Or would we find whole new ways to screw it up? I’ve been on a WKRP in Cincinnati kick lately. A running gag of the late 70s, early 80s TV show was badly-dressed skanky sales manager Herb Tarlek, who chased beautiful receptionist Jennifer Marlowe around the office. Today, such nonsense wouldn’t be tolerated but forty-five years ago office sexual harassment was quite the norm. I myself worked with a Herb Tarlek in radio, except he was the news director. I got to pondering female power poorly wielded after one episode which offered a twist: Program director Andy Travis finds himself romantically targeted by evil station owner Mrs. Carlson, mother of the station manager. Mrs. Carlson is played to diabolical, whiskey-voiced perfection by the late showgirl and movie actress Carol Bruce. The episode is so good I watched it again the following night to more closely scrutinize the dynamics between the two, not to mention their acting. Gary Sandy (Andy) was phenomenal. I don’t know much about reverse professional sexual harassment, but having experienced the usual kind myself, Sandy nailed it. It starts with news director Les Nessman spreading the rumor Andy is dating Mrs. Carlson; he insists they’re not, but something is off in the way he responds. If it’s just business, as he only sort of insists, he’d be a lot more relaxed and forthcoming. But his answers are tight and uncomfortable; something is wrong. It unfolds he’s been meeting with her, hat extended, for money to buy a new transmitter. Somehow or other she finagles him into going out to dinner and plies him with martinis at her mansion. Events spiral out of control the way they often do for women. Andy’s in his thirties but he’s little better than a twenty-something female ingenue with Mrs. Carlson, a much older woman with a penchant for cruelty who enjoys being seen in public with an attractive man with ‘good hair’ and ‘good teeth’. Andy reminded me of me in my early twenties, dealing with my own Herb Tarlek (a married boss), and another married co-worker with whom I slid into a weird situation because I was too young and naive to realize that young single women simply can’t ‘be friends’ with an older married man. I was also harassed more seriously by a boss outside of radio. Just imagine being in the car when he puts his hand on your leg and wants to know if you’re available for dinner sometime. And oh, his wife is the president of the company. The dynamics between an increasingly uncomfortable Andy and Mrs. Carlson are quite similar to how it unfolds for women. It never got as critical for me as it did for Andy but I particularly watched his reactions as Mrs. Carlson preyed on him, cat-and-mouse. With his facial expressions and stony, sometimes downcast eyes, I recognized the mild paralysis when you’re entirely out of your element with someone who holds power over you. I recognized a man who mistook an older woman’s early predations for ‘doing business’, as Herb Tarlek the sales manager did—wining and dining his clients. Except Mrs. Carlson was footing the date bills while grooming Andy to be her lover, and when she grasps his arm at one point while her son is in the room and tight-grinned commands Andy to “Please drop back later this evening,” the live studio audience audibly gasps. I’ll bet a lot of women felt the same chill I did. I never was in quite that kind of a cobra clutch but I might have been had my Herb Tarlek not gotten fired the same week I was hired. The boss in the car ended our shared rides when he tried to kiss me as he dropped me off in the parking lot for my car. Mrs. Carlson knows exactly what she’s doing, the way the supremely entitled Mad Men were, the way Demi Moore’s character did while sexually harassing Michael Douglas’s character and then filing a false sexual harassment claim against him post-rejection in 1994’s Disclosure, based on a true story. As Douglas’s lawyer observes to Moore’s character: “Ms. Johnson, the only thing you have proven is that a woman in power can be every bit as abusive as a man!” Twelve years after an AIDS joke about South Africa launched the era of ‘cancel culture’, women have proven conclusively that when women dominate, the blood still flows, if more figuratively. I’ve watched the evolution of women in politics and the workplace for over forty years, particularly on the Web. We really have come a long way, baby. The early corporate Web was pretty Wonder Bread and phallocratic, but then (white) female faces infiltrated website leadership links—stereotypically clustered in traditionally female corporate HR, communications and marketing. Then the male faces got darker. Then they got a little more chicky. And even darker-chicky. Now I see more female presidents, CEOs and CFOs. A ton of women run their own businesses, often in female-traditional companies—cosmetics, wellness and healthcare, marketing agencies. But female faces lead technology, manufacturing and automotive too (we did lean in, Sheryl Sandberg!) In politics, I experienced the same headrush many feminists did during the 2018 Blue Wave, a mega-backlash against the Pussygrabber-Elect. I was exhilarated to see the new Squad, led by a Hispanic New York bartender, all of whom I now excoriate for being Cheerleaders for the Trans-Patriarchy. I’m not sure what glimpse of female power robotic Hillary Clinton offered, given how intensely self-protective she was, never giving Republicans the tongue-lashing or fifty they deserved. I expect her handlers told her it would kill her chances. The road not taken. Cancel culture, exemplifed by the current yay-for-Hamas campus ‘protests’ (against what, exactly, free speech? Peace? Anti-Islamofascism?) offers a preview. It’s Mean Girls female, and female aggression centers on relationship and isolation. Mean girls remove a rival or a friend with ostracism who has fallen out of favour, turning her into a social pariah. Boys and men don’t understand because they don’t work that way. Relationships are extremely important to females, and we’ll do anything, including subordinating our own desires, to preserve relationships. I was reminded of this in the WKRP episode in which shy journalism graduate Bailey Quarters applies for the news director assistant job, which threatens and angers chauvinist Les Nessman; rather than standing up to him, she backs down, saying she doesn’t want the job, inviting Andy’s wrath as he ‘went to bat’ for her with Mr. Carlson. I bet a black man would have fought harder in a similar situation, because men are more inclined to stick up for what they want. It’s a huge psychological weakness for women to care so much about relationships. It harms our ability to negotiate with men and gives power to nastier women who seek to destroy rivals’ lives and reputations. A world in which women ruled would likely result in fewer wars, but a higher suicide rate. I do believe men and women in integrated power offer us the best of all possible worlds. I truly believe we both have unique, sex-based gifts, talents, and thought processes that complement each other. Men’s resourcefulness, courage, logical thinking, motivation and competitive drive to win has driven human civilization for thousands of years; their huge mistake was in subordinating the other half of the human race and wasting their incredible brain power. Women’s penchant for compassion, grace, solidarity, courtesy, consideration, empathy, and helping others to ‘save face’ are talents men should cultivate more. A strictly stereotypical male existence, as exemplified by ‘men’s rights’ activist Andrew Tate and the cardboard wannabe NFT action hero Donald Trump are toxic and harmful to men. It’s landed one in jail and the only reason the other probably won’t be is because he’s an ex-President, and maybe the next one. Ostracizing others from the morally bankrupt fundamentalist ‘social justice’ religion is nothing less than a traditionalist medieval witch hunt wielded by females as feline as the description ‘catty’ suggests—evil creatures prone to torturing weaker ones for fun just like their animal counterparts. I shudder to think of what a Matriarchy would look like. When women began ‘invading’ male workspaces in the WKRP era, books counseled them on how to be more like men: Games Your Mother Never Taught You was a bestseller. I remember it advised women to have suits tailored with inside pockets so they didn’t need to carry around a purse. They were also counseled to communicate like men, to speak in sports and war metaphors. “We’re going to hit a home run with this account!” “Let’s get to the war room and create a battle plan!” If you wanted to succeed in business, be more like men. It was good advice for the times, but this ain’t 1985 anymore. According to Statistics Canada, women’s participation in the workforce is 61% with 9.6 million women employed in Canada in September 2023. And according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “57.4 percent of all [U.S.] women participated in the labor force,” in 2019. Women are far under-represented as CEOs and I’m not sure we’ll ever achieve equity because many women do value family and relationships over business success. While some men are threatened by societal ‘feminization’, I think we still need more feminine values, not less. But not to the exclusion of male values and perspectives. Men just get shit done in a way women often can’t—we haven’t learned yet. Women in corporate power can certainly abuse it. What’s interesting about the dynamics of abuse is how remarkably similar they look. I don’t know if men set the evolutionary standards for abuse, but I have a sneaking suspicion it’s more of a human neuro-structure. What I do know from growing up female is the politics of personal destruction on the relationship level are all-too-familiar in cancel culture, with a similar desire to destroy. Narcissism plays a huge role in power abuse, and research on sex differences reveals not much narcissistic sex difference. Men tend to score a little higher but not appreciably; we ladies can admit shamefacedly that we’ve at least achieved equity there. Victims, male or female, react remarkably similarly: They’re afraid to report abuse, they’re not sure what they did wrong. Men on the business end of sexual harassment find themselves without the lengthy history of female shared experience to guide them. Women are quick to blame the victim just as men are: At one point Mrs. Carlson tells her son, when he confronts her about Andy, “All of this is in Mr. Travis’s head.” In the real world one New York law firm speaks specifically to men being harassed by women. “…There are a growing number of cases arising out of men reporting that they have been sexually harassed by women. Sexual harassment of men by women is actionable in New York City. You should not be embarrassed to come forward. Sexual harassment often arises out of the abuse of power rather than sexual desire.” Sound familiar, ladies? When I ponder women in power, one thing I’ve maintained since college is: Humans suck, universally. I genuinely mean it. No humans are more bigoted than any other; it’s a tribalist conceit that ‘we’ are better than ‘they’. We’re not. October 7th has unleashed the hate and bigotry the left has always harbored just as Charlottesville unleashed it on the right. The campus protests across North America show a preponderance of women; a Washington Times opinion writer notes that college campuses are more female than they were decades ago; male students predominated in the ‘60s and ‘70s because there were fewer women; now the tables have flipped. And female protesters have demonstrated they can meet men head-to-head in calling for the genocide of others and in old-school right-wing-style antisemitism. The writer also speculates that Hamas finds it easy to emotionally manipulate women with particularly strategic social media promotions that the Jews are child-killers. Granted some children have died in the ongoing war but the death toll numbers, which come primarily from Hamas, a/k/a ‘Gazan health authorities’, keep insisting that one-third of the dead are children; and ‘child’ also includes young terrorists or anyone else Hamas deems useful to include. And the overall numbers have been revised down by others who aren’t ‘Gazan health authorities’. Who knew? Women can be trained as terrorists just as good commonplace men were once trained to run German death camps. If the campus protests aren’t brought under control, women may well lead actual pogroms. Women have become abusers, terrorist promoters, and terrorism deniers in the wake of October 7th. We still have a long way to go, baby. One day I may write my sort of response to The Handmaid’s Tale, in which women run the world in the future to the detriment of men, whom they’ve learned to control. It’s been rattling around my brain for thirty years; maybe that will become my post-retirement project. In the meantime, I keep remembering Nancy Pelosi, who dominated Donald Trump for four years and was ready to attack domestic terrorists with her killer stilletto heels on January 6th. At age 80. I want to be Nancy, not Hillary, when I grow up! Now that’s the future of female power. 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!

