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? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

The Enlightenment gadfly Voltaire was a true social justice warrior who infuriated the comfortable and powerful and actually got shit done I fell in love with a French guy in college. When my history class got to the European Enlightenment my ditzy college kid self was like, okay, whatever. But mah man Voltaire expedited my germinal liberalism forming around constitutional rights and my growing dislike for autocratic religion. These old rationalist dudes questioned authority, not to mention the existence of God, or at least the authority of God, and whether God even wanted authority over us since maybe He only really interfered in human affairs when it was absolutely necessary to keep us from FUBARing everything. (It also sounded like a good argument to my mom for not going to church anymore.) When we were assigned Candide, the work he’s most famous for, I cheaped out by borrowing a book on Voltaire’s collected works at the library. Candide didn’t blow my mind. But. That semester I spent my free time mostly alone, reading in the cafeteria or the Student Center. I read some of Voltaire’s other works. Like his Lettre on why the French should inoculate their kids against smallpox like their hated, sworn enemies the British. Did you know they had smallpox vaccinations back then? Well, they did. They were cruder and riskier, but Voltaire noted the English were dying less of smallpox than the rest of Europe, which regarded the Brits as ‘mad…maniacs’ because they deliberately infected their infants by making a small cut and inserting some virus. The English noted (just like, Voltaire observed, ancient Circassian mothers) that infants stood a greater chance of surviving smallpox, with less scarring, than older children or adults. Sure, some died, but many more survived, and regardless of what else might kill them at a young age, it wouldn’t be the scourge of Europe. I was totally ready to vaccinate my 18th-century baby! How logical. How exceedingly rational. Voltaire’s reasoning was impeccable. I think he inoculated me against a lifetime of falling for dogmatic tripe. Voltaire was a gadfly, an anti-elitist, pro-intellectual asshole. He became my kind of asshole with giant brass balls. He was forever on the run, one step ahead of the enemies of reason, rationalism, and calling out abusive power-mongers. He challenged oppressive 18th-century Catholicism, and the puffery of nobility and clergy remaking society to benefit mostly themselves, much like our self-appointed academic elite masters and politicians today who think they know better than us critically-thinking rabble. Voltaire’s privileged, effete enemies were to perish twelve years after his death on the business end of the guillotine, but I’ll bet he would have vigorously condemned Robespierre and his Reign of Error. I marvel at and admire his massive uncommon strength and courage at a time when cancellation meant the strappado, the rack, the wheel, and the thumbscrews, not just people calling you ‘Catholiphobic’. Today he would revile the left’s and right’s censormonkeys and blast XTwitter with a power greater than Elon Musk’s rocket ship. The radical Christian disdained most religions, but called for universal religious tolerance, never advocating obliterating them. In fact, nothing pissed off his nation’s elites as much as his intolerable calls for religious tolerance. “I disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.” Voltaire’s attributed quote is actually a more succinct synopsis of a longer and klutizer written expression. What made my First Amendment heart pound was his delightfully sarcastic essay On The Horrible Danger Of Reading , an evisceration of Turkey’s recent edict banning printing, and weaving in criticism of French censorship to boot. I printed it out and taped it over my typewriter, since I was working on a Great American Novel, that, had it ever gotten published, would have mightily pissed off the Republicans and their Christian Right masters. In the early 1980s, the Religious Reich Right was on a tear, banning books and, if I recall correctly, although I can’t find evidence of it today, burning them. But they were definitely banning them, often classics that called for universal tolerance. (Sound familiar?) So of course I read many of them. Never tell me what I can and can’t read. Nothing pisses off power-mad elitists more than reading forbidden books. In Voltaire’s day the go-to list for your next great read was the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books, who made him yesteryear’s equivalent of a regular on the NY Times bestseller list. Today books forbidden by agitating activists against Amazon and other book purveyors can be downloaded somewhere or you can boycott them until they return Abigail Schrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters right the hell now! Voltaire was a rebel. A maverick. Sometimes, he was a racist, antisemitic, ‘anti-mahometan’ asshole, but he believed in free speech, freedom from censorship, freedom of opinion, freedom of religion, freedom from religion, and freedom from torture and any sort of oppression. He was the scourge of pompous asses, the intellectual Scarlet Pimpernel of freethinking. He did time in the Bastille for pissing off the king. Twice. He was forever dodging the Church, which didn’t measure up to his moral and intellectual standards. He detested their power, and unchecked power in general. He wrote a devastating article condemning the Church for the arrest, hideous torture, and execution of a Huguenot named Jean Calas in a deeply Catholic country, after examining the appalling French system of jurisprudence: “As there are half-proofs, that is to say, half-truths, it is clear that there are half-innocent and half-guilty persons. So we start by giving them a half-death, after which we go to lunch.” He succeeded, after a years-long campaign, in getting the French government to re-open the case and re-try Calas posthumously. This time he was acquitted. Voltaire didn’t like Huguenots much, but he didn’t want to see one tortured and executed for something he didn’t do. It’s why I think he’d stand up for Jewish students in the face of the Islamofascist (‘Mahometan’) Reign of Terror. “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.” Voltaire didn’t suffer fools gladly, which is why he was such a wolverine about Jean Calas. The case had snowballed when Calas, accused of murdering his own son who’d pretty clearly hung himself, initially claimed his son was murdered to avoid his naked corpse getting dragged through the streets as a suicide. The local gossips, though, were like, “Oh, that sonofa chienne Jean murdered him!” and there he was, broken on the wheel and suffocated with an early iteration of waterboarding, declaring his innocence until the blessed end. Voltaire’s obsession with exonerating him embarrassed the Church mightily. It’s no wonder he was always hustling out of France to avoid being assassinated or executed. He pissed off fellow philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a very bright man who could nevertheless go off on weird hippie tangents about how people should maybe go back to nature and just get it on with the wild and offer a massive collective finger flip to civilization. Voltaire wrote him a sarcastic letter saying that, even at his own advanced age, he’d like to get down on all fours and crawl around the forest. Rousseau got all snowflakey about it and the two feuded, in the sense that Rousseau hated Voltaire who thought the former was just freaking hilarious. Sarcasm kept Voltaire in a steady state of trouble throughout his long life, which ended at eighty-three, by natural causes rather than someone finally whacking him. Although in his various letters to friends, Voltaire the Hypochondriac spent the last fifty years complaining of his ills and warning the end may be near. No one took longer to die than Voltaire, no, not even PeeWee Herman at the end of the movie Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Writing ‘to act’ Voltaire’s polemics against religious intolerance included extolling King Henry IV for bringing peace to England and converting from Catholicism to Protestantism. While in England, he scrawled out essays about how great the English government was although, not, to my knowledge, similar paeans to the food. Without explicitly mentioning how poorly the French government fell short, it was still wickedly obvious who he was excoriating yet again, so the French government banned his Letters to the English . His most unforgiveable up-yours was his observation that England’s Royal Exchange brought together men of all faiths and the only ‘infidels’ were those dumbasses who went bankrupt. Religious tolerance was definitely a non-non for French authorities and this peaceable observation was, therefore, intolerable. He wrote ‘to act’, to change opinions which can bring about social justice, and he did. I expect today he’d notice and call out how religious-y progressive politics have gotten, with mandated dogma and severe consequences for deviation. Can you imagine what he’d make of today’s Transquisition? Betcha he would have read the WPATH Files and the Cass Review! Afflicting the comfortable His first stay in Club Bastille began with an essay criticizing the government. Not being one much for learning his lessons, he wrote yet another one while warming his cell bench, this time criticizing rather than praising Henry IV