain the size of an amoeba. But the worst was what happened between my ears. I dropped the note in my property manager’s mailbox (it’s still 1975 where they live where there’s no Internet). “I have bedbugs in my couch! Please help!” Those creepy three-bite patterns had shown up. One as a triangle, another in a row. Bedbugs aren’t exactly the Einsteins of the insect world. They’re not as good at bloodsucking as mosquitoes, which get it right the first time. Bedbugs are kind of like the blood bank trainee trying to find the right vein for your donation. They gotta stab a few times. I found the evidence under the couch cushions, but not in my bed, thank Goddess. I had A Bedbug problem years ago, when I was living with my ex in Connecticut. We began getting the three bites at night, but never multiple times, or both of us together, and had no idea what they were. We blew it off and hoped the problem would eventually go away, and it did. Probably our lone bedbug died of loneliness. We never had a problem again. I expect one of us brought it home somehow. Back then, bedbugs weren’t as common. They were the scourge of our ancestors until about 1939, when a Swiss chemist developed the pesticide DDT, which was outstanding at knocking out bedbugs, roaches, mosquitoes and other insects, but also, as it turned out, American bald eagles, ospreys, brown pelicans, peregrine falcons and California condors. It was banned in the early ‘70s and has been cited by some as the reason why bedbugs made a comeback. Except they’re horrifyingly evolutionary in response to new threats and they’d already begun developing a DDT resistance. They’ve developed it against other pesticides, too, which is why it’s so difficult to get rid of them. Bedbugs evolved about 100 million years ago and may have plagued the dinosaurs. I tried to find an evolutionary reason why they even exist—surely there’s some purpose for them, right? Didn’t everything evolve for a specific reason? Where are they in the food chain? Can humans exploit them somehow for some property they possess that cures infected hangnail or something? I found nothing. Some scientists believe they’re a food source for certain spiders, but I suggest there aren’t enough of those spiders around. As far as I can tell, all bedbugs are good for is poking holes in humans. I Googled to learn what I could do to prevent the couch monsters from finding my bed. YouTube videos showed me how to make little protectors for my bed’s feet for trapping those who depart and those trying to enter. I learned bedbugs supposedly hate peppermint oil, so I bought some, (14 drops of oil for 3/4 cups of water), and sprayed the floor between my living room and the bedroom every night. I also sprayed the door frame. And the bedclothes. I felt like a witch, circling my bed every night with my Magic Potion Mister intoning the hallowed incantations of my ancient foremothers and foresisters: “Get the hell away from my bed you filthy little #$%^&s!” After a couple of days my bedroom smelled like a North Pole cathouse. Taking back my power from the stress Anyone who’s been thusly cursed can testify that bedbugs bring stress and depression. Your home has been invaded by a mostly unseen army and you’re always waiting for the next rash. The property manager scheduled an exterminator for a week hence and I was like, But what if these #$%^&s overpopulate and come looking for me??? Not to worry, one female lays an egg a day, so they’re not like African driver ants which lay 3-4 million eggs a month. Younger me would have broken down in great despair and considered abandoning the apartment, leaving all my worldly possessions to the bedbugs. But, I thought, someone who writes a Substack newsletter called Grow Some Labia really shouldn’t wuss out so easily! It’s all in how you think about life’s slings and arrows, and how you choose to interpret them. The reason why they schedule a week in advance is so that you have time to plastic-bag all your clothes, books, and other possessions in the treated rooms, remove electrical outlet covers and vacuum your own bedbug-ridden furniture. The old me would have put off what needed to be done for awhile and then forced myself, whining and crying that it wasn’t faaaiiir, and why was I being so put-upon by this curse? Why was God being so mean to me? How we react, and our resistance to our plight, is what can make a crisis like this far, far worse than it needs to be. As I walked home from the drugstore with my peppermint oil and trusty plant sprayer, I felt a little more powerful, like a warrior who wasn’t going to submit to my enemies’ demands without a fight. I am taking back my power! I thought to myself. I refused to give in to my familiar inner personal enemy, The Terminator . I shoved a towel under the bedroom door crack. It probably wouldn’t keep the beasts at bay if they wanted in but they’d have to work for it. I’d wake up in the morning thinking, Do I itch anywhere? No, I didn’t. By Labor Day weekend, five days after my bites, my stress heightened. But my Magic Potion seemed to be working. Or maybe my enemies just weren’t hungry enough. Bedbugs can live for months without feeding, some up to a year. If you Google too much you find horror stories of how they’re resilient to just about everything except maybe a nuclear holocaust. I’m not sure if they’ll survive like the cockroaches but I’m not sure they won’t. I mean, they survived the dinosaurs’ killer comet and now they party on pesticides. Can you drown them? Yes, they can’t breathe underwater, but they can hold their breath for hours. Can you flush them down the toilet? Yes, but they’re like little Navy Seals who can come back up from the tank and live to terrorize you further, probably a thousand times more pissed (ar ar). They can track your scent, your sweat, your vibration. They know when the pest dudes are coming, because like they’re psychic or something, and they will amass an air force and parachute into your bed, leaving your drained, dessicated corpse for the exterminator to find. I had to move my sealed plastic bags to the balcony, which looked like a Toronto garbage strike. My Inner Terminator was screaming that this was all for naught, I would never get rid of them, and they would terrorize me forever. “Shut up,” I said, and envisioned myself slipping on a helmet and picking up my  Peppermint Spray Mister O’ Death and meeting the enemy on the battlefield of my living room floor. “Die, you foul beasts, die!” I yelled in my fantasy as I sprayed them with Christmas nightmare. Peppermint oil kills on contact although you have to actually find an invisible ninja to do this. Which is why it works better as repellent. I cried the night before the exterminator came because I was so stressed out. I wasn’t eating much; my stomach was constantly upset. Later, you can’t put all your stuff back; you must live out of these hermetically sealed garbage bags until the exterminator returns in 2-3 weeks to get the recently hatched bugs. My beautiful apartment had turned into a nightmare hellhole, even as I thanked God, Goddess, and Darwin that the little f—kers hadn’t invaded my bed. I lay there that last night, checklisting what I needed to do before I left for work, as my boss had arranged for me to work at their ad hoc ‘office’ in the city. And I felt another mild panic attack. I reminded myself, There are people in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza right now who fear nightly attacks by an enemy far worse than bedbugs. I’ll bet they’d trade for my piddly-ass problem any day. Privilege