It's hard to stop stupidity when it pays off so handsomely. But political stupidity's glad-handing harms people who weren't dumb enough to invest in it themselves. Value is a weird, inscrutable thing. I wouldn’t pay $25 to hang a Picasso painting, genuine or imitation, in my living room, unless I could sell it. His work doesn’t move me and I don’t understand his alleged ‘genius’. I’m not sure why anyone would pay me millions for it. Another value thing I don’t understand is paying $65 for a rusted metal helicopter missing a rubber nose because someone thinks it’s worth it to have an old toy he’s never going to play with again. Why are such things valued? Why do some pay so much for Picassos and 1972 Christmas stocking schwag of arbitrary ‘value’, just because someone somewhere says it’s worth X? I recently read the Zeke Faux book Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. It’s a short, well-narrated journey through another value thing I don’t understand (and I’ll bet you don’t either). It doesn’t get too deep into the boring aspects of cryptocurrency, which are about as comprehensible as the dog’s breakfasts of bad investments that impelled the Great Financial Collapse of the late ‘00s. Thingies called bitcoins (some more honestly called shitcoins) were said to possess X value: Customarily, $1 USD for no particular reason. Then they rose in value for some weird reasons, and they didn’t revolutionize the world the way the crypto bros promised. They weren’t easier to use than a credit card, normal retailers and services wanted cash/credit/debit, they was insecure as fuck, and marketing/huckstering blahblahblah. The investosuckers made money for awhile, sometimes lots, but didn’t realize it’s a house of cards; unless you know when to get out, and gamblers rarely do, it gonna go bye-bye. I kept wondering why investors who weren’t crypto bros weren’t asking the obvious questions. About value. How much it was worth. About whether there was any there there. Cryptocurrency, to be truly legit, requires all the ‘evils’ it promised to ‘liberate’ us from: Traditional currency, financial regulation, and (they don’t say this out loud), something actually backing it. Because here we are, a year after its collapse, its fuzzy-haired baby-faced crypto god Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years, and investors’ billions wiped out overnight. And all over claimed/perceived value. Where people chose to place their faith about currencies and NFTs, which are those works of digital ‘art’ others claimed were valuable. It’s all fake money, but so what? Bankman-Fried bought a real condo complex for hundreds of millions in the Bahamas. I love to ask obvious questions others don’t, which the crypto crazies didn’t. Like, Should I be investing in something that’s not regulated? Why should I trust this? How are digital coins seemingly mined out of thin air valuable? Are they really worth a dollar? How do I know this company is honest with no financial reporting? If they claim it’s backed by some other currency or entity somewhere, how do I know? And, Why are these NFT cartoons of ugly apes worth more than an original Picasso? But mostly, Should I trust a guy selling blorps? Faux quotes comedian John Oliver who described exactly how sheer crypto-bullshit worked for one crypto king: “One blorp is always worth one dollar. And the reason I can guarantee that is I’ll sell as many fleezels [to back it] as it takes to make that happen. Also, I make the fleezels.” Long story short, after a blorps cash-run and with fleezels as liquid as Monopoly money, apart from being non-existent, the price of each blorpcoin fell to $.00001834. (Maybe Trump should have asked a Blorpcoiner for help in Georgia.) Too bad investors in that crypto king’s scheme didn’t ask those glaringly obvious questions. We’ve seen this all before, with the dot-com craze, the subprime mortgage crisis and the Great Financial Collapse. Why didn’t those now-crypto-losers question all that value? Why didn’t they wonder what they were really getting into? And why do they get so mad when the rest of us point it out? They’re embarrassed to be revealed as duplicitous in their self-con. They know it, deep down, but they can’t admit it, especially when others point it out, which is why they cling so relentlessly to their scam and blame everyone and everything but themselves. Their narcissistic self-image is off the charts, and there is nothing else so precious to any of us. Humans have always been easily scammed and many will buy anything that boosts their egos, whether it’s to getrichquick or get the ‘beautiful girl’ in Singapore declaring her love for someone to whom she’s flogging the latest blorp who, if the marks were thinking critically, would wonder, What does she see in me? And, Is that actually a man pretending to be a gorgeous woman to scam me? People who didn’t ask the hard questions about crypto’s true value mostly got royally screwed. That’s the gotcha when you believe too guilelessly. I actually had zero interest in cryptocurrency before reading this book, and I still do. Why did I put it on my Christmas list? Part of it was the human schadenfreude, the feeling of superiority for not being as stupid as all those dumbass testosterone-fueled young people, but it was also a further attempt to understand why we humans are so relentlessly, single-mindedly stupid sometimes. Why we believe what we want to believe and ignore the risks and problems. I’m reminded of it as I monitor the Matrix-style slow-mo karate kick to, for example, transgender ideology. The world is sleeping now, while the left-wing media surreptitiously cleans a shit-ton of egg off its face, privately debating in boardrooms how they’ll spin for their readers what we now know about the scientific bankruptcy and near-psychopathic adherence to Sacred Transactivist Dogma they’ve been uncritically pushing at the behest of their activist-driven kiddie reporters. How could the New York Times be so stupid??? To persistently believe stupid things, you have to be committed to your inflated self-image—in this case, as Good Liberals being all inclusive and shit, but thou shalt swear fealty to the authoritarian mandrake that has rooted itself in the illiberal soul. The New York Times is discovering the perils of hiring woke social justice kiddies out of America’s most elite antisemitism factories as they struggle to tell the truth, as journalists are supposed to do, about the documented evidence for sexual violence committed by Hamas and Gazans on October 7th. All the news that’s fit to print, indeed. It’s the same question I asked over and over again, over forty years ago, as I watched an earlier iteration of another insane dogma unfold in the United States beginning with the ouster of Jimmy Carter as President, replaced with the kind, daddyish, Great Communicating Revelation-loving Ronald Reagan. Like a sandworm in Dune, the Religious Reich erupted from the ground, spraying the same childish fundamentalist zeal we see in today’s equally self-infantilizing woke warriors. How could anyone believe in a Christianity this stupid? I wondered as a college student, raised on more liberal, mainstream Lutheranism. I interned at a Christian TV station which intersected with my major and for two summers I suffered induced cognitive dissonance in Christianity that eventually led to my apostasy. It wasn’t that Christianity itself was stupid, it was that the fundies’ version was so goddamn brain-dead I was like, You have to have the intelligence of Christ’s donkey to believe this crap. Fundamentalist Christians believe mindlessly in a clearly man-made religious ideology that appeals to their superiority complex, and promises them that anyone who criticizes or mocks their consummate moral and intellectual hypocrisy they will one day look down upon from Heaven and laugh at all those morons now shrieking eternally in agony. Don’t ask the obvious questions like, Why would a loving God horrendously punish people for a lifetime He assigned them to and maybe gave them a really crappy starting point, and maybe a damaged brain, and how is their life entirely their fault? Why are you worshipping such a psychopath? Maybe Lucifer had the right idea? Or just, If I’m this much of a sick fuck who laughs at people being tortured, what makes me so sure I’m worthy of Heaven? Is there a Holy Mainframe on a cloud somewhere and God’s programmers run your life through it and assign value to the number and severity of sins you’ve committed and say, “You, Joe SixPack, got a score of 832 so we sentence you to 6,500 years of hellfire before you can come into heaven, and you, Adolf Hitler, get 8.5 million years because you were one seriously fucked-up puppy, but after that, if your sins have been properly expurgated, we’ll let you into Heaven”? Cults: The open-license framework was laid down first by religions. You can see the cultiness in the bitcoiners who believe in something to which has been assigned arbitrary, opaque value—something they don’t understand. Bitcoins, like Picassos and old toys, possess value because someone says they do, rather than actual value: You can’t eat bitcoins, paintings or toys but you can arguably sell them for more than they’re worth and feed your family. Until someone decides they’re no longer worth anything. People believe in value that clearly isn’t there, if they want to believe, no matter how ludicrous. If there’s enough of potential payoff, like a community-supported self-image feeding you the powerful ego drug we’re right and they’re wrong, our guy is good and theirs is bad, they won’t ask the obvious questions. Crypto investors who tried to pull out too late lost everything; progressive parents are waking up to the fact that their naive belief in gender-affirming ‘experts’ may render their ‘trans’ offspring sterile and themselves without grandchildren. Because they didn’t ask the obvious questions. Trump’s Christian fan club almost certainly isn’t asking, But what about when dictators turn on their allies? Can you really trust a guy with ninety-one criminal charges? And has this guy ever even asked, ‘What would Jesus do’? History recalls countless scams for which the gullible failed to ask the obvious questions about true value: Nigerian princes, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi schemes, 17th-century Tulipmania - now, TrumpCon, BidenCon, TransCon and the ongoing CryptoCon. Why, in the 17th century, should Dutch flowers suddenly be worth so much, why do people today give an alleged billionaire money, even before he started publicly begging like a TV evangelist, why do parents not question why they themselves never knew a single ‘trans kid’ growing up? Why can’t liberals see Biden doesn’t understand how transactivism has harmed so many women and children? Why doesn’t the mainstream press write more about whatever the fuck is clearly wrong with Trump’s incoherent mouth and brain? The payoff for willful ignorance isn’t always money. Partisan voters who remain as mindlessly loyal as a faithful doggo ignore mountains of pretty damning evidence because they want to believe their own absurdities as much as transkid parents and crypto investors to preserve their precious self-image of being smart and competent and most importantly not wrong. Their houses of cards will fall, too. Delusional investments—whether financial, political or personal—demonstrate how easy it is to get taken when you shut your eyes, when you guilelessly buy into the hype, when you suffer from FOMO, when everyone around you is doing or believing it so it must be cool. Crypto investors believed themselves much smarter than the rest of us (and some were, although most weren’t). Transgender and MAGA True Believers can’t vote intelligently when they believe in pseudoscience, debunked narratives, and the evidence of their own lying eyes. When they shut their ears and yell la-la-la when someone asks those obvious questions. As I read Number Go Up, I kept laughing, “This is so stupid! How could anyone ever buy into this crapola, much less with money? How can this ugly ape picture be worth millions? How can anyone believe fake money can properly back fake money? Why isn’t this regulated? How can anyone be this stupid???” I say the same, with less laughter, when I listen to idiots uncritically accept the claims of transactivists, or Trump’s or Biden’s defenders, or DEI initiatives, or the next silly-ass investment dupe. I mean, come on, seriously, folks? Where the hell are their brains?? Crypto culties hurt mostly themselves, but political culties hurt us all. I don’t know how we can evolve as a society if we can’t ask ourselves the glaringly obvious questions. Especially when it could land us in jail. Or on the business end of a malignant narcissist’s vengeance. Or a fuzzy old grandpa’s cluelessness. 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!