for some damn thing and, just to be a gadfly pissant, he trash-talked religious extremists some more. It got published after his release which led to a violent brouhaha with an angry nobleman and, well, they’d saved his cell for him, the bench still warm from his butt. Getting rather tired of this whole prison thing, he asked if he could spend the rest of his sentence in England, which was almost as bad for a Frenchman used to food that doesn’t taste like paste. But it’s where he learned to love freedom of speech and religion, so it all worked out. For us, anyway, less so for the French government and the Church. The 21st-century Voltaire What still strikes me, forty years after I fell in love, is just what a courageous maverick Voltaire was. He dodged his enemies while throwing over his shoulder ever-more-vitriolic condemnations. Voltaire was his pen name, but 18th-century anonymity didn’t exist when you were the most famous and read writer in Europe. He couldn’t gush virulence at night disguised as @ecrasezlinfame and wander down to the market in the morning for breakfast without being recognized—or potentially stabbed. Pissing off the Church was akin to irritating Hamas today. If they’d gotten their hands on him, he might have wished for a death as ‘easy’ as Jean Calas’s. Which ended broken on the notorious Wheel. He afflicted the comfortable and comforted the afflicted, the genuinely marginalized victims of his day. His most detested sin was irrationalism. He would have adored the downfall of TV evangelists and assured them God had ordained it. He stood up, unpopularly, for an executed man in an unpopular religion, one Voltaire himself scorned, but his dislike of social injustice far exceeded his dislike of Huguenots. He spoke what the masses didn’t dare say, the most vicious gadfly up the arses of all their enemies. What would he and his Enlightenment buddies make of the chowderheads and peabrains running the GOP and the Democrats, how much they’d eviscerate wokeness and MAGAtry with their sharpest of verbal rapiers. How much their words would crush the anti-semites and hateful elitists. Voltaire would fulminate relentlessly against academic, journalistic, and political doxing, SWATting, and deplatforming of public speakers. He’d condemn everyone’s book-banners. He’d likely recognize woke ideology as a mind-numbing religion, and call it out for paying lip service to the weak and helpless while elitely obsessing about whether the term ‘field work’ is racist. He’d call out the semi-literate morons on XTwitter far more sarcastically, and with better spelling and English syntax. Voltaire died before the French Revolution which is a shame; I strongly suspect he’d have condemned Robespierre and defended the very nobles who loathed him. I wonder if he could have saved lives by ripping Robey a new anal exit, maybe from England. (Critics blamed Voltaire posthumously for the French Revolution.) Thanks to freethinkers like Voltaire, the monarchy eventually disappeared and the Catholic Church lost much of its power. They inspired The Founding Fathers’ nascent democracy in the American Colonies. The same can be done to the woke and MAGA, both the enemies of free speech, free thought, and universal tolerance. Because bad ideas never last. Although, pretty arguably, maybe for the next four years. Good luck with the election next week. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. 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The Gisele Pelicot case highlights just how frighteningly high is the number of 'normal' men who have a penchant for, and might be willing to act on, rape. I’ve just finished reading a great book titled Bad Men: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment & Assault by psychology professor David M. Buss. Great book, but worst title ever. Didn’t the publisher consider those of us who use public transportation? BAD MEN is in like eight-foot letters on the cover, so there’s no way you can read this without looking like a man-hating crazy-ass victim feminist asshole. I read it with the cover curled back, and later with the book flat on my lap, the way some were reading Fifty Shades of Grey several years ago. Just as I finished, I learned of the horrifying Gisèle Pelicot rape case in France. She’s making the trial of fifty-one of her accused rapists public, and also allowing the French press to publish her name. She's also allowing the court to show her recorded rapes. From 2011-2020, husband Dominique drugged her and invited men to have sex with her unconscious body. Gisèle is no young, naive ingenue; the rapes began when she was 58 years old. She learned of them four years ago when police informed her. They found them after arresting her husband for upskirt photography. According to the Secretary General of a French human rights commission, nine out of ten French women don’t press rape charges, and when they do, 80% of the cases are dropped. But not Gisèle’s. The ‘normies’ who rape Eighty-three individuals have been identified by police as having visited the Pelicot household to use a stranger’s wife’s body for their own sick sexual pleasure. Not all have been identified by police and one is on the run. Fifty-one men are on trial at the moment, along with Dominique Pelicot. According to Herald Scotland, Dominique was described by two psychiatrists as having ‘obsessive fantasies’ approaching ‘necrophilia’ and described him as having ‘a total absence of empathy’. He recruited men in chat rooms to live out their rape fantasies on his now ex-wife. Who were these monsters, between the ages of 26 and 74, some of whom made return visits? They were otherwise perfectly ‘normal’ men going about their daily lives. They were “firefighters, stonemasons, gardeners, prison guards, soldiers, journalists,” most without prior criminal charges. One was late to his first day of trial as he was taking his son to school. Dominique Pelicot himself is adored by his grandchildren. According to Bad Men, roughly one-third of men fantasize about raping a woman. One six-study summary put the number at 31%. How the studies phrase the question changes the numbers. The 30-odd-percentages come from those in which the question included the word ‘rape’; when the word is removed, and phrased as, “I fantasize about forcing a woman to have sex,” 54% admitted to it, and 62% said “it would be exciting to use force to subdue a woman.” Sexual coercion fantasies appear to be a lot more common than we know, and Buss notes that some of the men who entertain these fantasies claim they would commit rape if they believed they wouldn’t be caught or punished. That plays into the high number of rapists who commit the act while the woman is drugged or passed out from alcohol. It feeds the feminist concern that ‘we don’t know which men are rapists,’ and while many of these men may never act on their fantasies, we know some might, and in fact, may already have. Rape activists note that you’re more likely to be raped by someone you know, but if up to half of men may be prone to rape if they can get away with it (which they probably would, since the victims are loathe to report it, or at least at the time, which may explain the 80% dropping of reported rape cases), it gives weight to women’s overall fear of male strangers. Historically, women have had much to fear from strange men, in times when there were zero consequences if there was no one around to defend her. Bad Men is an analysis of the evolutionary sexual strategies employed by both men and women over the millennia to impel or force the opposite sex to give them what they’re wired to want. For men, that’s to impregnate as many women as they can, thereby perpetuating their genetic line, and for women it’s to get a man to commit to just her and their co-created children, since she has a helluva lot more skin in the reproductive game, and other women’s children with her partner is a zero-sum game stretching finite resources more thinly. It all, as Buss notes, boils down to reproduction: Women do the heavy lifting, bearing all the metabolic costs and being equipped to carry, give birth to, and feed the baby. Men’s investment is essentially hop on, hop off. We have evolved to strategize and manipulate each other to get what we want. Men learn to manipulate women into having sex; women devise strategies to avoid those manipulations, and to manipulate men; and both continuously leapfrog strategically. Men possess, Buss says, endless rationalization for their actions. Some believe ‘their victims really wanted it’. Some of the accused in the Pelicot case claim Dominique ‘tricked’ them into thinking his wife had consented. Others felt the husband’s consent was all they needed, illustrating that loathsome patriarchal belief in certain men that a wife is a husband’s property and he can do with her as he wishes, including pimping her out. (If I was a filthy rapist who wanted to cover my ass, I would have asked to speak to the undrugged wife first. But apparently rapist rationalization defeats logic.) Protecting the rapists Males with a high sex drive and short-term mating strategy, combined with Dark Triad traits—psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism—do whatever they need to do to get what they want, including, if the traditional wooing methods don’t work, ‘deception, threats, force,’ and alcohol and drugs. Roughly 81 percent rape under those last two conditions. They’re also prone to committing multiple rapes. One study of convicted rapists with assured confidentiality found 126 rapists admitting to sexual violence against 882 victims. Another study with 37 rapists charged with ‘only’ 66 offenses total, admitted collectively to 433 actual rapes. That’s 11 victims per rapist. What’s so unusual about the Gisèle Pelicot case is that she was willing to go public and face her accusers. That’s more than one can ask of a woman dealing with just one rapist, but Pelicot appears to be an abnormally courageous woman willing to take on the inevitable backlash against a woman who accuses a man, or a crowd, of rape. French feminists, of course, are rallying behind her, as #MeToo has come home to roost for several French celebrities accused of sexually abusing women, including actor Gerard Depardieu, and film directors Benoît Jacquot, Jacques Doillon and Christophe Ruggia. France is still home to Roman Polanski, the Polish film director accused in 1976 in the U.S. of having raped a 13-year-old, and he fled to France to avoid prosecution. Artists Claude Lévêque and Jan Fabre also stand accused of sexual crimes against women, as has French writer Gabriel Matzneff. Gisèle Pelicot’s got the labia Fifty-one accused rapists with some pretty damning videos and Pelicot’s filthy ex-husband are pooping their pants right now as the—who knew?