means our afflictions are often much bigger in our heads than they are in reality. When I got home that evening, all my furniture was upended and I couldn’t move anything back until after I was declared bugless. This was my new, albeit temporary life. Every step of the way was a new source of depression. But then, I noticed—because Buddhism teaches you to pay attention to your emotional storms—that after a day or two I got used to each new step. That Friday night after putting clean bedclothes on the bed, restoring my computer desk to minimum working order, and moving several balcony bags to the living room so everything didn’t mold, I treated myself to dinner at a local Italian restaurant including two glasses of wine, because wine cures all situational depression. I really didn’t give a crap about the bedbugs as I stumbled home with my leftover pizza box. I was a lot safer now. Bedbugs happen What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, unless you choose victimhood. Depression immobilizes you, makes you incapable of action. It’s sort of a parasite of its own, draining you of competence and confidence and telling you there’s nothing you can do to change things. I have to remind myself to snap out of it, to re-frame how I’m interpreting a situation, not to take anything personally, that I was dealing with a problem many people have. I didn’t even have anyone to be mad at. The bedbugs? They’re dumb insects doing what they’re designed to do. The property managers? Bedbugs suck out their profits. God? Oh please. Bedbugs happen, and contrary to mythology, they don’t care about your housekeeping. They only care about you, their human buffet. I reminded myself this was a challenge , an adventure , and as difficult as it was I’d gotten off easy. There was nothing else to be done; this is how you deal with these little ratbastards. You wash or high-heat dry all your clothes, bedclothes, linens, everything. I did multiple loads on my normal washing day and the day after The Grand Steaming, I did several more, and our basement laundry was predictably busy on a Saturday morning. When I finally found a free dryer I raced to the washing machine to pull some stuff out and claim it; but an old lady was already loading her clothes in there. “That’s my dryer,” I told her. “I just saw it and I raced over there to grab some clothes and claim it!” “But I need a dryer too!” “I saw it first. I have a helluva lot of laundry to do.” “So do I, I haven’t done it in a month!” But she compliantly unloaded for me. Later, I apologized. “I’m sorry I was a pissant earlier. You said you have a month’s worth of laundry to do, well guess what, I have to wash everything I own because I just got treated for bedbugs.” Nothing makes people more sympathetic. She was nice about it, and I found something else to be grateful for: An old lady who wasn’t going to hold it against me that I metaphorically elbowed her out of the way for a dryer. Unlike bedbugs, not all people suck. I offered her a blessing as I departed with a huge pile of warm laundry. “May the washers and dryers you need always be free for you!” She smiled. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

#MeToo has trained men to fear women. Why should they? How can men change the conversation? It's time for all of us to speak truth to power. Okay, it was a really weird thing to talk about at a professional holiday sales mixer. But, in my defense, the gentleman did  ask what I did on my off-time when I wasn’t doing sales. So I answered honestly. “I have a website called Grow Some Labia,” I said, and as soon as it was out of my mouth I was like oh fuck. “What? Grow some Libya?” he asked, clearly confused. Waytago, Sushi-For-Brains, I thought, but I plowed forward. “Grow Some Lay-bi-a,” I said. “Grow some  labia?” I don’t think he knew what the word meant, or perhaps wasn’t sure if he understood me right. I am not explaining to this guy what labia are,  I thought, but also realized I had boldly chosen this name for my mission, and I was going to have to explain it to an awful lot of people. Okay, I’ve been out of the in-person professional networking thing since the pandemic, but usually people ask me stuff like, “So what do you do?” with the understanding they mean, How are you keeping yourself off the streets and out of the pool hall? And absolutely everyone else did that night. Except for this guy. Instead of explaining what labia are, I said, “I write about how women and others can reclaim their power—” “Oh, so you’re a feminist!” he said, wide-eyed, like I’d just told him my profession was ‘serial castrater’. “I come from a very patriarchal country!” It sounded more like fright than warning. “It’s okay, I’m not the scary kind of feminist!” I said. So I told him a bit about Grow Some Labia, without mentioning the name again, and emphasized how my mission was not just to help women, but men too, to avoid bad, abusive relationships, to speak truth to power even when you’re not marginalized. He and I shared something in common: We both are. And not. He’s a man, and I’m white. I explained I also want to bring the masses together on the left and right so we can take liberalism and conservatism back from, well, the crazies. I didn’t define the crazies. I didn’t want to get too political. Shortly after, another gentleman joined us, and we returned to more business-like conversation. At some point the first guy said he’d left a job because of a female manager. Twice, she had said something extremely personal about him in front of other people. He was horrified. He was humiliated. He resigned the next day. He didn’t tell us what exactly she said, but I asked, “Did you report her to HR?” “Yes, I hope you reported her!” the other guy chimed in. “I didn’t,” the first man replied. I didn’t ask why. I know why women don’t do it. “Maybe I should have.” “Women aren’t allowed to do that either, you know,” I told him. “We aren’t allowed to harass or say humiliating things to men in the workplace. The rules are for everyone.” There. That’s the kind of feminist I am. If he figures out how to spell ‘labia’ maybe he’ll visit my website and see I’m not the kind of feminist who thinks The Patriarchy is, like, this overwhelming male-only Illuminati controlling the world. with their own Patriarchal space lasers aimed at Amy Comey-Barrett’s head. “That’s right,” the other guy concurred. I felt so bad for the first guy. Did he not know the rules apply to us, too? Maybe he did, but didn’t feel comfortable reporting it. Maybe the HR manager was a woke woman, or worse, a DEI consultant. Maybe he didn’t think he had the right. I didn’t feel comfortable asking him about it, I had just met the guy. Maybe men really don’t know we can’t do pull this stuff either. Maybe that’s a failure of feminism. We need to upgrade. So. A year ago this past spring I went down to the States to visit my Mom. She lived at a retirement home and I had to pack her walker into my rental car. I asked for help with one of the older assistants there, a guy about my age. “Hey, I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re a very beautiful woman!” he said. “Please don’t get mad!” “Awww, I think you’re a very sweet man for saying so!” I replied sincerely with a broad grin. He started getting really nervous. Like he’d just fucked up. “Please don’t get mad, I shouldn’t have said that,” he reiterated. “I don’t want to get in trouble with HR again. I said this to someone once before and she reported me.” “I promise you I’m not like that,” I assured him. I saw where this had gone. The poor man! He was my generation, old enough to remember when telling a woman she was pretty couldn’t get you fired for being a galactic-level asshole. “I got in so much trouble before,” he said. “Listen,” I said, and I looked him right in the eye, “I’m not that kind of woman. I’m a feminist, but not the victim kind. We’re of the same generation. I don’t get bent out of shape over stupid stuff. I’m flattered when a man tells me that, and I know he’s not trying to get a date. I don’t believe women are disrespected when you say stuff like that.’ “I know I shouldn’t have said that,” he said. “Yeah, I’ll agree, since you got busted once already, but only because you never know who will take it the wrong way even though you didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry someone reported you. Y’know, if I’d been upset by what you said I would have told you, nicely, why. I wouldn’t have gone ratting you out to HR.” Why is that always the first line of defense? Why can’t we first explain to the man why what he said rubbed us the wrong way, and if he’s a jerk about it, then  you take him to HR? This guy was so worried I was going to report him. I crossed-my-heart-and-hoped-to-die like I was six and told him may God strike me dead if I’m lying: I am not going to change my mind in a few days and report him. I am not going to talk to my gal pals and let them change my mind. A man who tells a woman she’s pretty should not be reported to HR. Maybe if everyone’s had training telling them they shouldn’t handle it themselves. Or if they think the guy will be a jerk, or worse. But, I think if I was the workplace associate to step out of line, under different circumstances, I would appreciate it if the aggrieved party told me privately, first. I could be an asshole about it, upon which they’d be perfectly justified in escalating it. Or I could be a big girl (or a big boy, if I was a man) and say I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said/done that, I’m sorry I offended/hurt you, it won’t happen again. And I’d have been very, very grateful they didn’t report me to HR. Michael Woudenberg has written a great Substack on clothing, sex, and how everything we wear  advertises our sexuality, with some great questions we should ask ourselves before we go out dressed however we are (especially young people who don’t always think about the consequences). It’s food for thought. Women have social, romantic and sexual responsibilities, too. I’ve been thinking about these stories a lot because I don’t like the power #MeToo has given me over men. On the one hand, I like that they know they can’t pull Harvey Weinstein shit. People like that get what they deserve. On the other hand, men need to understand they don’t have to take endless shit from the sort of feminists who throw tantrums over tiny little ‘microaggressions’ (which we Gen Xers used to call a ‘compliment’). That there’s a way to stand up to women when they get out of hand (as we sometimes do). When we’re being too sensitive. Can a man explain himself like an adult and challenge her notion that she’s been ‘microaggressed’ or whatever? Can he tell a woman she’s pretty, and respond powerfully and responsibly if she goes on social media to pitch a feminist tantrum, and can he challenge all the anonymous haters who tell him he’s a dirtball and human slime? I think there is. We should talk about that more. I think we’ve hit ‘ peak woke ’ including all its in-your-face, balls-to-the-wall, belligerent feminism. I’m behind feminism 100%. Everyone has a right to a seat at the table. Let all of us achieve our full potential and be held back only by our talent, skills, experience, drive and intellect. Not by arbitrary invisible rules, and senseless identity-driven boundaries. If we’re not achieving yet, it’s up to us. Related: Why Shouldn’t Transwomen (And Other Men) Compete With Women In Chess? I hope my non-white mixer friend perhaps drew a lesson from our conversation about my feminist blog and his dipstick manager: We need to hold our own tribe to the same standards to which we hold another. Female managers don’t get to behave badly just because they’re arguably less empowered as women. Women can be sexist pigs too, just as people of color, and especially self-described ‘antiracists’, can be, in fact, racist. I hope to help sincere men stand up to and challenge over-the-top feminism, just as I, a white person, challenge histrionic antiracism. I focus on non-white racism because the world is full of critics of the other kind. In fact, there isn’t enough actual white racism to go around, so 'antiracists’ have manufactured truckloads of ‘white supremacy’ so they have a reason to get up in the morning. It’s in your chocolate chip cookies ! And traffic signals ! Even Pokémon ! Even water  is racist! Don’t drink it or bathe in it or you’re supporting white supremacy! White people, including non-woke liberals, can speak truth to power too, and yes, even people of color have power. If one can destroy lives with cancellation, or support a filthy terrorist organization like Hamas, as Black Lives Matter clearly does (I can’t find ‘Israel’ or ‘Hamas’ referenced anywhere on their website from their search engine, and ‘October 7’ brings up irrelevant event links), and if it has the power to misappropriate funds , it’s powerful enough to criticize, no natural skin cancer prevention required. We have to think carefully, and be wary of our words as we speak truth to power, but white people can challenge black or brown racism, even as ‘antiracists’ claim eternal victimhood. Yes, we can do it without being racist, a Karen or a Kyle , although we have to learn not caring when they call us that. We have to know when an accusation of racism is meant sincerely, upon which we should pause and consider whether maybe they have a point, and when to know it’s just being lobbed to shut you down. ‘Progressives’ deserve the reputation for being wusses. They’ll only speak truth, ultimately, to white male power. They pretend no one else has any, despite numerous clear advancement of many people who are neither white nor male, or one but not the other. Accountability is for everyone. Illiberal feminists, ironically, collude and collaborate with ‘The Patriarchy’ when they refuse to challenge misogynists of color. Especially Hamas . Women have power we didn’t have before. #MeToo has been fantastic for giving voice to women who’ve been silent about very real grievances against patriarchy, particularly entitled penises. Men know there may now be real consequences to acting upon sexual entitlement. Where Third and Fourth Wave feminism has erred is in blanketing all  men with the sins of a minority. Men who wish to challenge extremist feminism have to be ready for accusations of being sexist or misogynist, and have to be comfortable challenging themselves if they think it might occasionally be true, but know when to look her in the eye and say, “No, men have a right to voice opinions on rape/alleged sexism/Russell Brand too. No, you don’t get to invoke my manhood to shut me up. If you have a logical response to what I just said, let’s hear it. Otherwise, if all you’ve got is defensive victimhood bullshit, come back when you can argue like an adult.” We need to think, and talk more about this. ‘Woke’ is in the hot seat now for numerous reasons and we, the new Silent Majority, have the power to challenge its power. How can we do this, as rational-thinking lefties and righties? We will talk about this more. Let me know your thoughts. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing!