It takes two for an abusive relationship. Because an abuser can't abuse a person who isn't there. This is Part II. Bitch: When I Was The Abuser (Part I) is right here. I remember the men I mistreated. Like Boring Bob and Jimmy, both from Great Expectations, which turned out to be a bust. Boring Bob was twelve years older than I, but he was kind of cute and had a good job. Unfortunately, we had little in common. His hobby was the stock market. His musical tastes were stuck in the 1970s with Neil Diamond and the Beatles. I liked Blink 182, Green Day and Three Doors Down. “You sound like my nephews,” he harrumphed. I had a three-date rule before giving up on a guy. I kindly told Bob it wasn’t going to work. He made a fuss and pleaded for a fourth date so I went, but he wasn’t any more interesting. I broke it off. He kept calling and eventually he talked me into one last date. Once more, with feelin’. Or not. I said no, firmly. The calls continued, about once a month, and he was getting on my nerves. How pathetic of him to be such a nag! I should have gotten caller ID, or told him to STOP CALLING ME, DAMMIT! but I’d dug several feet farther down my hole. My anger turned into a game to see how much crap he’d take before he gave up. He’d signed up to be my Abuse Toy. It felt good to hurt someone the way others had hurt me. He was so willing to take all my crap. He’d call, I’d insult him. I called him pathetic. I told him he was a loser. I began taunting him with other men. “I’m fucking around,” I bragged. “Well, okay,” he’d say, sounding disappointed. “If—that’s what you want. I mean, I can settle for that if that’s what you want.” “Including other men?” “Well—yeah.” I was a decade away from Please, guys, don’t be this guy! Never let a woman treat you this way! “Seriously, man? You’d be willing to be part of my harem?” “It’s not what I want but—okay.” “Can we get together soon?” he asked. “I’m leaving Wednesday for England,” I told him. “To see my friend Gareth. We’ve had an affair already and now it’s my turn to visit. I’m going to have wild sex with him!” I can’t imagine why anyone would still want to date someone that toxic. “I’m never going to fuck you,” I’d tell him. Bob wanted love, and I enjoyed being cruel. He let me. It doesn’t excuse me in the slightest, but guys—it takes two to tango. I ended it eventually, not because I felt bad about what I’d done but because I realized this is how one can potentially create a stalker. I called Great Expectations and asked them to get him off my ass. They called later to confirm they’d threatened to cancel his membership if he called me again. And he ranted about how I hadn’t given him a chance— Another guy from GE was Jimmy. He brayed like a donkey when he talked. He wasn’t very attractive. But he was a nice guy. I feel even more guilt about him than I do for Bob, and I feel like a scumbag about Bob. Jimmy didn’t agree to become my abuse toy, and in fact I admire him for telling me to go fuck myself. He took me out for dinner—by this time I was callously using Great Expectations for free dinners since I despaired of ever finding anyone in the year I’d paid for—and he didn’t make a good impression. He was a former military sniper who was proud of all the men he’d killed. Now, I understand war is ugly, but bragging about kills was pretty inappropriate first-date conversation, and the first sign Jimmy possessed little common sense, which repeated itself on a memorable second date ending with me ditching him. I received an angry phone call later in which we agreed to get together and talk things out, but then I came home to another angry voice mail telling me, I forget exactly how, to go fuck myself. Good on you, Jimmy. You took back your power. You refused my shit. Years later, Jimmy went nuts. If you’ve ever read American Sniper you know how crazy that life is. In fact, the author was himself killed by a Marine with PTSD at a shooting range. I often wondered whether the author might have gone crazy himself later. It’s not natural for humans to kill, although they can be taught. I looked for Jimmy online after finishing the book and found his strange obituary, which didn’t mention his military service. I learned that a few years prior, he was arrested a few times, once for shoplifting in a grocery store in a trench coat with ammo in the pockets and guns in his car. It doesn’t look like he was planning a mass shooting that day, and perhaps not at all. But they sent him to a famous New England psychiatric hospital. I suspect he committed suicide but I can’t confirm it. I probably didn’t have anything to do with it, but I can’t swear I didn’t contribute in my own brief way. I’d wanted to apologize to him and Bob, years later, after I moved to Canada, but a male friend talked me out of it. He said I’d just re-traumatize them, that I should let it go. I wish I hadn’t listened. Bob died just a few years ago, and doesn’t appear ever to have married. I wish I’d apologized to both of them. There were others, too, who put up with my short-term anger. Like the gorgeous-but-stupid guy I intended to use for sex who turned out to be semi-impotent from alcoholism and was only interested in beer and rock ‘n’ roll. I remember leaving him sitting on his bed naked, looking dejected, and telling him the alcohol was making him a limp dick. Looking back, it’s a wonder sometimes I didn’t get murdered. My anger made me reckless. Sometimes it was expressed not by cruelty to others but simply not being honest with them. I once dated two guys. I knew they assumed I was seeing no one else and had they asked I would have been honest, but they didn’t so I said nothing. They would surely have been angry and hurt had they known I was sleeping with them both. They each gave me flowers. When one came over I hid the other’s flowers in the closet; then I’d switch them for the other guy. They never found out, ergo never got hurt. But it doesn’t exonerate me. It wasn’t right. What a piece of work I was. My mother didn’t raise me this way. Maybe there are a lot of angry women in the world who train some guys to expect crazy and bad treatment from women. It’s why I have sympathy for abused men, too. I know what bitches women can be. I was one. When I abused Bob, I took a sick pleasure in it. I unloaded a lot of baggage and garbage he hadn’t earned. And he was a good guy. We would never have been happy together but I wonder if bad women like me ruined him forever for marriage. Instead of trying to get me to fall in love with him—which was never going to happen, not even if I was less insane—he should have been finding a woman worthy of him. He had a good heart. He was adult and responsible, but not good at identifying serious headcases. There were women who could have shared his enthusiasm for playing the stock market, who perhaps he could have happily taught. Jimmy would never have made for a good partner or husband, dying mysteriously five years after me. I knew when he bragged about killing 59 people, that he might well turn violent some day. My dates with him served as the opening chapter in a dark fantasy novel I wrote years later, Tales From The Anonymous Divorced Witchbabe. The angry, entitled main character was, not surprisingly, partially based on myself, with an offline dating service I called Nickleby’s. Some of the main character’s dating woes were based on a few other men I met through Great Expectations and whom I treat with more sympathy in the novel than I did in real life. The Canadian guy who was willing to shag a racist I’ll call him Inconnu, the French word for ‘unknown’. I don’t remember his name. He was a Canadian immigrant, like myself, except from a country with a well-earned reputation for aggressive horndogginess. I don’t want to slam his home country, so we’ll call it Ecuarico, which was the name of the fake country of an exiled South American dictator who briefly invades Gilligan’s Island. I met Inconnu at a party and I’d implemented a new rule for Toronto men: Don’t talk to or engage with guys from Ecuarico. They greatly lacked social and romantic skills and this guy was so aggressive I actually Googled the next morning, ‘Why are Ecuarican guys so…” and before I could type the last word the dropdown showed me other popular endings to this question. Which ended in ‘aggressive’, ‘horny’, ‘persistent’, etc. The complaints about Ecuarican guys were global. The country itself has a very bad reputation for the way it treats women. By the time Inconnu arrived I’d had a few drinks. I get chattier and friendlier when I drink, so even though I thought, “Don’t talk to the Ecuarican guy! Don’t talk to the Ecuarican guy!” I did anyway. We had a few conversations and when I was ready to leave he said, “Oh, are you going home? So am I. Why don’t we ride on the subway together?” “Sure!” I said. So of course, we hadn’t finished the five-minute walk to the subway when he asked, “What kind of guys do you like to date?” I was past Peak Angry Bitch period, so I didn’t say what I wanted to say—“Anyone except Ecuarican guys!” which I would have a few years previously, but it explains how things went down afterward. We were both pretty drunk and his persistence activated Bitch Mode. I fended off his advances (all verbal) until politeness ran out. “No, I’m not going out with you. Stop asking.” I should have said, “Knock it off right now or I’m going to sit over there and read my e-book!” But he’d just agreed to become my Abuse Toy. I think I had a fleeting memory of Boring Bob. The more he persisted, the nastier I got. I abused him, I insulted him, but no matter what I said, he still wanted to fuck date me. And of course I lost all respect for him. It turned into a game once again. How much shit will he take before he gives up? He was so persistent I got racist. I eschew racism in all its forms but I wanted to see if he was so pathetic he’d want sex with someone who treated him like an inferior. This is one of the most shameful things I’ve ever done. But I remind you: Remember George Costanza in Seinfeld wanting to fuck the hot Nazi white supremacist chick? I remembered, that night. “Listen,” I told him, “I don’t fuck Ecuarican guys. I NEVER fuck Ecuarican guys. You’re all disgusting. You’re horny as fuck. And you guys are mad for blonde white women, aren’t you! You’ll do anything to fuck us, won’t you!” The main reason I’d decided not to talk to or engage with Ecuarican guys is because of their own racist fetishization of white women, and especially blonde white women. They’re famous for it. They’re not the only men who do it, there’s a whole part of the world I could name that also fetishizes blonde white women—as I was to learn from my Googling the following morning, because porn is primarily Western-produced which means many of the actresses are blonde white women. “I never fuck brown penises. (Not true. I’d already had one or two.) You are never, ever, in a million years, going to plug your tiny little brown Ecuarican penis into me. This is one blonde #$%^& you are never going to see, much less touch!” I forget what else I said—it was late at night so there was no one else in our car—but I kept insulting his country, his penis size and his manhood, and still, still, still—he wanted to fuck me, no matter what I said. He was a thousand times more pathetic than Boring Bob. Not to mention an embarrassing stereotype. It was a long trip home. I’d expected he’d get off somewhere before me but he didn’t; he lived in my neighborhood. He insisted on walking me to my building. It sure wasn’t out of any sense of honor or concern for my safety. “Why are you being so racist?” he asked. “Because you’re a pathetic loser and I wanted to see how much of my crap you’d take. You’re such a loser you’re willing to fuck a racist. For fuck’s sake, get some self-esteem!” He walked away. Jim McCoy believes emotional and psychological abuse are worse than physical. Bones and flesh heal. Brains and souls, not so easily. I had legitimate grievances about treatment by men, but none who were abusive. Rude, inconsiderate, insensitive, sometimes dumber than dirt, but not a single one worthy of my treatment. Single men still remain relentlessly clueless about women while drowning in an ocean of information about them, which is why I don’t date anymore. Not out of a sense of anger or hostility; I’m just tired of cluelessness. I’m romantically exhausted. I keep telling myself I’m done with it but then a few years later I’m back online trying again, hoping once again for love (that’s all there is; have I mentioned that?). I joined various F2F groups before the pandemic but most guys were too young and others showed no interest. Granted, Canadian men are extremely passive. Trauma always remains with us. You can move beyond it with meditation, therapy, cathartic art, or whatever, and change your life. Then one day something triggers you and your brain snaps back to 1992 and you’re yelling at some ancient asshole while your current partner stares at you in disbelief wondering where the hell this is coming from. It’s part of the reason why I wrote an article last year pondering the people I’ve hurt, and wanting to apologize—forty years later. What I crucify myself for is how I handled myself. I can genuinely argue ‘I didn’t know what I didn’t know’, like how online dating was a Sears catalog that commoditizes human beings. Or that just as Jerry was tossing me overboard, far more people were availing themselves of free online porn, that soulless algorithms fed their customers endless wank gratification, including more extreme and violent porn and even kiddie porn. Young girls and young women watched it and taught them that a woman’s place was to be a slut and do whatever filthy thing a man wanted. I didn’t know, when I re-entered the dating scene in the early 2000s, just how stacked the deck was against me. And everyone else too, including men. I didn’t know that Buddhist psychology wasn’t all a bunch of shit. What I blame myself for is choosing to dig my own hole and even flirt with evil one dark night. What I’m responsible for is becoming a horrible person, at least for a time. It wasn’t all my fault. It wasn’t all their fault. I feel obligated to mention again, my mother didn’t raise me this way. So don’t blame her, or my father. They raised me to a be a good person. I even bought that silly Rules book about playing your grandma’s games to snag a man. “Well I tried honesty and consideration,” I told myself. “And that didn’t work. So let’s try deception and games. Isn’t doing the same thing over and over again the definition of insanity?” I was right, and it was. Honesty and consideration really had failed. But I still knew better. I always knew better, however I rationalized. When I tell women to stop letting him treat you like that, to grow some labia, reclaim your power and don’t be the victim, I fucking mean it. I’ve never tolerated bad treatment from men, but some have tolerated it from me. I am 100% responsible for myself, but you can’t abuse a person who isn’t there. Don’t be that guy! As Jim McCoy eloquently put it. Not to mention a retired abusive bitch. Don’t Be The Victim - My Substack anti-abuse articles 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!