—unconsenting wife holds them all accountable. It’ll be interesting to see if any of them receive light sentences for what they’ve done. Several, of course, are arguing that it ‘wasn’t really rape,’ because, well, they didn’t know this fell under the legal definition of rape. Even if they met Dominique in a chatroom called ‘A son insu’, meaning, roughly, ‘without knowledge’. It was a chatroom for wannabe rapists who wanted to pump an unconscious, unconsenting woman. Gisèle Pelicot didn’t hide away on an island in shame somewhere with a changed name. Instead, she grew some massive labia and decided not only to face her rapists herself in court, not only to allow her name to be published, and not only to allow the rape porn to be displayed in court, but to hold as many accountable as she could. According to Bad Men, men simply don’t understand how upsetting rape, or its possibility, is to women, unless they have a close family member or friend who’s been raped and has had it ‘splained to them. Rape is the most feared aggressive act by women; men report that being sexually victimized by a woman is only ‘moderately bothersome’, and I wonder how many responded, “You can’t rape the willing!” I also wonder how they’d respond if asked how ‘bothersome’ it would be to be overpowered and raped by a man. Evidence strongly indicates it’s a lot higher as the fear of rape increases dramatically in men faced with the real possibility of going to prison. It’s why I’ve argued that accused rapists don’t get off ‘scot-free’ if they’re wrongfully acquitted or receive a light sentence. They spend months worrying about the very real possibility of being violently and viciously raped up an orifice not designed for entrance, and forced to orally pleasure another man. Take rape seriously—ladies! Bad Men validates, along with Gavin de Becker’s book The Gift of Fear, what I’ve been stating for many, many years: Failing to report a rape at the time, with evidence intact, collaborates with rapists to keep it a relatively consequence-free crime. Failing to report a rape, like failing to report a home invasion robbery, isn’t illegal. It’s the victim’s decision whether to hold the offending parties accountable. It demonstrates the choice victims must make, however ugly: Does she report it and do what she can to hold him accountable? Or does she let him go free to rape again, which he may do now that she’s taught him it’s true what they say, 80-90% of rapes go unreported. And of course, 100% of unreported rapes result in zero convictions. The odds are heavily stacked in the rapist’s favor—by women. If nothing else is accomplished, a reported rape that’s thrown out of court or results in an acquittal or the judge more sympathetic to the accused than the victim, at least forces the victim to become known to his family, friends, and other groups, so women in his orbit can know they need to be careful around him. Most critically, it forces him to ponder the possibility of his own rape, including gang rape, in prison. Holding a man accountable for rape is NEVER a wasted effort. If nothing else, there’s a report or a complaint filed with the police they’ll find if he’s accused again by others. Bad Men notes the high percentage of repeat rapists, and how most raped women don’t receive ancillary physical assault in this process; in four-fifths of them, they’re out like a light, whether from drinking too much or unwittingly consuming a drug like a roofie. The best prevention for avoiding this horrific crime is to teach young girls, and for women to be aware themselves, of the importance of not drinking too much in public places, and to always always always keep one’s drink firmly in hand. Women have the power to avoid rape, and to prevent it for others; for every woman who fails to report a rape, every woman he rapes after her is partly thanks to her. It’s collaboration, plain and simple. We’ve got to stop this, ladies! Gisèle Pelicot grew some labia and is making sure all of France, and perhaps all of Europe is watching as she, with a near-unnatural courage, holds her rapists accountable. Other rape victims need not go as deeply and dramatically as she has; all they need to do, once they realize they’ve been raped, is go directly to the hospital and try and get a rape test—yes, I know how hard it is to get one, and how many rape kits are thrown away unused—but until we demand better treatment nothing will change. If a woman does everything in her power to hold the rapist accountable and see him duly punished—and fails—she is still a real hero to other rape victims. She tried. She grew the labia to say, “I want him to end with me.” She can go to her grave knowing she did what she could to stop a rapist, rather than giving him permission to do it again. And again. And again. I wouldn’t shame a woman who decided weeks, months, or years later to report, but at this point I do shrug my shoulders and say, “You waited too long. It’s your word against his.” Unless she keeps the stained clothing . Then, maybe, she can get a little justice, even if it’s just public shaming, to hold her accused rapist accountable. Some Rape Victims Emerge Stronger, Not Permanently Debilitated How Do Women Enable Rape, Trafficking, and Human Sexual Abuse? How Not To Report A Rape And Compromise Your Own Credibility When You Do Donald Trump Offers A Terrific Lesson On How Rape Victims Can Get True Justice Rapists Who Get Off Easy Don’t Get Off ‘Scot-Free’ A Tampa Woman Fought Off Her Would-Be Rapist—Could We? False ‘False Rape’ Allegations - The Way Feminists Now Collude With Rape 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!

Missing pets. Missing women. Missing children. When mass murder is alleged, our first question should be: Where are the remains? I can’t identify whether, culturally, Haitians can or have eaten dogs and cats—in Haiti anyway. Some cultures do chow down on chows! Like the Chinese. Even First Nations in Canada have eaten dogs—the Canadian author and Ojibwe playwright Drew Hayden Taylor has written about it . The early Jamestown settlers in Virginia ate dogs, too. In fact only they and the Native North Americans, as far as I know, ever did it here. I have yet to find any documented evidence that immigrants, or descendants of immigrants, or any remaining colonists today eat pets in North America. Apart from a woman in Canton, Ohio, who was recently arrested for allegedly killing and eating a cat in front of others. But she wasn’t Haitian; she was American-born. She did however seem mentally disturbed. I can’t promise pet-eating absolutely, never happens here—especially if it involves someone with mental illness. Or who was literally starving. Or who was a serial killer, with a penchant for animal cruelty. But so far, zero evidence indicates immigrants—including Asians and Haitians—in ‘Murica are killing and eating people’s pets. I don’t care how many Ohioans claim otherwise on Eyewitness News. Because there’s something that really bothers me. Where are the animal remains? Springfield, Ohio should be littered with cat and dog skeletons by now if LieBoy and his couch-humping running mate can be believed. Has anyone checked the dumpsters? Looked for small, shallow graves? Has anyone’s dog brought inside half a hastily-buried cat it dug up somewhere? Whether it’s cats, dogs, or humans, when mass murder is alleged, there have got to be remains somewhere. The evidence can exist for millennia. Look, we know the world’s oldest murder victim was over 400,000 years ago and Otzi Man was murdered 5,000 years ago. I investigated three (in)famous mass murderers, accused of crimes so hideous they’ve been enshrined in the annals of true-crime history, which isn’t always as true as purported. I’ll keep the gory details to a minimum. Google them if you need nightmare material. And also, now, in Canada, we’ve got our own mass mystery—the Hundreds of Buried Indigenous Children Who May Not Be. But first let’s visit some of history’s most notorious alleged sadistic killers. Gilles de Rais A French knight and lord and Joan of Arc’s companion-in-arms, De Rais was accused of torturing, molesting and murdering over 140 children, crimes he ‘confessed’ to under torture. The allegations were as horrendous as a fevered ecclesiastical imagination could, er, ‘coax’ out of him. Countess Elizabeth