My worst job was a case study in Internet-boom corporate misogyny and a toxic masculine sales strategy This is what working for Fiberphonophobia reminds me of Giant shark’s jaws. Image by Jan Hrasko from Pixabay “This is my letter of resignation.” I pushed it across the desk. My boss glanced at it — there wasn’t much to read, just short impeccable corporatespeak saying, in essence: “I’m fucking off now. Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish.” I don’t remember what he said. Probably, “Okay.” Maybe there was a relieved look in his eyes. He’d no longer have to worry about baby rattlesnakes in his desk or yellowcake uranium doughnuts. “I know you haven’t been happy here.” The understatement of the year. He wasn’t solely responsible for my unhappiness. He was more like the cursed caboose in a long miserable train ride through hell. “I think it’s best for all concerned,” I said. “Now, I can give you two weeks’ notice as standard corporate procedure dictates, but if you want I can leave today.” Companies don’t usually want severely pissed-off almost-ex-employees hanging around. Not only aren’t they productive, but managers are afraid you might blow up the printer room or plant a virus on the network. “It’s best if you leave now,” he said. “I think we both understand why.” “I’m glad to hear you say that,” I replied. “Because I leave for Mexico in three days.” He looked a bit surprised. “Oh, I knew what you were going to say,” I replied. “Where’s my computer?” The new Fiberphonophobia job sounded great — despite the crappy starting salary, mitigated by three initial monthly ‘bonuses’ to get us going, but the commissions promised were good. It was a new fiber optics phone company, founded in the wake of the recently-passed Telecom Reform Act in the United States. It opened up local phone service competition for the first time, allowing ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers, i.e., the traditional Baby Bells) to compete on long-distance service. The new sales team’s territory was the state capital and thirteen regions surrounding it. Juniors and seniors could sell everything: Dialup, long distance, and high-speed Internet services like T-1s and frame relay. At least, that’s what we were told when we got hired. On the first day for the all-new sales team it became apparent something was not right with this company. I found a lonely phone on my desk. “Where’s my computer?” I asked my new boss. “Oh, you don’t get one yet. You have to earn it. When you start closing deals you get a computer.” I stared at him like he was freaking insane. “How am I supposed to close deals without a computer?” I asked. I was surprised they weren’t making me ‘earn’ my phone either. What was this, 1982? The Glengarry Glen Ross School of Sales Management. Do everything you can to prevent sales. Everyone with a sales career has known this asshole. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and a few days later we all had computers. That was the first shot over the crippled bow of the most dysfunctional ship of state I’ve ever worked for. Our shoes had barely hit the pavement when they began restricting what we could sell, one corporate diktat at a time. “Junior salespeople may no longer sell data services.” “Junior salespeople must bring a senior salesperson with them to sell an account with ten or more dial-up lines.” Because, you know, local dial tone is friggin’ rocket science. “No more free installation. Flat $65 per line one-time installation charge.” Yes, Mr. Customer, for just $650 we’ll switch over your ten phone lines to our service and charge slightly less per line! You can expect the ROI sometime late next year! (Wait’ll you see the bang they got for that buck.) “New accounts must be five lines, minimum.” None of these aligned with the expectations they’d outlined during the interview process. Exactly the opposite. All this to sell our new competitive services to local companies who’d been served by the Baby Bell forever and didn’t trust these newfangled CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers). Their mistrust was well-placed, since the customer service team responsible for transitioning service from Baby Bell did so with all the finesse and success of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Despite promising the customer a seamless transition over a weekend, Monday morning us salescritters would receive rage-filled hysterical phone calls as our new clients opened up to no functioning phone lines. Their businesses depended on them and none of them fucking worked, in direct contrast to what we’d promised them in good faith: That we were a phone company who knew something about, you know, like, phone service. Shortly after, big surprise, we’d bring in a new account only to be informed by sales engineers there was some obscure technical reason why we’d never be able to provide service. Meanwhile, our Crack Customer Service Team On Crack was on the blower daily to the Baby Bell, the only entity which could fix the problems. There was little our company could fix ourselves, so it got done when the Baby was damn good and ready, which was right after their own customers. Yeah, there was a business model for the ages: New competitive companies who relied on their traditional, monolithic competitor to provide the product without a lot of grief. There was nothing I hated more than selling a shitty service I had no power to fix. At least as a computer reseller I could get a computer fixed in a day or two. Back then businesses didn’t rely on computers as much as they do today. I’d go home in tears, convinced I was a failure and wondering how I’d make quota when management kept cutting back what service we could sell or provide, where, how much, and under what circumstances. The stress was unbelievable. I might have started drinking except I lived with a reformed alcoholic. The Little Phone Company That Couldn’t “We no longer provide service in this town. Or this town. Or this town.” The sales team was reduced to selling in the main city. It was a state capital, but no major metro, and we began to bump into each other prospecting. Our new team sales territory, a few months later. Photo by Tomwsulcer on Wikimedia Commons Almost every new account was met by the word ‘can’t’. “We can’t provide service here! There’s some really weird obscure technical reason why. Oh, this is such an unusual problem. You’ll never run into it again!” “Oh, well, maybe one other case of this highly unusual problem elsewhere in the city.” “The jack is wrong.” “The lines are too old.” “The lines are too young.” “Oh no! Copper wire! Who expected to find that in a telephone line?” “OMG! The lines run through the walls!” “OMG! These lines connect to tall poles outside with cables running between them! We weren’t expecting that!” We were still pressured to make quota. “Not here. Or there. Or in gray buildings. Or buildings on street corners. Or in office towers located on streets. And not in months with an ‘R’ in them. No service to neighborhoods where vengeful corporate exec ex-wives live. Nor if the business owner is prone to wearing spandex. Or owns a dog. Or a cat. Or has children. ISDN service may only be provided to people who eat eggplant. And are missing a back molar. And who watch Seinfeld .” Can’t. Can’t. Can’t. Can’t. I’d never in my life seen a company so sales-averse that if they weren’t very, very vigilant, if they didn’t watch us like hawks, someone might sell something. “Why don’t we go into the pizza business?” I suggested. “It may not be within our wheelhouse, but at least people want to buy it and even we can’t screw it up.” Sales Nazis Must Die Our Crack Management Team On Crack started to unravel. Some asshole on the sales team (it wasn’t me) sold some phone service that actually worked, so they fired my boss and hired a Sales Prevention Assistant to ensure it never happened again. This is why, I assume, her primary objective wasn’t to enable the sales team, but to seduce the new VP of Sales. He wasn’t particularly attractive, with eyebrows like Andy Rooney, but she had a huge crush on him. She was a terrible ‘assistant’ from the get-go. Her thick Nor’east phone voice grated on our nerves and if we asked her to do anything — like, say, her duties — she turned