Animals aren't always as 'trans' as advertised, and although clownfish change sex, they can also breathe underwater, which you--also can't. We share this glorious planet with God’s or Darwin’s gorgeous array of creatures, at least the ones who haven’t been exterminated by overeager hunters or who are in the process of dying off from the effects of global warming (Great Barrier Reef, we hardly knew ye!). The biological miracle of life on earth includes some fun facts you may not know: We human beans share our DNA with just about every other plant, animal, and even the mold in your fridge. For example, we share 99% of our DNA with each other. That’s right, ‘those people’ you hate are almost exactly like you! Obsessively intolerant to genetic variation much? We share 90% of our DNA with kitty kats and 84% with our faithful doggos, which kind of calls into question why they’re a hair farther away from us than our nonplussed cats. Check this out: We share 60% of our DNA with bananas— bananas! —and only 44% with honeybees, which have some semblance of a brain, even though they’re light-years from putting the first honeybee trans-butterfly into a Bud Light commercial. We share the same amount of DNA with bananas as we do with fruit flies so that explains that. Even the fungus among us are more closely related at nearly 50%. That’s right, mushrooms are closer to animals and people, genetically, than honeybees and plants. There’s something for vegetarians and vegans to contemplate as they order the stuffed mushroom caps appetizer. Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean you need to be kinder to the mold in your fridge as you clean it off with a hyper-sanitized sponge and twelve rubber gloves, or that weird pink stuff that grows in your bathtub. But it does mean one thing: Just because we share some ATGCs (adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, the DNA compounds) with other life-forms doesn’t mean we are or can change into the only other opposite sex there is. The one that you’re not. The Transformers we ain’t. Fellow power feminist and sophomoric silliness-seeking subscriber Persephone Phoenix pointed me toward another delightfully transphobic article about the trans-ness—or not—of other life forms, from Quillette. From Banana Slugs To Human Beings, There Are Just Two Sexes. Go read it. It’s hilarious. Remember to come back here when you’re done. If you do, I promise you some red-hot super-sexy gastropodous ( yes, that’s a real word! ) porn action in a True-Life Adventure you ain’t never seen from Walt Disney! Go ahead. I’ll wait. Anyway. Now that you know more about sequential hermaphroditism than you ever cared to know, let’s talk about the lies and misinformation spread by people with an absolute holy terror of being what they were born to be: Human males or females. Specifically, reality-phobic transactivists. They love to argue that because some creatures change sex, it means we can too. They use clownfish as a primary example because—please take notes, there will be a quiz later—clownfish are customarily born male and only change female when the other guys need one. I’m not sure how this works - whether they send around an email asking for volunteers or whether only one fish transsexualizes and they all jump upon her in a massive orange and white fishy gang bang, but clownfish do in fact qualify as transsexual animals because they can change from one sex to another without checking into a gender identity clinic. If human males could change their gonads from testes to ovaries like clownfish, their balls would somehow rise into their hips to become ovaries and I guess their ding-dong would somehow widen, blossom outward, and develop some way for the baby to emerge victorious, clutching its little endlessly striped Pride flag. But no human male has ever done this. Clownfish can do it, but humans can’t. Clownfish can also breathe underwater, which humans can’t do either. Just sayin’. Jellyfish also qualify as transsexuals, because they not only change sex, but they can be two different types of hermaphrodites at the same time! (Frankly, I think that’s just showing off and shaming the clownfish.) Not only are these pulsating blobs able to change sex, but they’re also ‘simultaneous’ hermies because they can display both sexual characteristics at the same time. But they have no brain whatsoever. Which, now that I think about it, indicates they have more in common with transactivists than I initially gave them credit for. Point to you, TERF-haters! Oysters are also part of the be-what-you-want-to-be sex-changers, and just to be disgusting, they are the bukkake champions of the animal world. Even worse, it’s self -bukkake! They spray a cloud of sperm into the water which then impregnates them. So when you tell an oyster to go fuck itself, it probably will. The black sea bass sex changes in reverse order: They begin their lives as females and then later turn male if they watch enough Jeffrey Marsh videos or hang out on TikTok a lot. And then there’s one of my favorite transsexual animals: The extremely broad-minded American slipper limpet, which is a very common critter up and down the U.S. eastern seaboard. Empty slipper shells look like slippers, hence the name, and I can tell you from my adolescence they make for lovely ring-y beach mobiles. They’re also the most orgiastic sluts in all of Earthlandia as they pile on top of each other and hump away—or whatever it is that slipper limpets do when they’re in the throes of love—and they actually shag through the shells, because this is how the whole crazy fucked up sex life of slipper limpets gets. If a slipper limpet is clinging to a rock somewhere all sad and lonely, he turns into a chick, sends out a ‘come fuck me’ signal to the other limpets, and they all pile on top of her and they shag the shit out of her! And they all fertilize her! Like seriously, the paternity suit must be a nightmare. How the hell four of five guys piled one on top of the other manage to impregnate the lone female at the bottom of the orgy pile is beyond me, but I’ll bet human males reading this right now are simultaneously grossed out and turned on by this sexual scenario that we can also add to the list of ‘Things Transsexual Animals Can Do That You Can’t’. The Quillette article points out that many animals in the original article by a gay rights organization on eighteen alleged trans animals aren’t in fact trans at all, just kinda queer-ish. Some definitely resemble transactivists in that they’ll fake being the opposite sex to try and get laid. Count among them the ruff, a Eurasian wading bird, for pulling shit like that. There are a few other genuinely transsexual animals mentioned, but it’s important to note the species that are missing—like all mammals and primates. Not a single one of us hair- or fur-bearers change sex, not even with a team of surgeons and a boatload of cross-sex hormones. Look, a real transsexual can change sex and still get pregnant or get someone pregnant (especially one extremely exhausted female limpet). In the end, there are indeed several animals or creatures who can change sex but we’re not any of them. Just as some animals can breathe underwater or fly and we can’t do either of those things without scuba tanks or airplanes. Flying from Hartford to Dallas-Fort Worth doesn’t make you a bird any more than not being able to change sex, as your cat or dog or budgie can’t do, makes them human. So stop it with the faux biology already, chilluns. And if you’ve made it this far learning about weird sex-switching practices in the animal kingdom, you deserve that promised slug porn! I wrote this many years ago for a creative writing group and it’s since been recycled more often than a Marvel Comics franchise. I’ll be honest, banana slugs don’t really qualify as sex-changers either except in the case of a particularly unfortunate circumstance. But you know what? If you can impregnate someone while dangling from a snot rope three feet above the ground, which is how most of them get down over the ground.,I for one will happily gender you as ‘it’, or ‘they’ for the rest of your life! WARNING: The following is NSFW. It contains graphic, gratuitous, brutally frank descriptions of superhot slug sex! You’ve been warned. “Hey baby, you ever do it in the air?” “Uh, is there any other way?” I asked. I joined the Yard High Club last year. “We could do it on a rock wall,” it said. Well, that would be a new one for me. Last year, the first time I ever mated, my mate and I did it suspended from a slime thread about sixteen inches long. While a rock wall had an air of kinky novelty about it, I wanted to stick to what I knew. Look, this is only my second time reproducing ever, you know? I’ve probably got four more good shags left in me assuming I’m not eaten by a bird or used as fish bait. I’m a banana slug, and hey, it’s spring. Lovely, glorious spring, warm and moist and hardly any birds around because their migration systems have been totally hosed by global warming for the last several years. “What’s your name?” I asked it. It was the hottest slug I’d seen in a year. Long, Chiquita yellow, and covered in slime, just the way I like ‘em. “Leslie,” it said. “And yours?” “Chris,” I replied. We’re hermaphroditic, although occasionally some of us are turned into females. Which won’t happen to me because I’m very careful where I stick my thing when mating. I don’t mean to brag or anything, but I am extremely well-endowed for a banana slug. My mighty mandingo is nearly half my total body length. Well okay, so is everyone else’s, unless they’ve been apophollated, which happens if you get stuck in someone’s orifice. Whoever isn’t stuck gnaws off the pathetic pudd of the one who is. That’s how you get chickified. So we slimed around each other for a bit, doing a size check on each other’s tunnel o’ love, then began our mating dance, waving our colossal love cannons in the air above our heads, which you can do when your penis is located there. We circled each other for hours, then dangled from a long strand of snotty-looking slime, swaying in the gentle breezes as we writhed around each other and engaged in a mutual yellow squirmy shag-a-thon. I came, it came. It was great. It was beautiful. I quivered from the sheer glory of the miracle of mutual reproduction. Leslie pulled out of me. “Okay, it was nice bumping slimies with you,” it said. “I’d like to stick around and chat, maybe share a plate of fungi or dog poop, but I gotta run. If I hurry home I can just catch Stephen Colbert. So can you please disengage?” “Can I what?” “Can you unfasten yourself please?” “Huh?” “WILL YOU TAKE YOUR DICK OUT OF MY — what the hell do we call these other things anyway?” “I don’t know,” I said, “but okay. Sorry, didn’t mean to keep you.” I pulled. And tugged. And yanked. “What’s the matter?” Leslie asked. Oh no. 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!

He was good at playing women, but he offers further lessons on red flag recognition, as well as a helpful lesson for single men who don't want to be. Neuroscientist and body hacking guru Andrew Huberman would never turn my head if I passed him on the street, with or without the shirt. I’m an early Gen-Xer not into super-muscular men, or much into tattoos. But I can understand his appeal. Huberman plays female psychology well. Calling him a master would be a stretch, but he’s effective at tapping into and expressing the female-friendly warm jargon and feelings of psychology and therapy. He’s particularly skilled at something many men are not, however well-meaning: He makes women feel heard and understood. Utilized for the good, many men unblessed with good looks, wealth or celebrity like Huberman could find themselves more popular with women than they realize. And women who analyze how he effectively played so many women at once can better psychologically arm themselves against such games in the future. On the surface, and even when you drill down below the so-called Andrew Huberman scandal, there doesn’t seem to be much there there, to misquote Gertrude Stein. So this Huberman guy is a player? Who dated six women at once? He was a cad and a bounder? No news here! Furthermore, plenty of women have done and continue to do the same. They’d surely be slut-shamed in a way Huberman is not but so what; frankly, he’s just a boring old manslut, and I’m not afraid to slut-shame men, not that they care. (Ladies: Why do we?) I examined the Huberman affair to see if there was anything to his story; his body-hacking didn’t interest me much, nor did the allegations that his supplements and behavioral hacks weren’t as rooted in science as claimed; once again, nothing new under the sun. Nothing that hasn’t already been lobbed at other philter-floggers like conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and probably most of the overpriced elixirs you can buy at your local earthy crunchy hippie store. Usually, when some guy emerges as the newest X-trend for dirtball behavior, I examine less the man than the women drawn to him. It’s my ‘post-mortem’ to explore how women can better arm themselves against manipulative males. I don’t do it in reverse mostly because I think I just don’t see it. We miss what isn’t happening to us, whether it’s getting followed in a store by a rent-a-cop or marrying Johnny Depp’s Amber Turd. Maybe we don’t hear about female malfeasance if women are better at covering up affairs. Or don’t try to juggle half a dozen at once. I’m not sure. Folks are welcome to reach out to me about some ladyho they think is mistreating men and I’ll listen. I do find some lessons both sexes can learn from Les Affaires Huberman. What can men learn? Huberman was great, on the surface, at expressing emotional intimacy. What he wasn’t so great at was genuine emotional intimacy. I’m reminded of a scene in the 1988 movie Casual Sex in which singles resort dirtball Vinny, ‘The Vin Man’, an annoying on-the-make misogynist Italian-American from New Jersey (played, appropriately, by Andrew Dice Clay) takes a shine to Stacy, one of the main characters, but later falls in love with her. He’s faced with a conundrum: How to get her to fall in love back? “Be sensitive,” one of his friends counsels. “Chicks love sensitivity in a man.” Later, Vinnie is reading a book: How To Pretend To Be Sensitive. That was Andrew Huberman’s greatest skill. When his harem began to unravel, he didn’t lie or deny it. He would text “I hear you, I understand you, I want to work this through with you.” He also self-applied the warm fuzzies: He’d talk about ‘repairing’ himself and ‘healthy merging’. Apparently his merging was taking longer than expected because he’d been in therapy since high school and it didn’t seem to have taught him much beyond how to pretend to be sensitive. He also confessed to one lover about regularly lying to the therapist, and laughing about it. For all his obsessive focus on body-hacking ‘down to the cellular level,’ Huberman didn’t appear to put much real effort into managing his emotions. He wasn’t always good at it. His press agent, hired to parrot whatever Huberman put in front of him, claimed he was ‘very much in control of his emotions’. He wasn’t, but more in a bit. When he was with a woman, he was there. His focus was on her. He treated her like she was the only woman in his universe. He even planned children with one (which his pressbot denies but didn’t explain why, then, Randy Andy was injecting her with IVF treatments). When he was away—and he was, a lot, as a busy entrepreneur and rising celebrity which provided convenient cover for his pudenda-chasing—Huberman maintained his relationships with warm texts and phone calls. They bought it all. Men faking emotional intimacy is nothing new; a whole book was written about it by journalist Neil Strauss twenty years ago called The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read on female psychology. But here’s what how-to-con-women manuals—they’re legion—don’t tell men. How to have a mature relationship when the easy sex wears thin. Not more sex, but better sex; maybe to one committed woman and a family. Not all men (or women) grow tired of promiscuity; but several did in Strauss’s book including himself. He now refutes pickup culture and is happily married with a family. But he was already a well-rounded, well-traveled journalist who’d written for Playboy, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, and he possessed a higher level of maturity. One of his compatriots was a guy who only wanted to get married but wasn’t good with women; pickup artistry landed him a wife, but he didn’t know how to be in a relationship and his marriage failed. Strauss’s friend Mystery suffered