Báthory The Hungarian 16th-century countess was accused, with four of her servants, of hideously torturing, mutilating and murdering 600-650 women spanning two decades. Over 300 people at her trial described alleged physical evidence and claimed to have seen her horrifically mutilated and dying victims. Many testimonies, like in de Rais’s case, were obtained under torture. Madame Delphine LaLaurie The wealthy New Orleans slave owner allegedly got busted having performed Josef Mengele-style grisly medical experiments on her slaves, many of whom were allegedly found dead and several of whom were still alive, after a fire broke out in her mansion in 1834. The details of her alleged crimes are pretty hideous. I began wondering if these horrendous stories were really true one night and Googled to find mention of remains. Where were de Rais’s 140 children? Where were Countess Bathory’s ex-playthings? Where was Madame LaLaurie’s Crab Girl? When you start asking the hard questions, you find there’s not a lot of there there, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein. Let’s start with Madame LaLaurie. Historians claim rumors about her extreme slave brutality had swirled around N’Awlins for years, but there are no recorded complaints or reports from the time. She was allegedly torturing and murdering her slaves above and beyond the call of slave-owning duty in nineteenth-century New Orleans, but the townspeople never noticed the stench of rotting bodies of the dead within, in that chronic heat? Madame LaLaurie’s cruelties may have been real and sadly legal, but it’s unclear as to whether she was more brutal than customary. The tales of her alleged experiments, involving rent flesh and broken bones, grew more explicit in the decades and centuries after her death. To be fair, whatever Madame’s neighbors found definitely shocked even them. The firefighters were so incensed, Madame LaLaurie barely escaped with her life from an enraged mob, and is believed to have died in France. So there may be some truth to the allegations of an excessively cruel slave mistress, but not of her alleged experiments. I can’t find any modern-verified reports of her many alleged victims, including a slave girl who supposedly jumped to her death from the roof of the mansion when her mistress chased her across it to beat her with the brush. Or maybe it was a whip. No one seems quite sure. In particular, I’d like to know where Crab Girl is allegedly buried, as the damage done to her bones would confirm there was more going on than discipline. Countess Báthory’s gory adventures also lack any evidence. Servants claimed in court they’d helped to bury victims but no one, to my knowledge, has found their graves. She was accused of horribly mutilating and murdering hundreds of women purely for sadistic pleasure. Where are they? None have been found in the castle as alleged. None in the church graveyards around the region. And who today can believe torture’s testimony? The evidence at Bathory’s trial was all hearsay with no actual proof. And not a single corpse. The allegations grew more lurid over the years, like a bit about her vampirically bathing in the blood of virgins, considered by modern historians to be B.S. Why would her contemporaries lie about the horrible things they claimed to have witnessed? Would they have said them if they weren’t being tortured? Speaking of politics, greed, and testimony obtained under torture, Gille de Rais’s considerable land and wealth was conveniently seized by greedy nobles. A mock trial of his alleged hideous crimes against children was held in France in 1992 and he was judged most likely innocent of these gravest of crimes. Not a single child’s body has ever been found buried around or near what’s left of his castle to support his alleged murder of many dozens of children. So pardon me if I doubt the word of hysterics in Springfield, Ohio and elsewhere we see on YouTube alleging witnessed pet-napping followed by din-din, with yet no proof apart from hearsay and highly questionable videos on social media. People say a lot of stuff. Even when they’re not being tortured. Why are alleged journalists giving screen time to their ridiculous allegations rather than asking where the bones are buried? Bodies, folks. I’m looking for bodies. Skeletons. Graves. Something we can point to and say, “Yes, this poor creature was tortured in the manner alleged of Mme. LaLaurie or this sick French bastard.” Or that Queenie wound up in the stew pot. Which is why I’m skeptical of all those accounts of cats and dogs killed and eaten by immigrants. It’s a recycled century-and-a-half-old urban legend about Asians, who allegedly sometimes substitute cat or dog meat for chicken in their restaurants. The instances of the native-born alleging horrible pet-related crimes by immigrants are levied at every single last damn group, including Europeans. Immigrant anxiety causes adults to say the darndest things. There’s not a single documented incident of an Asian restaurant serving cat or dog to North Americans. Look, consult Snopes! And if you’ve got real proof of one, email Snopes! It all smells heavily of yet another Satanic-style moral panic. The rule of evidence requires that those making a positive claim, “So-and-so murdered a kid,” or “My neighbor killed and ate a cat,” provide the evidence. Like, say, an actual murdered cat, as in the recent case in Canton, in which they have the remains along with the crazy lady in custody. The conspiracy theorist who alleges pets are disappearing all over a small community needs to produce at least a few skeletons. Meanwhile, up here in Canada… The ‘missing’ and ‘buried’ Indigenous kids We’ve got our own Canadian missing-corpses scandal unfolding over the previous scandal that no longer seems to have happened. Some brief backstory. Canada, like the United States, wasn’t exactly kind to the original owners of the land. One very real thing that happened was the effort to ‘civilize’ the ‘Indians’, by forcing Indigenous children into residential schools for ‘proper’ white education. It was a joint effort by the government and Christian groups, and were, like anywhere else this ‘experiment’ was proffered, an abusive, traumatic failure for the victims. Children were isolated, prohibited from speaking their own languages, their heritages denigrated, and suffered physical and sexual abuse, etc. These schools operated for about a century. In recent years, Native bands claimed mass ‘genocidal’ graves of children’s bodies were found near residential schools, most recently in Kamloops, British Columbia. Scandal ensued. Canadians, who care about, or at least pretend to care about, the victims living and dead of this black mark on our history, wrung their hands and demanded investigations. Which was a good idea, except the Indigenous alleging the crimes of murdered or abused-to-death children hastily buried in a plot of earth somewhere keep getting in the way. A Kamloops Native chief alleges 215 ‘missing’ Indigenous children have been found buried in a field near a former residential school. This is only the most recent of other allegations of mass graves. The ‘evidence’? Ground-penetrating radar (GPR), which surveys sub-surface ground for investigating underground utilities items like pipes, masonry, metals, cables, etc. It can also show that soil has been turned up, dug into, and replaced. One can’t know what’s actually there without investigation, which hasn’t been done on the Kamloops site because the local bands won’t allow it. You’d think they’d be eager to damn existing Canadians with clear evidence that these alleged children were missing and murdered or simply allowed to die. But when some ‘denialists’ tried to excavate it to see if there really were remains, band members stopped them. Okay, these people were trespassing; but why doesn’t the band allow any further excavation? By anyone? Long story short, a 2023 book called Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools) reveals that there’s no evidence for the ‘genocide’ of residential Indigenous children. The particularly damning piece of it is, once again, no actual bodies. It’s fed a narrative preferred by some that Canada is hideously racist and genocidal against Natives. Canada certainly does have a documented racist history and has treated Natives quite poorly but—embarrassingly, for many Native bands, the charges of child genocide at residential schools are shaping up to be a massive hoax. To cadge an idea from the new Matt Walsh mockumentary Am I Racist?, the demand for anti-Indigenous racism greatly exceeds the supply in Canada. Nothing new under the sun Mass MAGA hysteria may be suspected in the wake of Trump’s and Vance’s unverified lies, and of course they, too, have motivation: They want to win an election, and Trump is already a documented chronic, uncontrollable liar. As many critics point out when one is trying to suss out motivations, ‘Follow the money’. Who stands to benefit from this, and why? Pet-eating is just another Republican Pizzagate. If there really are bodies of Indigenous children scattered around Canadian land, let the band who ‘found’ them produce some remains. Otherwise, this is beginning to look an awful lot like the historical elites smeared by rumors, with not much else required for a conviction. But anyway who cares, because the Trump/Vance team is soooo over Lassieburgers and Lasagna à la Garfield. ‘JEZEBEL’ HARRIS PRACTICES WITCHCRAFT!!! , don’tcha know??? Up next on Fox News! 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!