combative and insisted she didn’t have time to type up proposals or make some phone calls or help us calculate some numbers. Worse, management supported her obstinacy and insisted she absolutely had to perform these tasks and not us. Never mind that clients were waiting for proposals, the company pressured us to sell faster, and we couldn’t do that without timely proposals. Complaining that The Useless One ‘never had time’ fell on deaf ears. It was downright sadistic the way they pressured us to make quota each month, yet wouldn’t hire someone to assist with sales, since what passed for a sales assistant was far more focused on fucking the VP and becoming his EA. The fact that they were married — to other people, and with families — mattered not in the slightest to either. …And then we get sold… The technical issues may be chalked up to the earliest days of competitive phone service when no one knew what they were doing, but the sheer obstinacy in hiring someone as useless as Little Mrs. Hotpants amazes me even today. We were strictly prohibited from doing anything that might result in almost anyone making quota. Customarily, salespeople who can’t make quota get fired, but we weren’t. The whole Dilbertesque management strategy was straight out of the Go-Go ’90s Dot-Com Hypermasculine Toxic Competition Is Good For Sales Teams Corporate Strategy handbook. Maybe it’s more effective in companies that aren’t afraid to sell. Eventually, the sales gods smiled upon our beleaguered team and Little Mrs. Hotpants got her promotion into the VP’s bed. I mean, into his Executive Assistant position. (Which might be in the Kama Sutra.) Senior management screwed up and hired a new sales assistant eminently capable and as easy to work with and eager to help us as Little Mrs. Hotpants was not. We still had to watch out for The Penguin, a short squat sales team guy who did, in fact, sound like the Batman villain. He wasn’t a ‘team player’; he famously ‘account jumped’ — moved in on accounts he knew others were targeting and closed them out from under his fellow team members. Everyone learned quickly to hide their accounts from The Penguin. Our office finally got a new sales manager. By that time, everyone in Sales was pretty miserable and no one made quota except for Top Producer, the mega-senior saleswoman who was about the only one allowed to sell anything, and who was on the edge of shagging her biggest account. (Love was always in the air at Fiberphonophobia.) Customers still called in screaming like clockwork, and word spread the company was up for sale. When the completed sale was announced, rumor had it that senior management made A PILE, and one reportedly went on a weekend-long bender to celebrate his new good fortune. It was years before I found out who. Not Andy Rooney. By Christmas I was drinking when I got home every night. Someone had gifted me a bottle of rum and I asked my partner, “Is it okay if I keep this if I drink it? If it tempts you to fall off the wagon I’ll give it away.” “You can keep it around for awhile,” he said, “but not forever.” No problem. Image by Social Butterfly from Pixabay So I had a tall rum and coke every night through Christmas after I got home from work. Sometimes I had two. The world didn’t ‘look so dirty’ as Lee Remick’s character told Jack Lemmon in the last scene of the 1962 film about the descent into alcoholism, Days of Wine and Roses. Significant Other was already used to me coming home in tears, throwing my purse on the couch, pushing him away, and saying, “Leave me alone, let me do my email.” It wasn’t the personal chore it is today, and after I’d forgotten about work for awhile I could tell him how my day had gone without yelling and screaming and using language with more f-bombs than Scarface. The following spring the new boss took away two deals I’d closed, denying me the commissions. I went home early that day, which you can get away with when you’re an outside salescritter, in one of the most blinding furies I can remember. My partner was out of town and missed all the fun, like me crying and raging on the couch and inventing violent fantasies of what I’d like to do to my boss. I spent the rest of my time looking for a new job rather than new accounts, and found one just as Fiberphonophobia completed its acquisition by a former competitor I’ll call Big Dick Telecom. “Now under new management…” I went to Cozumel for a week and had one of the greatest vacations of my life, lolling on beaches and visiting parks and getting whistled at by friendly but not pervy Mexican guys. Every once in awhile I’d think, I NEVER HAVE TO GO BACK TO THAT FIBER OPTIC SHITHOLE AGAIN! My heart would soar, I imagine, like Little Mrs. Hotpants writhing away under Andy Rooney. I stayed in contact with a fellow co-worker who kept me apprised of all the excitement I was now missing: Little Mrs. Hotpants got drunk at a company picnic and was all over Andy Rooney in front of both their families. At the office, the receptionist opened the supply closet to find the lovebirds engaged in what is best described in the parlance of the time as a Bill-and-Monica. One of the employees stole from others, got into a violent screaming match with another, and got fired; they had to alert security not to let her into the building, fearing she might get all American and return with a gun. Not an implausible scenario given the working conditions at Big Dick Telecom. Under their even less benevolent leadership, sales morale dropped from lousy to abysmal. Big Dick Telecom, it seemed, favored an even more toxic masculine style of management and proved it by merging Fiberphonophobia’s sales team with their own soulless psychopaths, who made The Penguin look like Mother Theresa. They set everyone against each other, reasoning that a highly competitive toxic work culture would juice sales. My friend reported record levels of drinking and deteriorating mental health. The Penguin showed up less and was suspected of working an alternative job — i.e., ‘double dipping’. Someone compiled a case against him, confronted him with the evidence and — how he pulled this off remains one of the greatest Unsolved Mysteries of the closing years of the twentieth century — managed to convince the Big Dicks it was all a huge misunderstanding, and that wasn’t his voice on the other company’s phone at his suspected desk which, if you called it while he was at Fiberphonophobia, responded with a voice mail message stating his full, unusual name, in his distinctive Penguin voice. Big Dick Telecom wilts A few years later Big Dick Telecom went dramatically, flamingly, and globally bankrupt. They set whole new records, including Biggest Bankruptcy Ever, a record set by a large energy company just a few months previously, and a vainglorious honor Big Dick Telecom held for several years until Lehman Brothers went belly-up during the Great Meltdown. It was the most bizarre company I’ve ever seen, with a terror of sales, punished with infuriated customers if you sold anything. It’s possible the problems were in our office alone, as ours was one of about fifty Fiberphonophobia offices around the United States. The press release about the sale noted the value of sound performance and praised its great ‘corporate culture’. Maybe ours was the only one run by lunatics. Big Dick Telecom was an even more abusive employer and I’m surprised anyone stuck around for it. Maybe it was Battered Employee Syndrome. The CEO, as was customary for high-flying technology companies back then, cooked the books while covering up his own personal debt which he’d accumulated by spending other peoples’ money. The flameout of Big Dick Telecom and many other tech companies of the era are why Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act mandating the CFO was fully responsible for and would be held accountable for improperly reported financial statements. Many CFOs retired early. With all the drama, sex, and underhanded machinations, Fiberphonophobia would make a great movie, kind of like Office Space except run by high-functioning psychos. With Alec Baldwin playing my last boss. And Eugene Levy as the VP of Sales. Kevin Spacey as the CFO. Pedal to the medal. This first appeared on Medium. If you're in Canada, I'm not talking about your company!