a nervous breakdown when sex was no longer fulfilling, yet he couldn’t connect with a woman through any means other than sex. I say this not to beat up on men but to observe: They don’t know what they don’t know. It’s easier, for sure, to con women with faux emotional intimacy than to be emotionally intimate, but in the hands of a man who actually is emotionally intimate, it can be powerful mojo. I think of Don, a fellow I worked with many years ago in Connecticut. He onboarded me and another new hire for the sales department, also a woman. He was 35 and looked like Wally from the Dilbert comic, which wasn’t yet widely syndicated. Don was a helluva nice guy: Warm, sensitive, and a great onboarder. He had a girlfriend he loved a lot whom I met once at an office party: She wasn’t very pretty, and introverted in the way plain women used to invisibility often are. But Don doted on her. Linda, my fellow new hire, commented to me the following Monday, when we were alone, “I hope Don’s girlfriend appreciates what she’s got. He’s a wonderful guy. Don’t tell him this, but I’m kind of attracted to him.” “So am I,” I confessed. It made me think about all the men women overlook until they get to know them, and how surprisingly attractive they become once they do, if they have something else to offer. Like a great personality or sense of humor and a genuine ability to be emotionally intimate. They’re far more powerful than human beings realize. It works in reverse, too. My attraction to Don shouldn’t have surprised me. I’d fallen in love with a guy in college who looked like another cartoon character, known at that time only to those who bought Quaker Oats: Waldo, the branding icon who eventually became a ‘90s sensation as the most sought-after man in America. Jim wasn’t a ho, he was a super-nerd, and I was his first girlfriend. He was genuinely warm, kind and sensitive. The ones who aren’t so good with women, who look like Wally or Waldo, might want to treat—but sincerely—one special woman the way Andrew Huberman treated each woman. It takes a little longer with no immediate chemistry but she’ll be quite surprised when it kicks in. “He’s so not normally my type!” What can women learn? Perhaps the biggest challenge women face in sorting out the players and abusers from the ‘good guys’ is an inability to recognize red flags, and to excuse them when someone points them out. Huberman appears to have been better than many at juggling as many as six women at once, but what no mortal man can pull off is effective time management, not unless he’s got Hermione’s time-turner device. The biggest red flag was Huberman’s ‘flakiness’, as many described it, his countless silent disappearances and last-minute cancellations. And when he was with friends he was, as one described, ‘buzzing’ and ‘anxious’. No wonder. He went to a cabin in a park one weekend with a friend and disappeared for a day and a half without explanation, leaving the man alone with his dog. He would go silent for awhile with friends, explaining he was traveling. Rising celebrity was an effective cover for all the traveling he didn’t do for work. And when he finally texted, it was something designed to melt any woman’s squooshy innards. Another red flag was the way he talked about ‘ex-girlfriends’, some of which were less ex- than others. He’d describe them as ‘stalkers’, ‘alcoholics’, and ‘compulsive liars’. He said one ripped away part of her own scalp yanking on her hair; another supposedly tried to trick him with some dead baby story. I learned a few years ago—and hadn’t ever thought of this myself—that if a guy has a lot of ‘crazy exes’ the problem may not be them but him. (And that goes for women with crazy exes too). Does he have bad taste in women? Does he attract nutbars? Celebrities usually do but they don’t necessarily get involved with them. There’s an alternative explanation: He’s lying. Which Huberman appears to have done because when his harem began doing Ladies Who Lunch, they found each other to be vibrant, engaging, and not crazy in the slightest. Huberman’s pressbot denies he’s abusive, but one of his girlfriends exhibited the classic signs of an emotional abuse victim. According to NY Magazine’s The Intelligencer, the pseudonymed Sarah ‘felt herself getting smaller, constantly appeasing.’ This is because the allegedly even-keeled Huberman was prone to flying into rages about her past lovers and choices and even her children from before she met him. He became furious at times with the other men she’d been with and the children she’d had with one of them. He compared his relationship to her as like ‘bobbing for apples in feces’. He’d psychoanalyze her when she hadn’t asked for it, going on about her eleven years of ‘subsconcious drives’ creating ‘nearly impossible hurdles’ for them. The problem, clearly, was his and not hers, but she found herself describing herself as ‘selfish, childish and confused,’ and, pathetically, in an obvious reach for nurturing, ‘needing his protection’. She’s the one he injected with IVF while he was off screwing other women, sometimes on the same day. She’s the one he gave HPV to because they were having unprotected sex, as were the others. Because he led them to believe they were the only ones in his life. There are those who practice ‘open’ relationships or ‘polyamory’, and those come with rules. When one multi-shagger leads others to believe they’re the one and only, it’s cheating. Huberman may have been less New Age-fuzzy on modern relationships than advertised; he allegedly expressed to some women that he wished for a woman who was submissive, whom he could slap on the ass in public, who ‘would be crawling on the floor for him,’ when he got home. (With his ding-dong still damp from someone else?) Guess what response the pressbot gave to that story. I can’t get as outraged about Andrew Huberman as others; apart from being a celebrity, he’s an otherwise run-of-the-mill slimeball. I’m impressed with his admittedly superficial ability to express tenderness and seeming love; it’s depressing, actually, to know that it can be hard to tell the difference between someone who honestly loves you and someone who’s just playing you. But there’s nothing new under the sun there, and women can be just as devious. We can, however, learn from Huberman’s mistakes, and from his women, not all of whom, I suspect, failed to recognize red flags. There may not have been any. They didn’t know until someone reached out to them on Instagram or they found the texts on his phone. Huberman wasn’t a master player, but he was better than many. We ladies can learn from his girlfriends’ mistakes, many of which could be explained away as the hazards of fame. What men who would like to have a real girlfriend can learn from Huberman is the way he treated each woman, apart from the one he clearly emotionally abused. Do that, with genuine warmth, love, and sincerity, and she’ll be eating out of your hand. Unless she’s legitimately crazy, and some women are. Upon which, I will counsel these men the way I do women who complain about bad men: Find someone who is worthy of you. You deserve better. What Women Can Learn From Studying Pickup Artists What Can We Learn From This Woman’s Abusive Relationship? (about red flags) Do You Have A Thing For Abusers? 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!

Persephone Phoenix shares how women need to follow their own hero cycle. 'You go through hell and you triumph in the end. No one will rescue you: You have to rescue yourself. Here’s how I did it.' I am so pleased to introduce my friend Persephone Phoenix who has kindly allowed me to make her Grow Some Labia’s very first guest post. She prefers to remain anonymous to protect the innocent from the vengefully guilty. I met Persephone on another blogging platform years ago and we bonded over a similar power feminist value system—a tool of Da Patriarchy (dun dun DUNNNN!!!!) she’s ain’t :) We met once for dinner in Toronto before she moved to the States with her current (and, I hope, her last and lasting!) husband for his new job. What I love about her life is she was in an abusive marriage but she finally ‘grew some labia’ and said The hell with this! and LEFT! To be fair, she wasn’t in as grave a situation as other women trapped in marital hell so don’t take this as a ‘should’; that if you’re currently in a bad situation, you ‘should’ do the same. We don’t know what you ‘should’ do but we DO want you to understand that you have made and are making choices along the way. Persephone decided to leave. If you want to but you can’t, there’s help at the end of this article. I will shut up now and let Persephone tell her story, in her own way, including what she learned about taking back her power from an unworthy man. Part II concludes it on Saturday. When I was a high school English teacher, I taught a unit in grade ten English called “The Hero’s Journey.” The students read traditional myths, modern short stories, and viewed recent films, all through the lens of Joseph Campbell’s version of the hero cycle via Carl Jung. Versions of this symbolic system are used everywhere today, including in psychotherapy. It’s a popular theory that has become ubiquitous since Campbell published his seminal book in 1987.vgv Infographics of the cycle are all over the internet. Here’s one: It basically outlines how someone becomes a hero, or the best version of themselves. It’s as easy to apply this system to the ancient Greek myth of Theseus as it is to apply it to the story of Martin Luther King’s fight against racism in the 1960s (one year I showed the film Selma in my class). Fay Weldon’s 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, for example, noticeably follows the pattern. It’s one of the few feminist novels I read in the eighties that had the heroine take charge of her life once she realized her husband was an abusive dick. It may have even inspired me to leave my own oppressive dick of a husband. Anyone can apply the hero’s journey to their own life; you can easily cast your own struggles with adversity into a compelling story if you look at your life a certain way. There’s the rub; many young women today, coached by feminist theories, prefer to see themselves as victims of male aggression and oppression. Any pushback against this mentality is often seen as ‘blaming the victim.’ In so doing, they trap themselves needlessly in abusive relationships. The call to adventure: I meet a new man who is open to starting a family with me. I met my first husband at a restaurant where we both worked. We began dating. He was a recent immigrant, and he impressed me with his work ethic and discipline. He was also very handsome. He showed few hints of his fiery temper while he was courting me. If there were any serious red flags, I completely ignored them. He also said he wanted children, which was very important to me. Why the disaster happened in the first place, or how I accidentally crossed into the underworld or unknown world. I married this man at age 24. Our daughter was born when I was 25. Our relationship had developed quickly—too quickly. I was young and naive, and had also endured trauma from my abusive and neglectful parents. According to classic psychological parlance, I had unconsciously married my more negative parent— my mother. To be fair, my husband had also endured trauma; he was an immigrant from Iran who arrived in Canada as a refugee in the early ‘80s—right after the Iran/Iraq war. Not only was there a terrible war he could have been forced to fight in, he had also grown up in a violent, repressive society where women were routinely forced to wear the Muslim hijab or be subject to violence on the streets, and could also be beaten and killed for adultery. His father was an officer in the Iranian military and his younger brother was sent to the front to be cannon fodder (he miraculously survived). I will give him that pass—I know now that he was possibly more damaged than I was. I won’t give him a pass for how he treated me or our daughter- that’s on him. He was a narcissist who never engaged in any kind of self-reflection and his emotionally abusive treatment of me was not excusable. I got pregnant and also got started on my road of trials. The abuse started during my pregnancy. He felt stressed at having a baby in the first year of our marriage, so he felt justified in expressing all his spleen whenever the anxiety of responsibility hit him. He could be loving one minute and enraged the next. One time in about my seventh month, we were riding the elevator in our apartment building. We had been having a normal conversation when I said something like, “When the baby comes, we should…” He looked at me and said with fury, “I don’t want the baby!” I was floored; it was a little late in the game to be saying this when we had agreed that I would have the baby right after I showed him the pregnancy test. I thought it was settled. Turns out, no, he was actually pissed at me for being pregnant. Brimming with pregnancy hormones, I started crying. He got angry with me for crying. Bringing up baby or living in the belly of the whale This was the beginning of the abuse. After the baby was born, I spent most of my time isolated in our apartment while he worked six or seven days a week. I was caring for a newborn, with no experience and no help from my own mother who lived in a nearby city, and who was too absorbed in her own problems to care about mine. My wonderful sister stayed with me to help for a week, but she had her own baby and a life in a town two hours away. Even though I was overwhelmed with caring for a beautiful but colicky infant, I tried to do my share in our home. It was a losing battle. Sometimes I left the dishes unwashed (we had no dishwasher). He would take a picture of the messy kitchen, have the film developed, and shame me with the picture. The rest of my daughter’s infancy is a bit of a blur. He was rarely home. She didn’t sleep. One thing he would do was put her in her car seat at night when he got home from his restaurant shift and drive her around for miles until she finally fell asleep. This was helpful. Unfortunately, it was literally the only thing he did. He claimed he couldn’t change her diapers because the smell made him sick. Every time he ‘tried’ he would begin a dramatic retching performance so that I wouldn’t make him change her. I simply gave up trying to get him to contribute to her care beyond putting her to sleep at night. Oh, and I couldn’t help with that, because he actively prevented me from learning to drive. Making sure he diminished my light and our daughter’s light so we wouldn’t leave: sensing the abyss Our daughter transformed into an adorable little girl with curly dark brown hair and a mischievous laugh. She was literally hilarious. If I said something silly, she would say, “You’re fordicalos, Mommy!” (She meant ‘ridiculous’). She ‘wrote’ her own version of Cinderella when she was four. I would staple together pieces of paper into a book. She would illustrate the story with child-style pictures and then dictate the text that went with each picture: Cinderella lived with her two stepsisters. She was getting married the next day. "Or is it the day after that?,” she reminded to herself. For Christmas, she got a wedding dress and some shoes. She married the prince and the two stepsisters became the girl grand dukes. And they all lived happily ever after. The end. She had brilliantly re-conceived the original story so that no one was mean to anyone. That’s how innocent and good she was. And creative. What was his reaction to this story? “Not funny.” Much like Joe Dimaggio with Marilyn Monroe, he did his best to diminish her light so that she would not outshine him. My cooking was never good enough or a major challenge that tempted me with all kinds of fantasies of a future, healthy marriage: Magic flight. The only food he would eat was the Persian food his mother had made for him—about four different dishes. I bought a Persian cookbook and tried making some recipes. Everything was ‘disgusting’ and he would take one sniff and do the retching performance he did with the baby’s dirty diapers. I began to imagine a different kind of relationship. I admit that I got a little lost in fantasy. That said, I never even came close to cheating on him. Nevertheless, he sensed this, and developed some pretty paranoid behaviors. Once, at one of our daughter’s ballet recitals, I innocently looked around the auditorium to see if one of my friends was arriving, and he accused me of ‘looking for men.’ Oh, and during this period he actually engaged in several affairs. He was mean and demeaning to our daughter: Getting close to the nadir When she got a little pudgy from having pasta for lunch every day at daycare, he freaked out because she was making him look bad for being ‘fat.’ Later on, she developed a binge-eating disorder. She would take leftover food from the fridge and gorge on it, leaving the dirty dishes under her bed in shame. Then he would scream at her for it. He demanded that she massage his feet for him to honor him as a father like good Persian girls supposedly did in Iran. He abused me financially: The absolute nadir A lot of you might be thinking at this point, why didn’t I just leave him? I had a good job as a high school teacher (teachers in Canada are paid well and everyone is on the same salary grid no matter what school district they teach in). I had the financial means to hire a lawyer and set up my own household and a strong desire to leave, but I didn’t. Truth be told, I didn’t yet have the self-esteem I needed to make the break. I brought home a good salary (the equivalent of $100,000 per year in today’s money). How much was he contributing? I wouldn’t know because I was not allowed to know how much he made. When we briefly separated, he refused to pay child support. I became terrified of not being able to pay my bills, and I reluctantly moved back in with him. Honestly, I just didn’t have enough confidence in myself. I never had parents who talked to me about how to handle life. My upbringing was mostly them expressing hostility to me for my very existence. How I finally woke up: Consciousness expands. I developed health problems. A rheumatologist diagnosed me with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). He explained to me that some people are genetically predisposed to CFS, but do not develop the disease. Others do when they experience significant stress. He asked me about my childhood, my adolescence, and my young adulthood. What were they like? All stressful: Constant moves, eleven different schools, bullying, physical abuse, neglect, and one spectacular incident: A mass shooting at my high school when I was in grade nine. Add an abusive marriage to that list and you have a recipe for chronic disease. I knew I had to leave or I might actually not live long enough to see my daughter grow up. I left him for good: The apotheosis is on the horizon. I moved out of our beautiful marital home sometime after our fifteenth anniversary. It was basically my dream home. Growing up, and moving around so much, often to ugly suburban houses, helped me delusionally believe that a nice house would somehow make me happy despite anything that was going on in my life. No house, no matter how lovely, can make up for the ugliness of a life lived in fear and misery with someone who acts like he hates you. I still can’t believe how long it took me to realize this. I showed up at work the first day of the school year after I had moved out during summer break and started my new life. One of my colleagues remarked, “You look different. You look happier.” I had literally moved out two weeks before. I guess my whole demeanor and body language had changed in an instant. I felt free. I didn’t have to go home to my hostile, angry husband and our tension-filled house. He manipulated me into using his lawyer for our divorce: The refusal of the return. Despite my colleague’s observations, I was also so broken down before our legal separation, both the tiredness associated with CFS, and the lingering depression that I lived with throughout our marriage, that I allowed him to decide the terms of the divorce. I went to his lawyer’s office with him and signed a paper that stated I did not want to seek independent counsel. I had moved into an apartment in another house that we owned, not far from our marital home, so that our daughter could walk between the two homes. My (it turns out delusional) understanding was that I would get the second home (with two apartments, one of which I could rent out to help with mortgage payments), and he would keep the larger, fancier home that I didn’t want anyway, and didn’t feel I could afford to maintain. He had no intention of signing over that house to me. Or of giving me any kind of settlement. He had decided, living as he did in his own elaborate fantasy world, that somehow Sharia law would apply to our divorce, rather than Canadian law. When I finally demanded some actual paperwork for the property exchange, he told me he wouldn’t be giving me anything. He explained it by telling me I hadn’t actually contributed anything to the marriage. I reminded him that I had given him several thousand dollars a month for years to cover the mortgage and joint credit card bills. He dismissed that by saying, “All you did was make a few mortgage payments.” “The texture of the silence changed”: Revelation brings rebirth. I was utterly stunned. I walked back to ‘my’ house in a daze. I had completely screwed myself. I had signed a separation agreement that said nothing about a settlement. I thought that was the end. I would never own a house in our expensive city again. Not even a condo. And I had done it to myself. He could kick me out of the home I was living in any time he wanted to. For the first time, I got really, really angry instead of internalizing my anger and making myself sick. He phoned me not long after that and demanded that I pay half of our daughter’s first-year university expenses. We had started an education savings account when she was a baby. I knew how much was in that account. I told him to use that to pay for the year’s expenses and after that he could damn well pay for all her future years of education. I was giving him nothing. The fire had awakened. There is a scene in the novel The Life and Loves of a She-devil, where the heroine is sitting in her bathroom while her asshole husband is berating her through the door, explaining to her that he is entirely entitled to divorce her, take her children with him to live with his mistress, and to give her nothing, since she was supposedly nothing more than a worthless, unattractive hag. Fay Weldon deliciously captures the moment when Ruth, a woman almost completely lacking self-esteem, decides for once that she doesn’t have to accept her husband Bobbo’s low estimation of her worth: “On the other side of the door, the texture of the silence changed…” Bobbo waits for her acquiesce to his insane demands, and all he gets is silence. Uneasy, he leaves the house somehow sensing that his power over Ruth has been an illusion all along. If you have read the book or seen the movie, then you know that Ruth gets revenge on Bobbo by becoming attractive and rich, and essentially ruining his life the way he almost ruined hers. He thought he was going to be, in Orwellian terms, a jackboot stamping on [her] human face forever. He was wrong. As the great spiritual teacher Gary Zukav once said, “External power is an illusion.” People have power over us because we give it to them. When we stop believing in that power, it evaporates like Nikolai Ceaucescu’s hold over the Romanian people in 1989. My husband was also uneasy when the texture of the silence changed on the other side of our phone conversation. He protested when I refused to pay our girl’s education, knowing he had a lot more money than I did, despite his attempts to hide that from me. I told him, “I know that you know you can afford this and that I can’t since you ripped me off in our divorce settlement. And I’m not playing your game any longer.” Part II will be released on Saturday, April 6th. If you are in an abusive relationship and need help: If you are in IMMEDIATE danger, call 911, wherever you are in Canada and the United States. (NOTE: This doesn’t work in Nunavut and some rural parts of Ontario which still have no 911 service. We’re working to change that.) National Domestic Violence Hotline (United States) - 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). TEXT: 88788 (Text & Message rates may apply) Canada does not appear to have a national domestic abuse hotline. Not that I can find, anyway. There is a Crisis Text Line but I can’t get the website to load. For Canadian First Nations/Indigenous: 1-855-242-3310 Canadian Resources for LGBTQ - 1-855-687-1868 The iHeal app - “A free, private and secure app to help Canadian women who have experienced abuse from a current or past partner to find personalized ways to stay safe and be well.” 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!

Public hostility isn't always about what you look like, but what you've become Sometimes certain groups simply beg for the hostility and hatred. Like, you know, college students. The current backlash against elite colleges and their DEI enablers after the public flameouts of several university presidents blind to racist antisemitism demonstrates how university presidents, DEI consultants, and the Islamofascist students they pretend to teach are mostly racist assholes. And no one likes assholes no matter what they’re peddling, even when it’s putative civil rights, which no good liberal would reject. The cannier ones, however, reject the package when they perceive the hypocritical sins within. Black Lives Matter is Exhibit A. The vibrantly vintage hippie-ish disappointment looked exciting at birth. Every time a white cop shot a black guy, there was Black Lives Matter in front of the cameras uttering colorful catchphrases like the ‘new lynching’ and the ‘epidemic of white supremacy’ and the conveniently self-dehumanizing ‘black bodies’. But then we noticed how little BLM truly valued most black lives. Like whenever a mother grieved for her dead son murdered by another black man. A kid who might have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Where the fuck were they? BLM bought a house and stocked a recording studio with donations while black parents continued to bury black bodies planted six feet under by black hands holding guns. Later came the infamous tweet that launched a hundred thousand condemnations: BLM’s deplorable support for Hamas. They’ve had less to say about Tyre Nichols, the black man beaten to death by five black cops in January 2023. It’s still all white supremacy’s fault, sez BLM’s statement: “Although the media has spent a great amount of time drawing attention to the fact that the police officers are Black, as if that is important [italics mine], let us be clear: ALL police represent the interest of capitalism and impel state-sanctioned violence. Anyone who works within a system that perpetuates state-sanctioned violence is complicit in upholding white supremacy. Assimilation into a system that is anti-Black is one of the most dangerous weapons stemming from white supremacy.” Who knew black cops could be WHITE SUPREMACISTS? BLM’s falls in moral grace make it clear: Their growing unpopularity isn’t because they’re marginalized, but because they’re infested with racist assholes. If your moral compass is spinning like you’re standing at the North Pole, and you can publicly bully others, you ain’t marginalized. You have power. The tide of public opinion has turned, except on the Loony Left, not because the country is getting more racist but because it’s progressing away from it. Except for Black Lives Matter which flaunted its own commitment to racism on October 8th and has since morphed into a huge clusterfuck of We have met the racist enemy and he is us. The Marginalization Olympics It’s interesting they identify as strongly as they do with the Palestinians, another highly compromised victim group. Neither woke black antiracists nor Palestinians can move beyond their own historical trauma and focus on the present or the future. BLM and other woke SJWs, desperately ignorant of human history, fail to realize that while today’s Israeli Jews and their descendants deserve accusations of being imperialist, colonizing oppressors, the Palestinians and their ancestors deserve no less. Many of them got there via invasion in the 7th century under the banner of the new, deeply antisemitic Islamic religion to take, steal, and settle the land the then-contemporary Jews had lived on for thousands of years already. Along with today’s Palestinians’ ancestors. But BLM understands history the way a fundamentalist Christian understands earth science. They may have begun with the best of intentions but social movements, if not kept in check with proper internal controls, inevitably evolve towards extremism. Contrast them both with the Vietnamese, horribly bombed, burned, My Lai’d, tortured, and leveled by American forces in a war the oldest generations there can still remember, yet who largely bear no grudge against the U.S. today. Or consider how the Japanese moved beyond the Bombs. However you feel about the rightness or wrongness of Truman’s decision, what happened to two cities are pretty arguably the most violent attack on other human beings the world has ever witnessed. The Vietnamese and Japanese don't nurture grievance against the United States and declare perpetual war. If ever there were two countries given good reason to hate the United States, it’s these two. Yet they don’t. Meanwhile, BLM thinks they’re living one lost election away from white supremacist annihilation. Just try finding the words ‘Hamas’, ‘Israel’, and ‘October 7’ on the BLM website for months after the attacks. Nadda word. Today, those three words each return only one result: A call for an Israeli cease-fire. Of course. No call on Hamas for a cease-fire of violent attacks re their express genocide mandate against Jews, Israeli or not. People with properly-functioning moral compasses know Hamas deserves the hate they receive around the world because they’re assholes. What does that say about BLM? The company you keep, folks. There isn’t any data so far on where public opinion lies for the organization post-October 7, but two Republican senators want to rename Washington’s ‘Black Lives Matter Plaza’, which received the name after the George Floyd protests. The senators blame BLM’s blatantly racist support for Palestinians, antisemitic rhetoric and celebration of Hamas’s violent slaughter. Seems pretty reasonable since BLM has little tolerance for statues of white historical figures linked to slavery or the Confederacy. If racists are bad, we shouldn’t commemorate them, right? Not sure how well-received that’s been by D.C.’s black mayor. Israeli news organization Haaretz posted their own open letter: Dear BLM Activists, We Also Can’t Breathe. The subtitle corrects BLM’s ignorant racist assumption: Let me tell you something about Israel, where most of the Jews are Brown people who came from the Arab countries and North Africa. The other side of Middle Eastern assholery What about Jews? I can hear some of you screaming from the sidelines. Yes, Israel started to look distinctly more asshole-ish about 25,000 Gazan lives ago. To whom I ask, How’s that last vote workin’ out for ya? Netanyahu? What the fuck were you thinking??? The George W. Bush of the Middle East, the ‘protector of Israel’, who left the southern border unprotected where Trouble with a capital T sailed in, literally. This buttmunch was already clearly a dangerous collaborator with Hamas before his re-election in 2022. And the Israelis bought it. Again. La plus ça change. Israeli Jews are hardly marginalized when they can destroy 24 times the number of people murdered on October 7th. An Israeli-fueled humanitarian crisis has engulfed Gaza as a fair chunk of the region is leveled and one-quarter of Gazans face chronic food insecurity. People are starving to death. Children in hospitals, so gaunt and elderly-looking from lack of food, if they were photographed in black and white could be mistaken for Nazi concentration camp victims. Israel, pissing off world leaders everywhere, prevents food from getting through, leading aid organizations to drop food supplies - not enough, but whatever they can manage - with parachutes from planes. The world is beginning to forget October 7 as, well, sorry, greater human suffering continues to unfold in Gaza. And speaking of genocide, this video—from t’other side, doesn’t help. Yes, it’s real, according to Snopes. Yeah—uh—genocide—it’s not just for Hamas anymore. “In another year there will be nothing there, and we will safely return to our homes. Within a year we will eliminate them all and then we will return to plough our fields.” Where are ‘they’ going, if you don’t mind my asking? Of course, the Gazans did vote for Hamas, who doesn’t give a rat’s patoot about the Pals. And didn’t they vote partly because they agree Jews must die? Gazans educate and indoctrinate their children to hate Jews and perpetuate their own cycle of violence, training the future terrorists Israel will one day bomb. And all for a history of pretty equivalent violence, oppression, and violation