Wokeness is a collection of elitist, culturally relativist luxury beliefs for the class-privileged. Can it be rehabilitated? Or should we just 'burn it all down'? Wokeness: It used to be a good liberal ideal. The term originates in the 1920s, when black separatist Marcus Garvey exhorted Ethiopia and Africa to “Wake up!”, calling on greater social and political consciousness among blacks globally. ‘Stay woke’, the call to action among activists and virtue-signallers today, was popularized in a 1938 blues song by Lead Belly about the nine Scottsboro Boys accused of raping two white women. At the end he encouraged others to ‘stay woke’. Lead Belly meant it specifically as a caution to black Americans to be wary of racially motivated threats and danger. Other social and literary references later utilized the term, but it didn’t catch on with multicolored America until the 2014 Ferguson, Missouri riots. ‘Stay woke’ has a long and honorable history of genuine social justice on the left, popularized by Black Lives Matter after the police killing of Michael Brown. Woke: The MAGAS of the left Wokeness, once a marker of progressivism, isn’t recognizably progressive anymore. Progressivism is about genuine progress, and since 2014 those who primarily describe themselves as ‘woke’ have deteriorated into an ugly reactionary left-wing parody of the right’s counterpart extremism, Make America Great Again. Ironically, wokies are themselves also trying to Make America Great Again, as they attempt to mold or force America into their own image of what they think the country should be. And also ironically, they, like their MAGA parallels, believe the best thing to do to the country is to ‘burn it down’ and start over. “Yes, we do really want to burn it all down,” an anonymous Trump official told Rolling Stone magazine recently. “Of course we aren’t fucking bluffing.” Meanwhile, on t’other side, a New York Times/Sienna Research survey recently revealed that when asked about the need and extent of reforming the country, fourteen percent of American left-leaning self-described radicals agreed that “the system needs to be torn down entirely.” Surprisingly, the most radical came not from the traditional 18-29 age group, but from Millennials, those mostly unmarried codgers in the 30-44 group. Twenty-one percent claimed they were voting neither for Trump nor Biden (the findings, reported in the National Review, predated the Harris coup d’état ). As my ex-coworker in a Connecticut computer firm used to say, “FDISK and reboot!” referring to the process in the Olden Days to wipe a hard drive clean and reinstall everything when it’s beyond repair. Literally burning or tearing down the entire country is pretty extreme no matter which side you’re on. Social and political movements inevitably devolve toward extremism if radicals are left unchecked and unchallenged, which happened on the right when Donald Trump began demanding to see Senator Obama’s birth certificate. It happened on the left when social justice’s zeal to fight injustice embraced the very systemic wrongs it claimed to fight. What went wrong with wokeness? No good idea or practice remains so without limits. Liberalism’s laudable commitment to inclusion and tolerance brought us civil rights for women, minorities, children and even animals, but instead of recognizing that all proper values can go overboard, it didn’t stop to ask, “Is it possible to be too tolerant? Too inclusive?” An early example of how the faction that would one day be labeled the Regressive Left and today, the woke, had commenced down the extremism path, followed the response to radical Islam in the days, weeks and months after 9/11. As soon as it became known that nineteen Muslims backed by Osama bin Laden pulled it off, the radical right happily launched a nationwide crusade against America’s Muslims. Like 9/11, it too wasn’t coordinated, but rather a series of Al Qaeda-style ‘lone wolf’ attacks. We liberals watched in horror as right-wing nutbags targeted anyone wearing a turban or a hijab for harassment or violence. The Regressive Left responded in a manner not unlike their right-wing adversaries. Just as the right tarred all Muslims as evil, the Regressive Left turned them all into victims above reproach. It became verboten to criticize Islam at all, to ask questions about why there was so much violence everywhere in the Middle East, and whether the Islamic world itself bore some responsibility for the murder of not just 3,000 Americans but the countless victims of terrorist violence, within as well as outside of Islam. Conservative ditz-bomb Anne Coulter quite rightly complained that the American left was blaming America first and withholding accountability from a demonstrably violent religion and part of the world. We see that mindless support and deification of ‘victimhood’ in today’s college student protesters, who now mindlessly support Islamofascism exemplified by the filthy, genocidal Hamas cult. Wokeness is no longer a proud label. Woke is racist The woke fancy themselves anti-racist, and at one time they were—until their hatred for ‘oppression’ metastasized into hatred against all white people just as the right’s hatred for Islam did after 9/11. Black Lives Matter began with the best of intentions, but found itself with egg on its face years later when research revealed only a few dozen black men were killed by police every year, at least some in the process of committing crimes, rather than the hundreds or thousands estimated by themselves and other Americans. Later, scandals erupted around how BLM was spending its money—not on social justice efforts like reforming a highly problematic national police force, but on the leaders themselves. The nadir of BLM’s personal admission that they stood as much for social justice as the American Nazi Party came within days of October 7. Can Social Justice Be Rehabilitated? On The Eternal Whiteness Of Being ‘Woke Racism’: John McWhorter’s Take On What’s Wrong With Antiracism White People Who Hate White People Are Racist Then there’s wokeness’s permeation of DEI initiatives as a way to ‘fix’ racism, but which has since become an outlet for grossly overpaid, mostly angry black women to vent their personal frustrations and lack of talent on white people and now, their new fave scapegoats, the Jews. A Man’s Suicide Started With A DEI Consultant’s ‘Antiracism’ Workshop What If New Hires Had To Take A ‘Snowflake Test’ To Get The Job? Liberals & Conservatives Are Making For Strange Bedfellows In Massachusetts ‘Don’t Call Me Karen’ Doesn’t Go Over Well At Uber Woke is anti-feminist ‘Luxury feminism’ is a term first coined by Ayaan Hirsi Ali to describe woke feminists who can afford to ignore the gross abuses of their sisters in less-privileged countries, because, Muslim. She and Yasmine Mohammed at the Free Press have got some harsh words for how tolerant Canada is of abuse against women and girls when they’re not Western, and their criticisms are every bit as applicable to privileged feminists outside the country too. Unwoke feminists know women’s rights are for all women globally, especially those without voices, not just the ones like us who can afford to speak up without frightening retribution. Ali and Mohammed have lived under real Muslim oppression and demand to know why luxury feminists ignore so much gross Islamic misogyny and support the very worst of the worst Islamic terrorists. We liberal feminists want to know, too. Some Rape Victims Emerge Stronger, Not Permanently Debilitated Feminists Against Women: When They Won’t Say No To Men, They Harm All Females It’s Time To Reckon With The Left’s War On Women What If Women Challenged Male Aggression Like The Bonobos? False ‘False Rape’ Allegations: The Way Feminists Now Collude With Rape When Did Feminists Become Such Tools For The Patriarchy? Feminism’s devolvement to pleasuring, rather than smashing the Patriarchy, leads us to our next exploration of how wokeness went so hideously wrong. Woke gay conversion Perhaps nothing illustrates how horribly wokeness has gone off the rails as its commitment to ‘curing’ gay kids of their homosexuality by pushing them into sex change operations just like Iran does to gay adults. Woke extremists have become so addled by their own tolerance orgasms that they actually go along with science-free ‘gender-affirming care’ despite mounds of research showing that most ‘trans’ kids are gay kids who will outgrow their gender dysphoria. Clinging to ‘40s and ‘50s stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, any kid showing interest in something s/he shouldn’t gets them whisked away to the doctor, often first ‘identified’ by woke-indoctrinated teachers. When you’re as ignorant, as the woke are, to the science showing there’s biological and psychological difference between men and women, and that the tension between the sexes is more evolutionarily than culturally explained, and willfully ignore the lack of science behind transitioning, woke activists fall prey to greedy medical professionals and blithely believe the tired, long-debunked canard that their kids will commit suicide if they’re not allowed to transition. Don’t question. Just do as you’re told, good like wokies. A Dude-y Transactivist Demonstrates How Dangerously Dudeist The Trans Nuts Are Here’s A Running List Why ‘Transwomen’ Don’t Belong In Women’s Spaces Reality Is Not Transphobic Lesbians, I Know That ‘Cotton Ceiling’ Guy Who Called You ‘Transphobic ’ You Can’t Change Your Genes The Horrifying WPATH Files Document Leak Details Appalling ‘Gender Affirming Care’ Malpractice Woke anti-science It’s A Sign Of The Apocalypse When The Right Supports Science And The Left Doesn’t Has The Left Jumped The Shark With The Trans Biology Debate? Complaining About One’s Birth Body Is A Ridiculous Sign Of Privilege Here’s the final nail in the woke coffin of former liberalism: Their phobia of free speech and expression. Censorship: It’s not just a right-wing thing! Woke censorship One of wokeness’s most disgusting conceits is that ‘We don’t censor, right-wingers censor!’ Yes, they do, but so does the left, and both have a very long and ugly universal history of censorship, which is clearly a human defect rather than a partisan one. Censorship, Tyranny, And Science Suppression On Medium Which Online Platforms Don’t Censor Content Creators? Canadian LGBTQ Groups Politely Protest Free Thought At Libraries Banned! What The Left’s & Right’s Censors Don’t Want You To See It’ll be interesting to see what happens if Trump is re-elected. Left-wing censorship may come to an end while right-wing censorship will undoubtedly rise. Again. Should wokeness be abandoned, or can it be rehabilitated? As far as I’m concerned, anyone who describes themselves as ‘woke’ has as much to be proud of as anyone in a MAGA cap. Wokeness has come to be identified, rightly or wrongly, with vicious, destructive extremism, and we real liberals are complicit in what went wrong: We failed to counteract, challenge, and put down our extremists. We failed to curb our dogs. Can wokeness be saved? Rehabilitated, even? Not all who call themselves ‘woke’ are ideologically extreme. Some simply haven’t recognized, or perhaps they prefer to shield their eyes, from the extremism, anti-intellectualism, and refutation of traditional liberal Enlightenment values that has come to infuse wokeness. Perhaps, still engaging their own commitment to reason and rationalism, and capable of handling a challenge to their beliefs and values, they’ve simply missed how critically wrong ‘the woke’ have become. They certainly won’t find much woke criticism in the media, which has embraced a ‘social justice’ approach to journalism rather than the impartiality and facts presentation the profession once stood for and strove for. Too many of the ‘woke’ embrace political violence, domestic terrorism, and a nearly identical Nazi-like dedication to old-fashioned, old-school antisemitism, which they learned in social justice-infected academia. Those who want to return to a healthier definition of ‘woke’ have an extremely difficult road ahead of them. I make it clear to others that I’m liberal but not woke. There are plenty of liberals advocating a return to genuine social justice; intellectuals like Coleman Hughes arguing for a return to racial color-blindness that the ‘woke’ excoriate as ‘racist’. (Hughes’s TED talk was downranked and suppressed by TED when ‘woke’ employees complained about it.) Or feminists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Yasmine Mohammed arguing that feminism is for everyone, not just privileged woke Western women. And the voices speaking up against the trans movement are growing as the WPATH Files, the UK’s damning Cass Review, and countless systematic evidence reviews of the ‘science’ behind ‘gender-affirming care’ (for anyone, not just the young) is near-non-existent. Should we ‘burn wokeness down to the ground’ as they inevitably argue for society? Or should we slowly ‘drain the swamp’, and try to draw these people back to traditional liberalism? What are your thoughts? Comment below! 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!