And I thanked him. Spoiler alert: I didn’t get murdered. He wasn’t Batman, but he was masked nevertheless. Photo by Mjutan on Wikimedia Commons It was a lively trip to the drugstore this morning. I was on a mission — to buy an umbrella, some stamps and mail a card before the skies opened up for the entire damn day in accordance with the prophecy that the deluge would commence at ten. Mobile battery powered. Turbines to speed. Eddie & The Cruisers cranked. Roger. I had my tunes and a single-minded focus. As I approached the drugstore a tall man in a blue shirt who looked like a street person gestured to me. I shook my head and said, “No, no, sorry,” which is what I do when I’m panhandled. He stepped in front of me and his arm brushed mine as he extended it to stop me. His face darkened. He was angry, but not dangerously. He said something that sounded like he might have a speech impediment but with the buds in I couldn’t be sure. I was on alert but wasn’t frightened. I don’t scare as easily as some. My scalp tingled, but my heart hadn’t quickened. “Hey, knock it off!” I said sternly. He said something back, not sure what, but he commanded my attention. He angled so that my back was to the wall. I stepped forward and said, “Hey! You don’t touch a woman without her permission! You don’t EVER touch a strange woman! Now back off!” And I finished with the line every man in Canada knows by heart. “NO MEANS NO!” Someone said something. We turned and there was another man coming up the walk. He said something to the guy and gestured and my harasser melted away. The power of a more powerfully-built man. I moved to the pharmacy door for safety and turned around. My harasser was gone and my rescuer looked at me. “Thank you!” I said with a thumbs-up. “I appreciate your help.” He nodded and I went inside. Now, one might ask: Why did Mr. Blue Shirt (my harasser) think he had the right to just step in front of a woman and demand her attention that way? What made him think a woman’s attention is just there for the taking? What entitled, privileged, patriarchal stupid-ass notion in his head told him it was okay to try and intimidate a woman with his looming presence? The answer, I suspect, was the clamour of mental illness. I conducted my business with Canada Post and walked up the wrong aisle to check the prices on my favorite hair oil. It was the men’s section, and who did I run into but my rescuer. He’d done what many feminists ask men to do: Stand up for us in the face of misogyny. If Mr. Blue Shirt had decided to get physical with me, it could have gotten, well, scary. He was thin, perhaps not in the best of shape. Still, if he had a weapon he could have hurt me. We often expect men to step in and accept the danger on our behalf, don’t we? I was a stranger. I wasn’t my rescuer’s wife or his girlfriend. This time I had the presence of mind to remove my earbuds. “Thanks again for your help with that guy,” I said. “I appreciate you stepping in like that.” “He’s gone now,” he said. “Do you know what his deal was?” I asked. “He sounded like maybe he had a disablement of some sort.” “I think he has mental problems,” the guy said. “I called 911 and reported him to the police.” Now, why didn’t I think of that? “Thank you.” We walked away from each other. I turned back.“Thank you for standing up for a woman.” Always thank The Patriarchy when it uses its powers for good. I want to emphasize something: I don’t know how YOU should have handled it. I’m different from you. My life and my background is different. I’ve never suffered what I would call a truly significant physical or sexual assault. Any physical assault threat more often than not came from high school girls, except for one guy who learned never to hit me again. There’s been the occasional threat of sexual assault, sometimes involving me courting danger by doing dumb shit. Dumb Shit I've Done: I didn't get raped, but I sure made it easy for them But, I also have a GREAT mother. My Mother Taught Me Never To Tolerate Abuse: And you don't have to, either I got lucky in the birth lottery. Not every woman does. I did what I imagined I’d do if confronted by an asshole man. I stuck up for myself, I challenged him right back, I raised my voice and let him know I was no easy target. And I repeated the Holy Canadian Mantra: No Means No. If my rescuer hadn’t been there, I expect I would have pushed past this guy, yelled in a loud voice for everyone in the parking lot to hear, “KNOCK IT OFF! YOU LEAVE ME ALONE!” That’s probably when I would have thought to call the police, safely inside the drugstore. I live in Toronto, so the likelihood he had a gun was minimal. Also, I just don’t get pushed by men. I find that when you stand up to them a lot of them will back down. I don’t go all Hyper Super Wonder Woman Feminist on everyone. Ya picks yer battles and one doesn’t have time to operate on logic. I go by gut feeling. If my gut is screaming, “DANGER! DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!” I ditch the feminist stuff and just do what I can to vacate the area. My gut wasn’t churning with terror. My scalp tingled with heightened awareness of danger, but I wasn’t yet fearful. I never got that far, I guess, thanks to the arrival of someone whose power Mr. Blue Shirt respected more than mine. He could have stabbed me, I suppose, but the odds of that are even lower than getting shot, even though a woman got stabbed to death here in a drugstore a few years ago. While you’re worried about Mr. Testosterone Poisoning, your killer could be a pretty professionally-dressed female stranger with psychological problems. Further, around 64% of women are murdered by family (male) members or intimate partners, so your chances of being murdered by a stranger are fairly small. Fortunately for me, I live in a safe city, for a privileged white woman, I guess. I suspect my age is an effective shield as well. How we frame and interpret what happens to us wires our brains a certain way and determines how much we suffer from it. I choose to frame what happened this way: My rescuer was one of my peeps (a good-hearted person with a sense of social responsibility) and he looked out for me. Biologically speaking, I was at a disadvantage if Mr. Blue Shirt had pushed it. If he’d gotten physical I might not have been able to fight back. Even men smaller than I have superior strength. My rescuer used his male privilege — the respect a man has for another’s physical prowess — to help out someone at a disadvantage. He looked out for me and put himself on the line for a stranger. What will I or any other woman do if put to a test? Why do we always expect men to help us? Is this not a bit of patriarchal thinking on our part? If we want to share the wealth, share the power, share the glory, should we not also expect to share the risk? Why do we tear men down, tell them everything they do is wrong, pathologize and sexualize their every move, but then expect them to ride in like shining knights if they happen to be in the vicinity and take the knife, the bullet, or the fist for us? What would you do if you saw a woman being harassed? If you saw someone about to call 911 to report a heinous black birdwatcher? If you saw a man harassing his partner? What would you do if you saw a woman harassing her partner? What can we do when we ourselves or others are being threatened? I’m pretty sure my Medium peep and fellow old lady Julia E Hubbel , who works out more than Chuck Norris, would have broken this guy in half, ripped off his arm and beaten him to death with it. Or maybe ripped off Chuck Norris’s arm and weaponized it. Then she’d make earrings out of the perp’s testicles to serve as An Example To The Others. Image by knivesdeal from Pixabay For the rest of us, there’s pepper spray. In a cool girly disco container. We can step in like many women did when they saw a male actor harassing a female actor like in the above video. I just wish some would have had the labia to stop the woman getting abusive with the man. Why is it easier to ignore when women do it? I thought we were against domestic violence…? I’d like to think I’d step in and say, “Hey, is there a problem here? Everything okay? You need some help getting home, ma’am?” What might I do if I found a white woman threatening a black person with her Mighty Cell Phone? I’d like to think I’d pull out my own cell phone and aim it at her, telling her to go home before I upload this video to Twitter and get her fired. Granted, I’d suffer even less of a chance of getting murdered by Barbecue Becky than by a guy with mental illness, but the odds are against both. Just a reminder: Not everyone who stands up to a man behaving badly gets hurt. I’ve done it before when the guy could have easily figured out my name and come back to hurt me. I’m almost entirely certain I wouldn’t have gotten hurt this morning even if my rescuer hadn’t been there, but I respect him for stepping in bravely like he did. I think there’s a lesson there for all of us. Equality means shared risk. Have we got the labia for it? This originally appeared on Medium in July 2021.