of each other’s right to exist that literally stretches back thousands of years. If you look at the full history of the people who today we call Israeli Jews and Palestinians, it’s hard to tell them apart under all that blood. The blood of their enemies. The Islamic world, which carefully cultivates its terrorist asshole image, can hardly call themselves marginalized with their long documented history of imperialism, colonialism, oppression of non-Muslims, a deplorable hate-on for Jews, and blowing things up. Their founder was a military commander. Christianity’s was a peacenik. Muslims can be individually victimized, and 35 were last year with hate crimes in Toronto. It’s not okay, but it’s also not okay to victimize others while you’re whining about your own victimhood, and somehow Muslims always jump to the front of the cameras whenever they’re given an excuse to ‘acceptably’ hate on Jews (‘Support’ for the Palestinians: The left’s dog whistle for antisemites). If you truly support Palestinians with no antisemitism, your beef is with Israel, the Israeli government in particular, and the people who voted for the politicians responsible for this. You don't attack every Jew on the planet - or a Jewish hospital in Canada - that’s antisemitism! Both sides are the oppressors, colonizers, and mass murderers they claim their adversaries to be. Muslims complain about ‘Islamophobia’, but is it always? Maybe it’s because too many are pretty infamously antisemitic and violence-supporting assholes. Verdict: You’re all assholes. The American right whines while acting like assholes too Conservative white Americans are more tolerant of white mass shooters, to whom they sympathetically attribute ‘mental health problems’ for their actions, yet are outraged and condemnatory when an LGBTQer or a Muslim shoots up a crowd. Is the woke left simply hysterical about Donald Trump, or is it because he’s the right’s biggest asshole? He supports Putin. He wants to be a dictator himself. He tried to steal an election and then juiced a massive riot which resulted in six deaths and the traumatization of the Capitol police. He stole highly classified documents and we don’t know who he showed them to. He doesn’t pay the people who work for him, the very sort who vote for him. Team MAGA works hard to be seen as assholes. Their butt buddies the Christian right, in historical hysterics over Bill Clinton’s consensual affair with an intern, overlook the rapey past of the right’s biggest man-whore, a guy who, in the immortal words of Bill Maher, is the only man who ever paid a porn star to SHUT her mouth. Try speaking about this with fragile righty snowflakes and you’ll receive the same condemnation and indignation as from the trans-nuts when you bring up the WPATH Files. Other fundamentalists are disliked because they’re homophobic, misogynist, religiously bigoted assholes. Being an asshole is almost a requirement for transactivists, bonus points if they want to kill TERFs. They demand with fundamentalist fervor the policing of public speech, and the ‘right’ to indoctrinate children into their toxic cult as they fight to keep the Bible-thumpers from doing the same. The Christian right and transactivists are stuffed with pseudo-marginalized people who are are entitled fundamentalist assholes. Which is why you’re finding transactivists, who only pretend to be liberal, in the right-wing asshole section. We can all be assholes, and some people and whole groups invite it by collectively acting like, talking like, and being assholes. The Second Amendment set claims liberals want to take their guns when in fact what we want is fewer guns in the hands of irresponsible assholes. So if you suffer from a martyr/persecution complex, piteously mewing that everyone hates you because they’re vile fascist Nazi bigots, or they’re woke snowflake gender-bending weirdoes, I offer some food for thought late at night when you’re lying in bed and can’t sleep: Maybe, just sayin’, the problem isn’t that you’re ‘marginalized’. Maybe it’s because you’re an asshole. 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!

Is it epigenetic, or do we all traumatize ourselves with historical knowledge? The dreams of medieval tortures began when I was around seven or eight. I can’t remember the brutal details, but generally — men coming after me, wanting to torture me. The dreams petered out, then flared up many years later. Burning stakes, cages and sharp blades. One memorable device I wasn’t even familiar with. The huge heavy weight looked like a child’s top, flat above, tapering to a dull but broad point. My persecutors wanted to center it over my belly and crush me. When I awoke I thought, “What the hell? I’ve never even read of anything like that.” Past-life memories? Intergenerational trauma? Psychically tuning in to another time? Maybe. Although the earliest dreams started when I read my first book on the European witch craze. Written for children, its descriptions of interrogations, tortures and executions were nevertheless graphic. It was too upsetting to finish. Later nightmare revisits coincided with my exploration of Wicca. My adult reading now contained far more graphic historical descriptions, and I also had a better idea of what a torture chamber looked like thanks to old Vincent Price movies and a Gilligan’s Island episode in which the castaways are held but not harmed in a mad scientist’s torture chamber. I learned that there was, in fact, a torture device rather like my belly crusher. But I wonder: Was it a past life memory, or had I learned about it years prior and forgotten it? One’s unconscious doesn’t forget as easily as the conscious mind shocked into welcome forgetfulness. I can’t swear I hadn’t learned about it when I was younger. Memory is odd; we forget things. When reminded, we may not even recall a sense of familiarity of once having known it. I read years ago about a woman who ‘remembered’ a past life involving a minor historical incident in which she recounted details confirmed by other history books. Turns out earlier records had gotten some details wrong. They’d been corrected in modern versions. She’d ‘remembered’ not the incident that happened, but the faulty narrative in a childhood book. Coleman Hughes - American writer and podcast host, vile conservative lackey to illiberals, a breath of fresh air to us remaining libs—has just published a new book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. One might call him downright reactionary for suggesting we return to an earlier time for America when many civil rights leaders prescribed striving for colorblindness, and blamed racial inequities more on class struggles than systemic racism, even as Hughes acknowledges its current existence. He scandalizes ‘woke’ progressives when he dreams of a ‘colorblind’ America in which we recognize race, but treat each other like we do others. Easier said than done in the Ignited States of America, but seemingly doable in Canada, which doesn’t suffer from the lengthy slave legacy of America. Racism exists here, but is less prone to the racial hysterics of ‘woke’ American antiracism, which claims modern trauma from a slave history that ended nearly 160 years ago. No one is truly colorblind, but we can work toward it, and Hughes (I haven’t read his book yet) smashes the woke lunacy holding that claiming to be ‘colorblind’ is racist, and questions whether one can suffer trauma from things that happened to others. It would certainly give the rest of us opportunity to claim historical trauma, since it’s the story of the human race, although interestingly we never seem to suffer it if we don’t know what our ancestors went through. Like, I don’t have PTSD from my French ancestor who fought in Napoleon’s army and must surely have seen some shit. Nor did I know anyone growing up who suffered post-generational trauma from fathers who served in Korea or grandfathers in WWII. Colorblindness may be naive, for sure, but racist it ain’t. Not when one is making a good-faith effort to not be racist, however imperfectly. As any white person subjected to woke racism knows, there is no escape from being cast as a ‘white supremacist’. Even if you think you’re not, you are. White skin is the Mark of the Beast. Hughes’s skepticism of appropriated trauma caught my eye in his own article about his book on The Free Press. He questions the claim of PTSD (‘Post-Traumatic Slavery Disorder’) for those who’ve lived a more privileged life than their ancestors. Hughes briefly touches upon the emerging science of epigenetics, which explores whether historical trauma can become encoded in our genes. It’s an interesting theory which requires a lot more research. The early science leans that way, with experiments on rodents and nematode worms, with whom you have more in common, genetically, than you’d like to know. Genetic memories go back as far as 14 generations for our wormy cousins, and if it ultimately proves similar for humans, that’s 350–500 years back depending on how you count the length of generations. So yes, we could all hypothetically have genetic memories of trauma. Lab mice taught to fear and avoid a scent similar to cherry blossoms passed on that fear to the next generation. What I find a little questionable about human ‘inherited trauma’ is it only seems to affect people whose ancestral trauma was inflicted by white people. Other groups besides black Americans lay claim to inherited trauma too—specifically Native North Americans from white hands. But I wonder: How much of the spiritual trauma is caused by ‘ancestral memories’ or ‘genetic trauma’, versus how much of it is historical learning? Trigger warning: Some descriptions of medieval and Native American tortures and violence follow. I have a horse in this race myself, as I stated earlier. After reading about witches and fueling my nightmares with old horror movies, I became a modern-day Pagan over thirty years ago. I’ve witnessed and felt that same toxic confusion between the nightmarish abuses of centuries past, with the aggressive feelings and sometimes downright loathing for people today — modern men and the Catholic Church (the primary villains of the Witches’ Narrative). You see it when some female writers recount the tortures of the damned for moderns, in case we weren’t aware of how they ripped flesh from bones with red hot pincers or how the strappado worked. Let’s pour lemon juice on our wounds by describing in gruesome detail burning rods driven up vaginas, iron cages over hot coals, the rack tearing female joints apart like a hungry warrior with a leg of mutton. And yeah, they did those things to Jews, Muslims, atheists, heretics, and other assorted ‘not the right kind of Christians’. By the time you were done reading that shit, you were ready to firebomb your local St. Peter’s. Our angry feelings also bled over to modern men, most of whom, as far as we knew, thought the Spanish boot was something worn by hipster metrosexuals. We conflated the abuses of patriarchal dead guys with priests who no longer torture or burn women at the stake. I might arguably have my own ‘inherited genetic witch trauma’, as my genealogy stems primarily from France, a hotbed of witchmania, as well as England and Germany. England was a better place to be accused, Germany the worst. England eschewed the cruelest tortures, and preferred hanging for execution; Germany refined maximizing human suffering to a hellish art form and death by stake-burning took much longer. And they managed to make it even worse while you waited to die. Don’t ask. Just don’t. But I can’t say my dreams aren’t a direct result of my early childhood books and movies, and my draw to Wicca may be laid directly at the feet of an old Wiccan boyfriend in Massachusetts, where Paganism is no longer an executable offense. Why isn’t anyone who doesn’t read history books experiencing intergenerational ‘inherited trauma’? American blacks speak of the damage caused them by the American slave system, but never of the ancient system that existed in pre-colonial Africa. Nor does any modern black woman, to my knowledge, claim ‘ancestral’ damage stemming from a 2,000-year-old legacy of one of the worst human rights abuses ever, believed to have originated in Africa: Female genital mutilation. Where is epigenetic legacy of pre-European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Eastern Asian slavery, along with FGM? American slavery ended in the 1860s; FGM, along with slavery, is still practiced in some parts of Africa today. As for horrible slave ‘memories’, we are all likely descended from slaves. It’s a universal institution, spanning thousands of years and just about every single human community. We are blind to probably more than a few slave owners and traders in our own family trees. Black Americans’ genealogies, sundered by the slave trade, disappear only a few generations back, so they need never confront their own ugly past on the other side of the auction block: When their ancestors bought, sold and traded other human beings. Then there’s pre-European Indigenous violence. Again, don’t ask. But if you insist, go here. I’ll give you the thumbnail sketch: Mass murder, roasting alive, rape, torture, shit with pointy sticks you don’t want to know about, slavery (of course) and cannibalism. And that shit was just a few hundred years ago. Native Americans experienced horrendous genocide efforts from European colonists, but no one ever expresses ancient memories of being slowly roasted over a fire by warriors who looked a lot like themselves. Perhaps today’s slavery-traumatized modern blacks have done it to themselves with their own historical research, and, does mishandling that knowledge cause them to excoriate the wrong people? Are there better ways for all of us to handle knowledge of ancient abuses against our forebearers? I believe we must never forget history; we can never know too much, we must drill down forever deeper for new insights into the human condition and behavior; where we’ve come from, where we are, where we’re going. As ugly and traumatic as it is to revisit the trauma of slavery, or witch hunts, the danger lies in allowing ourselves to feel too victimized and even worse, to confuse the descendants with the villains of those dark times. The new conflation of ‘white supremacy’ with all white people today I believe is fed by an unhealthy preoccupation with the slavery era. I mean, we fought a damn war over it, people! It drives misplaced black aggression, confusing white people today with the slave owners of the past. As bad as modern, true white supremacists are, they’re a much tinier representation of white Americans. There are plenty of reasons for black Americans and women to be angry; but not for something no one supports anymore. It’s counterproductive to add needless anger aimed at moderns for things that happened generations ago. Women should be angry at patriarchal abuses today, but no longer for the wheel or the rack or Vincent Price’s famous pendulum. It makes no sense to be angry at Catholic priests anymore for abuses against women they haven’t practiced in hundreds of years; let’s instead excoriate them for the way they’re abusing children now. I don’t frankly care whether any of us are suffering ‘epigenetic’ or ancestral trauma. It’s the entire story of human history: Humans treating each other like absolute shit since we came down from the trees. We can be outraged by the oppression and cruelties of the past while keeping it in our modern-day perspective. Let’s continue drilling down deep, understanding the prejudices and conscious or unconscious biases that drove our ignorant ancestors, and recognize we all descend from cruel, stupid human beings, and that we’re not as morally far removed from them as we’d like to think. The baying human jackals of X and Instagram—on the right and the left—greatly resemble those whose cries arose for Nero’s circuses and Shakespeare’s bear-baiters. Human trafficking is also universal, including in your own country. Anyone who watches porn is pretty certainly supporting human slavery. Yes, we’re so much more civilized now. I will join the iconoclastic Coleman Hughes and other human progressives who encourage a return to sane, common-sense social justice values while we pull down ‘antiracism’s’ false idols: DEI, ‘Doing the work’, which too many of their own refuse to do, and ‘tolerance’, but only for themselves and their opinions. I’m done with the wounds of the past. The dreams have stopped screaming. I no longer live in the seventeenth century, and I hope ‘antiracists’ emigrate from there too. Trust me, for all its faults, the 21st-century is waaaaay better. 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!