We walk among you. We're silent when you say awful things. But we trash you behind your delusional backs. And we are finding each other. Fear us! I sat on a park bench texting a friend when three pretty little girls, all in various stages of missing teeth, came up and asked in all innocence, “Where are you from?” It was refreshing for someone to ask . I put my mobile down and said, “I’m from the United States. Where are you from?” “Serbia!” they told me. “Really?” “Yes, Belgrade,” replied a younger girl on skates. They peppered me with questions. We were joined by more little snaggle-toothed Serbians—sisters, cousins, friends. A brother walked up but his sisters pushed him away toward a pair of adults not far off. No boys allowed! This is Girls’ Stuff! Eventually I was joined by one of the mothers, and the children hie’d off to the playground. Mom’s name was Sara, 32 years old. I told her I was American and we did that immigrant thing I miss from a less-woke decade, chatting about what we liked or didn’t about our mother countries and adopted country. Sara liked Canada a lot, she said, but she wasn’t sure she would stay. She struggled with whether to continue raising her children (two, with one on the way) here. “I don’t like what they’re learning in school,” she confessed. “They’re learning weird things.” “I know what you mean,” I said. “I don’t like the weird things either.” She struggled to explain herself. She couldn’t articulate it. And she spoke excellent English. “I know why you’re afraid to talk about it,” I said. “I know what the weird things are. You don’t want to say them because people get so upset.” “Yes,” she nodded, eyes wide open, happy to have someone who understands. “And, they should play more.” “Absolutely!” I thought of Jonathan’s Haidt’s call for more play and less work, and especially less mobile time in the book I’d just finished, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Provincial cell phone bans in the classroom are sweeping Canada this forthcoming school year. ‘T’will be interesting to see how this plays out. “I’m so glad you understand!” Sara said, smiling. “There are many of us like you,” I told her. “We’re everywhere. We don’t like what’s going on either. And we’ve been afraid to speak up.” As the sun set I ambled home to make dinner—I was getting hungry although the pretty, snaggle-toothed girls had given me a brownie—but I decided to check my Substack notifications real quick and there was a direct message request from a recent new follower and fellow indy author, MJ Biggs. “I've been binge reading your posts and am loving them. It's a relief to find other non-woke liberals--especially ones who aren't afraid to speak up…If you'd ever like to bounce ideas off someone for future posts or just need a person to rant to about the crazy world we live in, I'm around. Thanks again for sharing your radical common sense and centered philosophy with the world. We need it for sure.” Another one. A Bad Liberal. We are everywhere. And we are tired of fake-liberal nonsensica. We walk among the ‘woke’ One has to be careful when speaking with strangers. You never know whether they’re One Of Us or One of Them. I have to share one of my favorite old movie clips about this. I’ve used it probably too often already, but I love it so much. It’s from Tod Browning’s 1932 early talkie Freaks. Highly politically incorrect, I nevertheless relate more to the ‘freaks’ than the beautiful equestrian and her jerkwad hyper-masculine boyfriend. One minute you’re getting along famously with someone, maybe a stranger you just struck up an acquaintance with or an old friend, gooba-gobbling with them quite happily, and then the next moment they’re standing there shaking furiously, nearly spilling the loving cup, because you said something utterly outrageous like, “I wonder if Kamala Harris will have the courage to support all-female sports teams.” Suddenly, the person you thought you’d known all their lives or the guy who seemed so nice turns into the Shit Demon from Dogma. Or maybe the Alien bursts out of her chest and screams at you that you’re a f—king fascist who hates puppies and kittens and rainbows and the color pink. Or they just cancel you in front of God and everyone. You screwed up. She’s one of Them. (No, not a giant ant. You get my gist. Not to hit the movie comparisons too hard.) But then, you talk to a stranger in the park and find that—they’re one of Us. We walk among the Woke and pretend to be like them, like Donald Sutherland before he turned into one of the Pod People. But sometimes we forget ourselves when we’re working undercover infiltrating the Killer Tomatoes. (Another movie reference. Sorry!) But here’s the thing: There are far more Undercover Killer Tomatoes than real ones. We are the Exhausted Majority, and we walk among the Woke—the Killer Tomatoes—and know that one day, soon, we will turn them all into ketchup. According to Hidden Tribes US, only about 8%— 8%!!!— of Americans actually hold ‘woke’ views. How is that we haven’t crushed these Killer Tomatoes already? Why aren’t we pouring Regressive Lefties into ketchup bottles? We are in the park. We are in your Inbox. We are the people you pass on the street. We seek each other—the Bad Liberals—and huddle together in dark corners whispering to each other even darker heresies. “DEI is racism!” “If blackface isn’t okay, neither is womanface!” “Slavery today is more important than 19th-century slavery!” “Thomas Jefferson was a great man!” “Indigenous Americans were brutal savages before the brutal European savages showed up!” “Antiracism has become antisemitic!'“ “Women should Just Say No to male abuse!” “I have conservative friends!” “Me too!” “Why are ‘anti-misogyny’ laws always about protecting men dressing as women rather than real women?” “Thanksgiving is a moral holiday!” “Transing children is gay conversion!” “No one is born in the wrong body!” “White skin is not a birth defect!” “Neither is a penis!” Here’s a conversation starter to really get Thanksgiving rolling this fall: “I didn’t vote for either Harris or Trump.” Maybe we need a Kerchief Signal , like what gay men used in San Francisco in the ‘70s, a clothing article that signals I’m Not ‘Woke’, Either. Bad Liberals can be hard to detect in a group. They repeat or pretend to agree with some dumbass idea a wokie expresses. One way to detect a Bad Liberal in a progressive conversation is noting whether they just nod and purse their lips at the right times, without saying much, doing the minimum to look like a ‘Good’ Illiberal. Bad Liberals survive by disguising themselves as Illiberals. I have a friend who does this. She just nods along and sort of goes along with what she’s hearing, but then she rants to me in e-mail. Bad Liberal-hunting is hard, because when you get it wrong they do that Donald Sutherland alien scream thing. A few years ago I tested the waters with a liberal, progressive friend whom I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic. I’d thought she might be mad at me. Just before the world locked up she got annoyed because I wouldn’t identify as a feminist. I explained I was embarrassed by what feminism had become, that I didn’t want to be identified by all those weak, whiny-ass little women who were near-exhaustion from getting triggered every time then-candidate Donald Trump opened his mouth. “How can you not be a feminist?” she demanded. “How can you not want equal rights for women?” I did favor equal rights for women, I explained, but for the last quarter-century I’d called myself an ‘egalitarian’ because that’s what feminism is about, equal rights for women and men. Except that feminism had come to identify itself with weakness, vulnerability, and lack of female agency. It wallowed in victimhood, blaming everything wrong with women’s lives on Da Patriarchy, rather than their own wussy, shrinking selves. It demanded no responsibility, accountability or self-analysis from women, only men. Grow some labia, girls!!! Over the course of the pandemic, especially after I started writing for Medium, I reclaimed the feminist label for myself, and took back my power by differentiating my own kind— power feminism —vs the whiny young Medium perma-victims. You bet your sweet bippy I’m a feminist now, sweetheart! My friend, over the course of the pandemic, had stopped being a feminist. And a liberal. Although undoubtedly she’d disagree with me. I tested her to see whether she’d remained liberal—someone I’d rarely disagreed with in the Olden Days—since we last spoke. When I got to, “Will Thomas has no business competing on a women’s swim team,” my friend shut me down immediately. “That is NOT up for discussion!” she informed me. I regarded her with dismay. How could this bright and formerly progressive Boomer be so—mind-numbingly pro- men’s rights? And she was a retired LAWYER, fer crissakes! No need for facts or evidence anymore. I wonder what she would have said if I’d condemned science-free kiddie sex change operations. I outed myself as a Bad Liberal. And she outed herself as an Illiberal. What we need to understand is that there are more Bad Liberals than Illiberals. And, combined with our fellow Bad Conservatives on the