Right-wing misogyny isn't How The Left Was Lost. It was women's, the primary administrators and executors of patriarchy and misogyny. The right hates Roe. The left hates No. The Red Tsunami flooded America after Democrats abandoned common sense, fair play, a commitment to constitutional freedoms, reason, education, and any American who fails to make less than $150,000 a year. How The Left Was Lost involved paying attention to the ‘Hitler’ in the other camp while ignoring the ayatollah in its own. If one was paying attention, which many ‘progressives’ weren’t, they’d have earlier identified the toxic ideologies of the ‘manosphere’ that have quietly permeated the progressive left. Antisemitism. White supremacy (tweak: Black, not white). Homophobia. A love affair with censorship and a growing one for political violence. And an equally virulent hatred for women. I’m not sure how many Democrats morphed red this month, but I’ve been reading about them. I didn’t cross the line, but I too divorced them. I will vote third-party from now on. I’m tired of being told to vote for the lesser of two evils. It’s getting harder and harder to tell them apart. We politically homeless aren’t holding our breath for change. The enemy was inside our house, too. We liberals saw it, even if progressives didn’t. What appalls me more than ‘liberal’ men who can’t handle female power, or who don’t take back their balls from dimwitted pussyhatters, are women who fight harder to roll back women’s rights more passionately than the U.S. Supreme Court. For all the post-election caterwauling about the misogyny on the right—and it’s real—the ‘progressive’ left has been taking orders from the hateful misogynist and about as unwoke-as-you-can-get manosphere for several years. Let’s break down progressive misogyny, exemplified by Exhibit A: Feminist tail-wagging, hand-licking allegiance to transactivist haters. The trans War on Women The manosphere discovered how easily manipulated progressive feminists are: Especially the most misandrist and patriarchy-obsessed. They were already eager pupils, group-trained to never say No to anyone seeking ‘inclusion’. Perpetually enraged manosphereists who’d had quite enough of feminism persuaded prog-fems to adopt values that look different from conservative authoritarianism but differ only in the minor details. They got the little puppies to accept the core tenets of traditional misogyny. The ugly reality is that this small category of liberals—‘progressive feminists’— abandoned what was left of their reason and common sense in favor of cultural Marxism and moral false equivalencies, setting themselves up for males cleverer than they to induce them to back away from female agency. How to groom a prog-fem for misogyny: Slap on a dress and a cheap wig and claim you ‘always felt like a woman’ Change laws to police women’s speech to conform to what men in drag want; Point out the correct word for ‘women’ is ‘womb havers’; call her vagina a ‘front hole’; ban ‘breast-feeding’ (the word, not the practice) and replace it with ‘chest-feeding’; Train prog-fems to detest and abuse women who defy transactivists’ claims; Promote faith-based genderwoo as ‘science’ in schools and recruit formerly scientific magazines for support; Indoctrinate schoolchildren with genderwoo and get the state to enforce their norms and practices; compel parents to affirm, use the ‘right’ pronouns, give their child puberty blockers…..or else. Invade bathrooms and other private areas for women, claiming discrimination if resisted; Tell young biologically female lesbians that ‘ some women have a penis ’ and that transwomen are women, and lesbians. If you don’t want to have sex with them you’re transphobic, ‘genital fetishist’, and a ‘cotton ceiling bigot’. Also, you’re not a ‘real lesbian’; Compel women to accept male athletes like Imane Khelif wanting to beat on and compete against women (News update: He’s more man than woman.); Ignore blatant sexual opportunism and legally permit violent, sadistic, or psychopathic sex offenders to share prisons with women; Indoctrinate prog-fems to deny women ever get raped or abused by male prisoners. Because that never happens . Dictating female speech, legally beating and raping women, punishing and pushing out scientists and other intellectuals who don’t tow the narrative line, indoctrinating children, punishing women for resisting male sexual pleasure, encouraging them to ignore thousands of years of evolutionary survival skills about strange men and that uncontrollable penis of theirs, and commanding them to believe what men tell them to are the exact same rules women must live under in theocratic, fascist cultures like ultra-Christian fundamentalism or Islamofascism. Convicted sex offenders in female prisons? How much must progressives hate women to support that? American sexologist Ray Blanchard’s historical research on ‘transssexualism’ found that around half of them were autogynephiles. Most of the rest were gay men hoping to attract more men men, and the fractional residual were what we far too broadly today designate ‘gender dysphoric’. The dizzy little proggies jump through hoops and sit on their hindquarters begging for a treat from their masculine overlords. They’re not smashing the Patriarchy, they’re jerking it off. The connection between right- and left-wing misogyny Right-wing traditionalists continue to glorify and fetishize the last golden years of unfettered male control over women before Feminism Ruined Everything ™. Women existed primarily for sexual purposes. Period. Show me some leg, sweetheart. The illiberal girlies style themselves ‘progressive’ as they jump and beg for treats from their masculine overlords, returning women to an earlier era when they compliantly prioritized men’s desires over their own. They accept male encroachment in places where strange men put all women and children in clear and present danger, using the magic word that blocks logic circuits in progressive women’s brains: INCLUSION The sexual desegregation drive began with the bathroom, when trans/queer culture was still a very tiny minority. The conversation began with ‘third bathrooms’ but was eventually discarded by men ‘identifying as women’ who desired not their own bathrooms, but women’s. Progressive women willfully ignored the glaringly obvious question: We’ve never allowed men into women’s bathrooms before for important safety reasons; don’t you see how sexual predators can take advantage of this to gain access to women in vulnerable places? Oh, don’t worry, they don’t want to hurt you, they just want to take a pee in peace! Here’s A