other side of the aisle, who aren’t any more into Trump and the Republican’ts than we Bad Liberals are with the Democrapic WokeNazis, we can work together to stop the onslaught of woke authoritarianism and hopefully prevent its replacement by Trump authoritarianism. Spotify podcast by Bari Weiss: The Republicans Voting For Kamala Bad Liberals aren’t really bad, of course. We’re definitely on the side of good. Right, just like every other wannabe dogmatic authoritarians, right? Right? How you can tell you’re not evil You’re on the side of good when you’re not advocating harm to someone else. Real harm, not the fake made-up harms generated by the Illiberals. Real transphobia is beating up a man because he dresses and acts like a woman. Fake transphobia is whining about people who won’t use your silly-ass pronouns or who don’t want your dick in their changing room, because they know how hard it is for the boys to control that thing. You’re on the side of good when you’re willing to consider others’ points of view, and recognize that you and your political kin don’t have all the answers, either. You’re on the side of good when you value facts and evidence over ‘feelings’ and highly subjective experience, which is filtered and diluted by one’s own mostly-unacknowledged fears, biases, prejudices, and dislikes. You’re on the side of good when you realize that lifting others’ boats who haven’t had your opportunities doesn’t mean you have to settle for a leaky dinghy. You’re on the side of good when you realize ‘equal rights’ doesn’t mean ‘special rights’. (Conservatives have struggled with this one, too.) In fact, you don’t have to be a Bad Liberal to be on the right side of morality and social justice. You can also be a Bad Conservative. Thinking for yourself—it’s available to anyone who chooses it. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

But rich, successful, powerful men aren't falling all over themselves to marry me. Who do I need to cancel until they validate my self-image and stop hurting my feelings? I need a new law. Many countries have passed laws permitting men to download an application, fill it out, upload it and get a certificate stating they are now, unquestionably, incontrovertibly, absolutely, positively, and no-backtalk-from-you-Missy a full-fledged woman. And if anyone says otherwise she can get that person cancelled, fired, ruined, and possibly assassinated. I mean, that’s her identity, man! I mean woman! And who are any of us to question how she really feels? I have always felt like a really gorgeous rail-thin almost criminally sexy supermodel. When I was three I dreamed of being a princess, and then a hula dancer (I grew up in Florida), and then a belly dancer (it was the ‘70s), and then  a supermodel, which is when they were invented. But my evil awful fascist Nazi hateful bigoted parents said, “Sweetheart, don’t be ridiculous. You need to prepare for a real job. Like, one that doesn’t require you to suck a lot of penises just to get a photo shoot.” My parents were soooooo negative and toxic. They made me go to college for four years but I still really felt like I was really a supermodel. I mean, I’m so freaking gorgeous! How could they not see that? My mother was so unaffirming. She was like, “You’re a pretty girl, Precious, but it wouldn’t be fair to tell you you’re outstandingly gorgeous when you’re not. Maybe you will be once you’re past puberty but I wouldn’t count on it. I’m not Raquel Welch, you know. And your father isn’t Cary Grant. And anyway, what you look like isn’t as important as how beautiful you are on the inside.” Isn’t that just such a Vile Mean Mom thing to say? Okay, so I didn’t have enough money yet to dye my hair blonde and Mom was too cheap to give me the money for it. She went off on another one of her irrelevant tangents: “Your father works hard to keep a roof over our heads and for enough food every week and to keep the lights and water on. We’re supporting two cars along with you and your brother and you don’t need blonde hair, you’re pretty enough as you are.” How was I ever going to become marry a top CEO with a mother like that??? I especially began feeling like a beautiful young supermodel after I turned 40 but that was during my Dead Life, Dead Name time. My real name is Lilac Jade Kinga, Supermodel And Global Star. I really really hate it when people refuse to affirm me. I mean, it makes me so mad I want to take up my cuticle scissors and STAB THEM! Because killing myself would be thoughtless. Why deprive the world of my great beauty and awesome awesomeness just because haters and BURPs (Beauty Uninclusive Radical Pissants) refuse to affirm me? I will make then affirm me! I will get that law passed so I, too, can get a certificate stating that I am in fact a really sexy young woman. I can shove it under rich men’s noses and demand that they take me out to an insanely expensive restaurant somewhere in Europe from their private jet and treat me to a dinner whose price exceeds the average gross salary of the Czech Republic, and that’s not even including the free-flowing Louis Roederer Cristal Brut 3L French champagne. Anyone who doesn’t do it is glamsphobic and needs to be cancelled out of every last dollar he has! You wouldn’t believe  what some of these spoiled, coddled, narcissistic, vicious pricks have said to me! “Lady, if you’re a day under 60 I’ll eat my Nick Fouquet Savage Coast hat. Now get outta my Acura!” The nerve of that guy! I began a campaign to cancel him on Facebook for treating a mega-hottie like me like that, but you know what he did? He cancelled my account! I told him he couldn’t do that and he said yes he could because he owns Facebook. Jerk!!! And then there was the mega-billionaire who laughed  at me when I said we should go take a spin in his rocket ship. He said even Amber Heard wasn’t that bold, and that I should come look him up in my next incarnation but before I’m old enough to buy alcohol. That’s really rich, coming from someone who’s impregnated  half the United States!!! I am grossly offended that Donald Trump has never once attempted to grab me by the you-know-what. And then there are the extremely unkind and non-validating comments I’ve gotten from people about my Dead Weight. I would like to remind everyone that some anorexic supermodels have a few extra pounds around the middle and occasionally a double chin. And that laugh lines are not wrinkles. You are whatever you feel you are. Feelings are incontrovertible evidence. They’re the strongest kind there is. My ‘lived experience’ is that of a globetrotting supermodel with rich men panting for me around every corner. It’s absolutely intolerable that others don’t agree, and clearly they need to be forced. By law if necessary. Let’s be honest: Age is just a social construct. I feel so mentally damaged when people say that if I can talk about living in the ‘70s I can hardly be nineteen years old. That’s not the point. The point is that this is how I identify. If Caitlyn Jenner can be who she is when she wasn’t not so long ago, why can’t I be who I am? The very embodiment of youthful babeliciousness? I live as a supermodel. I’m always walking around in a bikini because I love showing off my beautiful body. And I don’t appreciate the neighbors asking me if I’m pregnant or something. You would not believe some of the persecution I face because I have chosen to be my authentic self and not let the haters in the ‘reality-based community’ define me. I’ve been physically attacked by the police just because I tried to get into a club whose maximum age limit is 25. The bouncer who threw me out said I need to go home and take a good long look in the mirror. I get constantly triggered by identity critics who say I am biologically aging and that my butt sags more than a low-riding teenager’s pants. Or that I’m harming young people with offensive ‘teenface’. Or that I’m destroying beauty pageants because I successfully sued the Miss Teen USA organization to force them to let me compete since I identify as a 19-year-old. And the worst of it is just the day-to-day battle against people who insist that you can’t stay 19 forever, that it’s time for me to acknowledge I’m a grown-up, and that I need to move out of the house since my parents want to sell it and move to a retirement community in Boca Raton. Which I’m happy to do because they’re so toxic and bigoted and horrible about age identity I need to cut them out of my life entirely. I feel so unsafe when people say, “Cut the crap old-timer, I went to school with you and we both had Princess phones!” and “Get out of the frat house, Grandma, we’re way too young for you!” and the worst of all, when a Boy Scout calls me, “Ma’am,” and asks if I need help crossing the street. You have no idea what it’s like to live in a glamsphobic world, surrounded by haters and BURPs who are just jealous because I’m super-hot and they’re not. My life stinks. The world is full of haters. My mother thinks I should become a teacher. I am a gorgeous glamorous drop-dead sexy supermodel, and I can’t get everyone to validate me. People are so narcissistic, egotistical and selfish! 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!