Running List Why ‘Transwomen’ Don’t Belong In Women’s Spaces All this to indulge cross-dressing men. Sexual fetishists. Autogynephiles. Pretend we understand absolutely nothing about men and how manipulative many can be when they want something from women. Particularly sexual gratification. Prioritize men’s desires over your own safety needs. Yet….. Women may be the weaker sex, but not the gentler one Ironically, women are often the most dedicated administrators and enforcers of patriarchy and misogyny - even more strangely, on the left. Progressive feminists denounce ‘ tradwives ’ and other conservative women who submit to men; yet feminist ‘progressives’ refute women’s body autonomy by dictating to women to STFU about that penis exposing itself in the locker room. Sexual assault victims who have been used by male bodies should also STFU and get over their trauma, because a man in a dress wants to change next to you and your pretty little daughter, and (s)he has every right to, you transphobic, right-wing Trump lackey! The National Post reported in April that a new Scandinavian stud y found that women primarily make up the armies of the ‘woke’, with fearsome witch-hunting powers of the woke-infested state to enforce their rigid ideology against whoever dares challenge them. In the progressive feminist’s perfect world, finger-chopping would follow. The study measured Critical Social Justice Attitudes (CSJAs), among various populations, including ‘well-being’ variables like anxiety, depression and unhappiness. Not surprisingly, as has been found in other research, they found a correlation between (remember, primarily female) CSJA proponents and emotional dysfunction. Not to mention a willingness to dictate the speech of others, especially between those of perceived power differentials. Sounds pretty authoritarian, huh? The correlation between progressive women’s liberal views and depression, anxiety, and lack of happiness has already been well-documented by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. To wit: CSJAs are promoted and have successfully permeated many institutions including academia, sports, entertainment, politics, communities, mass media, journalism, and government (in the U.S., primarily the Democratic Party, and in Canada, the Liberals, the NDP and the Greens). Mostly by depressed, anxious, demonstrably neurotic women. The study also names several European countries - the most famously progressively liberal—for the promulgation and promotion of CSJAs. Psychology studies, as the Review article notes, finds women possess higher degrees of malevolence than men, but no real sexual difference for benevolence. I was reminded of an article a friend sent me recently about the reality of genocide among pre-contact Indigenous cultures in the part of North America we now call Canada. In an article urging Canada’s Indigenous to ‘ reconcile with truth ’ and be honest about how violent and genocidal pre-European North Americans were, the author quotes Samuel de Champlain who observed how certain Iroquois prisoners were turned over to the wives and daughters for very special and prolonged cruelty, with much feminine ‘delight’. We see shades of that ‘delightful’ and prolonged cruelty among women behind much of the ‘cancel culture’ and antisemitic attacks on social media. They’re as relentless in pursuing their victims as their old stereotypes, the Greek Harpies, who never gave up punishing evildoers. Did misogyny create this myth, or the recognition that women truly can run an enemy into the ground, or in the modern day ruin her life, her reputation, her career, and maybe even drive her to suicide ? In African cultures that practice female genital mutilation, resistance to change comes mostly from women—perhaps to justify what was once done to themselves. Who ‘slut-shames’? Who denies the loudest that Israeli Jewish women were brutally raped and tortured—sometimes at the same time—by Hamas on October 7th? Who now uncritically supports both Hamas and Hezbollah—Islamofascist dictators who differ little from Trump’s far-right Christians and who demonstrably hate women more visibly and vocally? Although now with no checks on his authoritarianism, perhaps Trump will enable Christians to legally throw recalcitrant feminists, lesbians, transfolk, and gay men off buildings just as their Gazan brothers do. I could get into the growing evidence that pedophiles are quietly contributing to the ongoing manosphere project to transition misandrist feminists into gentle little lapdogs for The Patriarchy, but that’s likely a subject of a future article. When they come for the children, these women will say ‘Yes, dear’. It wasn’t about abortion To any leftover Democratic voters currently licking their wounds and idiotically wondering whether they lost because Harris wears a bra, understand this, folks: Right-wing misogyny didn’t drive this election nearly as much as transactivism’s did. Most Americans, as it turns out, believe men shouldn’t compete on women’s sports teams. Or belong in women’s changing rooms. And they don’t want their kids learning ‘ weird things ’. The Republicans are going to launch an investigation into the Biden government withholding narrative-unfriendly information on the effects of kiddie sex change operations. I can’t wait. I already know how this movie ends. Let’s be clear: Abortion wasn’t, as the cosseted blue elitists believed, the women’s issue that voters, liberal and conservative, cared most about; it was women’s right to be women , and be protected from male sexual predators, and competitive cheaters. I can’t vote Democrat anymore; they’ve abandoned liberalism, women, children and reality. They hate real liberals. We think too much. We resist too much. We talk to conservatives too much. We ask the glaringly obvious questions. Until progressive feminists learn how to say No, ask questions, and identify sexual predators, they’ll roll back women’s rights further if they’re allowed back into power. And for those of us who don’t do what we’re told, they will change the laws . And that, folks, is How The Left Was Lost. More on how much progressives hate women: Bad Liberals: We Are Everywhere! What Went Wrong With Wokeness, The Left’s Authoritarianism False ‘False Rape Allegations’: The Way Feminists Now Collude With Rape Feminists Against Women: When They Won’t Say No To Men, They Harm All Females When Did Certain Feminists Become Such Tools For The Patriarchy? ‘ Cancelling’ JK Rowling Rather Than Emma Watson Demonstrates How Fucked Up Feminism Is Did you like this post? 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