It's real. It's worth exploring even for the UnWoke. Its purpose is to open our own eyes rather than beat up others (and ourselves) over birth lottery results. I thought about white privilege before it became the most tiresome selection on the Wokenati’s Most Overplayed Hits list. My self-analysis comes because I get frustrated with men for not understanding women a little better. How freakin’ hard is it to comprehend, for example, that women can’t just make a snap decision on whether we want to date a man by virtue of his looks? We don’t know if he’s a nice guy or a serial killer, and he can’t even talk to me for like five or ten minutes so I can look into his eyes a bit before he moves in for the kill? Or can’t they understand why sexual harassment is not flattery? That it’s scary? Or why we have to treat strange men as potential threats until we get a bead on them? Privilege makes you blind to that which never happens to you. Complaining to myself about men’s cluelessness naturally led me to ponder my own white cluelessness. I try to see what I’m not experiencing the way I want men to consider women’s experience. The world has been inherently unequal since the beginning of time. Hierarchy and power abuse is mostly true too for our primate cousins, with the possible exception of the bonobos. Ideally, levelling the playing field should aspire to equal opportunity . Where the privilege-obsessed fail is by hierarchizing it, and assigning primacy to the wrong category: Race. An article on Quora years ago asked about white privilege; a dark-skinned Indian woman claimed she was more privileged than most white people she knew. She’d been born into a very wealthy family and she went to the very best schools. Wealth and education, she summarized, were the two most important levels of privilege there are. Little else matters. She’s right. So was Martin Luther King, excoriated by the ‘woke’ today the way Malcolm X once did: Just a ‘chump’ who ‘doesn’t get it’ about the so-called evils of white people. Yet King understood the intrinsic importance of class, illustrating it with the story of Lazarus and the rich man in the Bible. “No, the rich man was punished because he passed Lazarus every day and did not see him … and I tell you if this country does not see its poor — if it lets them remain in their poverty and misery — it will surely go to hell!” Not a word about the color of the poor. My writing buddy Radical Radha wrote a devastating analysis of class privilege, from the standpoint of an Indian-American precariat who grew up in poverty, near-poverty, and clawed her way to the top 10% with a lot of hard work and study, who understands a lot more about privilege than most. The high cost of class climbing - Radical Radha at Radically Pragmatic I highly recommend her newsletter. She’s an ex-social justice warrior who ‘woke up’ from wokeness and is now one of its fiercest critics. Her article draws a direct line between the snobby, over-privileged rich girls she was insecurely friends with in school and the vicious, wealthy, mean women of the Democratic woke wing. It reminded me of Rob Henderson ’s Troubled memoir. It’s hard to take the problems of your spoiled, coddled compatriots seriously when their severest moral challenge is avoiding whichever words got struck from the ‘acceptable’ vocabulary list this week. Radha makes perfectly clear which privilege she regards as the most powerful. “My parents are the types of Indians that the narrative of the diaspora overlooks because we are known as the wealthiest and most educated of all the minority groups. This ignores experiences that have everything to do with class and nothing with race. My race didn’t somehow help me get ahead (it hindered me), but affirmative action for women probably did help. I don’t want special treatment or favors because it delegitimizes my hard work.” There’s nothing that genuinely separates us—especially Indians—quite like class privilege. Be honest: Would you rather be black and wealthy or poor and white? I’ve been white all my life and if offered this reincarnation choice I’d pick black and wealthy. Racism is real, but so is the sexism and misogyny I’ve lived with my entire life, and it hasn’t stopped me from living the way I wanted. Class and education enabled it. I’m not even aware of my sex most of the time. That’s right, I’m too busy making my mark in the world to even think about my ‘marginalized’ chickie-boo status. White privilege likely benefited me most when I grew up in Florida in the ‘60s and ‘70s, where and when blacks truly were oppressed, although Orlando already had a black middle class that emerged after former slaves settled the area which whites fought, unsuccessfully. Middle class looks wealthy when you live in a trailer park or on the street. I was surprised, in high school, to find I was considered to live in a ‘rich’ neighborhood. My small Ohio town didn’t have a ‘rich’ neighbourhood. It was split mostly between working and middle class, with a few families that lived only slightly better than mine. They were a few blocks over, but if you drive between my old ‘hood and theirs, neither was ‘wealthy’ as we know wealth today, or even back then. I had family in New York in a well-to-do community and I knew what real wealth looked like. Wealth privilege isn’t just a matter of economics, it’s also about opportunity and perspective . Wealth, for billions of people, means living with a full belly in a home with a roof. It’s when you have options that would seem pedestrian to us, even as we don’t visit Europe every year or own a Testarossa . I am extremely wealthy to many in the world, even though by North American standards my middle class existence is quite modest. Class and education privilege are what the social justice warriors miss, over and over again. It’s easier to bitch via inscrutable academic jargonbabble than to actually address what truly levels the playing field—since it might demand sacrifices from them. Comparison porn Education privilege is wealth’s twin sister, beginning when a child is still in diapers. ‘Wealthy’ homes contain books and other educational materials; parents who have time to read to their kids; museums and other cultural attractions they can afford to visit; and the child is encouraged to make the most of her wealthy-country free public education—or her parents can pay for a better one. If she studies hard she can get into a good college, and a degree will open up doors with important professional and social connections her working class and poor peers don’t have. We compare ourselves to others who seem more successful which creates dissension, envy and depression. But comparison porn works both ways. One can also compare one’s self with one’s peers who didn’t fare so well, perhaps explained by laziness and lack of motivation, or perhaps they simply never had one’s own opportunities. The comparer can feel quite superior. “Look at Joe! What a loser Mr. Big Shot Quarterback is now, and look where I am. I wish I’d known this was coming when he shoved my head into a toilet!” Privilege is mostly a birth lottery. Although I imagine it must be difficult not to blame one’s self for having been born poor. Why me? What did I do to deserve this? Why is that bitch Sandy better off than me? She doesn’t deserve it, I do! Except if the roles were reversed, the muser would probably be the coddled, entitled bitch and Sandy the envious one. Why? That’s what unacknowledged privilege does to many. Class doesn’t always tell. Radical Radha made something of herself and Hunter Biden didn’t. Equal opportunity access holds it own limits. Some are born smarter or more talented; but granting it gives the more economically modest the ability to make the most of their hidden talents and avoid what the NAACP warned in the 1970s: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” Of course, lack of motivation or laziness can get in the way of anyone’s true calling, whether to the manor or gutter born. There’s always someone who’s worse off, or better off. Many grow up learning how to fight for what they want and need, while milquetoasts whine that the college administration isn’t feeding them and bringing them bottled water while they tear up the campus green protesting a part of the world they can’t even spell, let alone find on a map. Life is pain, baby. Class and nonsensical privilege categories have wasted billions of minds over the millennia. Where might the world be if our ancestors hadn’t divided themselves between Us vs Them? We still remake their same mistakes as culture evolves faster than our brains. We can challenge our modern-day numbnuts, so petty, so small-minded, so deeply ignorant of the world despite overpriced college educations. The ones who preach that extra epidermal melanin is the real reason you can’t succeed, and it’s not even worth it to try, despite countless counter-examples who took advantage of school, and libraries, and spent more time on the Internet Googling whatever they were curious about instead of scrolling through Instagram envying people who lie about their accomplishments with highly Photoshopped selfies. Failure loves company. Pondering our privilege—and questioning the overblown claims of others’—enables us to be more aware of what must be addressed to truly change society. The idea isn’t to beat ourselves or others up but to understand fixable inequities to become more empathetic citizens. I challenge my own class and education privilege regarding the stereotypes and harmful beliefs I have about those who didn’t ‘make it’, who didn’t hardscrabble their way to the top like Radical Radha. The ultimate intersectionality of one’s own intensely unique experiences and circumstances can prevent an individual from even seeing a way out, rather like a man in a lightless maze who doesn’t know where the exit is. Or even that there is one. All I want is a room somewhere, Far away from the cold night air. With one enormous chair, Aow, wouldn't it be loverly? Lots of choc'lates for me to eat, Lots of coal makin' lots of 'eat. Warm face, warm 'ands, warm feet, Aow, wouldn't it be loverly? - Eliza Doolittle, My Fair Lady 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!