This is for everyone who denies trans-identified males are a threat to women in private spaces. I've found some who are. I’m losing patience fast with the ‘trans ally’ perpetual ignorance about the documented dangers of allowing trans-identified men (TiMs) into women’s private spaces. Talk to the ‘woke’ about sexual predators masquerading as women to access places men were forbidden before, and you’ll find a wall of DGAFery  and a veritable Moron Tabernacle Choir of defensive ‘I never heard of that!’ That’s when skepticism struggles out of the dark hidey-holes of their brains and they need ‘cites’, ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’ that male bodies are a danger to women no matter how they ‘identify’. Trans allies never seem to require evidence  for things like obstructed transition teen suicide, but whatever. I have zero tolerance for woke ‘progressives’ who claim allegiance to women’s rights and freedoms, but turn all pissy when we draw the line for men at the hallowed doors of our rooms for getting semi- or fully-naked. The men fighting so hard to get into these places are not  gender dysphoric. They’re fetishists, sexual opportunists , and in the worst cases, predators. Particularly those who ‘identify’ as trans immediately after criminal conviction. And most especially those who landed in prison in the first place because they are convicted sex offenders. ‘Progressives’ can’t fathom the no-brainer that allowing people to ‘identify’ as something they’re not and using the toilet corresponding to their ‘feeling’ will be used by some  TiMs to gain access to places where they can more easily assault women and children. “That never happens!” Progressives feign ignorance when I cite research that TiMs exhibit nearly no difference in criminality  and violence than male-identifying men. It’s not rocket science; they’re men underneath the dress, and most importantly between the ears. But they never heard of that research! Progressives can be remarkably ignorant about a subject they have strong opinions about. Crime statistics are now skewed by a seeming rise in sexual violence committed by women because of the insistence on treating TiMs rapists and predators as female. A few brave news sites are properly gendering people with penises who shove their dicks into unconsenting orifices just like, you know, males. But most refer to ‘transwoman’ defendants as ‘she’ and even in court, female victims are often forced to refer to their accused with female pronouns. This has falsely increased the ‘rape by female’ crime stat by misgendering male rapists as female. Not to mention a further victory  for misogynist transactivists for forcing an already-humiliated woman to further bend to male desires and spread her forced lie on the stand in compliance. I’ve created a Resources section on my Substack nav bar where you’ll find this along with other articles I’ve written one can use to debunk the woke illiberal left professing ignorance of (whatever). I couldn’t find a convenient website or list chronicling the sexual predations of TiMs so I can send a massive citation to the selectively skeptical. So I compiled my own. It doesn’t include all trans crimes, like trans mass shootings or TiMs assaulting males, or trans-identified women. The purpose of this list is to demonstrate why males can’t be trusted in women’s private spaces. They’re segregated because some  men are sexual predators, and we don’t know who. Except in prison, where the crimes they committed are well-known. It’s only TiMs driving this push. They cite safety concerns but they resist the solution of third bathrooms or changing rooms. Why is that? Here’s something for ‘trans allies’ to consider: Every time a man commits a crime while trans, or transitions after arrest when it’s clear he’s going to prison, it increases the statistics for trans crime. Even when he commits it before transitioning, and especially if he commits a sex crime in a female prison, it becomes linked to the trans predator crime statistics and adds to the anti-trans narrative for those dreaded right-wing critics who jump all over these stories like a drag queen on a new pastel wig color. It further adds to the narrative that transwomen are or are prone to sexual predation and many, in fact, are not. It sure doesn’t help the trans ‘grooming’ reputation , deserved or not, either. Here’s something else for overly-defensive non-criminal TiMs and their allies to consider: How long do you think you can sweep these stories under the rug? How credible do you think you look when you deny the obvious? Why aren’t you joining others in pointing out how most ‘trans prisoners’ are trans-for-convenience, to get into women’s prisons? These guys are ruining your reputation! If you really don’t want to be lumped in with sexual predators, SPEAK OUT, BITCHES!!! I’ve arranged this list into four sections: Criming Before Trans, Criming After Trans, Criming In Prison and Women Speak Out. That last includes articles about the terrorism female inmates experience with ‘trans’ convicted sexual predators in their environment. This is by no means a comprehensive list; I haven’t obsessively looked for trans crimes, but when I see one I save it. I want to make something absolutely, positively, beyond all shadow of a doubting Thomas crystal clear: NOT ALL TiMs ARE SEXUAL PREDATORS. Countless TiMs go about their business every day without sexually assaulting anyone. This list is NOT meant to damn all TiMs. It’s to refute baseless claims that women have nothing to fear from strange men in places historically exclusive of men because human males have a long, ugly, millennia-long documented history of not being able to control their sexual urges. And we never know which ones to trust, so we ban them all. That includes you, TiMs. If that’s your biggest life challenge, it’s a First World Problem. My documentation process I’ve done my best to document these as accurately as I can. If I can’t verify a story enough I don’t include it. Right-wing news is where most of these stories emerge, as the left-wing media only acknowledges it when it can no longer be ignored. If there’s any there there, more reliable news sources at the time  or shortly after will feature it, and I use those. A lot of the information comes from feminist websites like Reduxx, and this is where one can find the most details. Telling the truth about trans anything when it doesn’t reflect well on their victimhood narrative is extremely difficult to get left-leaning websites to cover, as Lisa Selin-Davis  at BROADview in Brief  writes in her stellar article Why It's So Hard for the Mainstream Media to Get This Story Right . The left and factual information about trans: It’s like feeding spinach to a toddler. It’s difficult to know what to believe anymore because even formerly reliable sources, like Associated Press and Reuters, and once-respected science journals, have been drinking the social justice Kool-Aid and ignoring valid discussions in more right-leaning media about, for example, the lack of scientific evidence behind gender-affirming care or the teen suicide myth. The left can’t be trusted much either, just as the right can’t be trusted on climate change or Donald Trump. Let me know what you think. If there’s a better source for a story, or you think the story shouldn’t be included, let me know and why with supporting evidence or at least a good logical argument . My documentation process I’ve done my best to document these as accurately as I can. If I can’t verify a story enough I don’t include it. Right-wing news is where most of these stories emerge, as the left-wing media only acknowledges it when it can no longer be ignored. If there’s any there there, more reliable news sources at the time  or shortly after will feature it, and I use those. A lot of the information comes from feminist websites like Reduxx, and this is where one can find the most details. Telling the truth about trans anything when it doesn’t reflect well on their victimhood narrative is extremely difficult to get left-leaning websites to cover, as Lisa Selin-Davis  at BROADview in Brief  writes in her stellar article Why It's So Hard for the Mainstream Media to Get This Story Right . The left and factual information about trans: It’s like feeding spinach to a toddler. It’s difficult to know what to believe anymore because even formerly reliable sources, like Associated Press and Reuters, and once-respected science journals, have been drinking the social justice Kool-Aid and ignoring valid discussions in more right-leaning media about, for example, the lack of scientific evidence behind gender-affirming care or the teen suicide myth. The left can’t be trusted much either, just as the right can’t be trusted on climate change or Donald Trump. Let me know what you think. If there’s a better source for a story, or you think the story shouldn’t be included, let me know and why with supporting evidence or at least a good logical argument . Criming Before Transition Stephen Terence Wood (Karen White)  - UK - Transgender woman who sexually assaulted inmates jailed for life - The Guardian, 10.11.18. The U.K.'s most notorious trans-identified male had a long ugly history of sexual violence against women and children and was one of the first 'transwomen' to be sent to a women's prison, where he proceeded to rape two inmates. Daniel Lee Smith (Zera Lola Zombie)  - Oregon - Murdered his girlfriend  - Wanted transfer to female prison  - 09.11.23 Thomas Preston Lamb (Michelle Renee Lamb)  - Kansas - He kidnapped and murdered a woman in 1969 and then kidnapped another in 1970. He was serving three consecutive life sentences when he turned trans at the ripe old age of 81 and was quietly moved into a woman’s prison (duh). He blamed his crimes on his gender confusion. His full murder case is in the Kansas City Public Library. David Ayrton (Davina Ayrton)  - Transgender woman jailed for raping teenager (while still a man) - England - 03.04.16 Criming After Transition Freddie Christian Trenchard (Alyssa Christine Trenchard)  - England - BBC - Raped a woman while trans - 10.30.23 Gabrielle Alejandro Gentile (Barbie Kardashian)  - Ireland - Irish Times - Imprisoned for threatening to rape, torture and murder his own mother - 04.27.23 No birth name (Daniela D)  - Netherlands - Extremely violent TiM inmate moved to women's prison - 12.04.23 Adam Graham (Isla Bryson)  - Scotland - Found guilty of raping two women - BBC - 01.24.23 No birth name (Samantha Norris)  - England - Facing kiddie porn charges after being acquitted of exposing his penis to 11-year-old girls - MSN - 01.26.23 No birth name - (Maria Childres)  - Kentucky - Trans-Identified Male Accused Of Sexually Abusing Infant Will Be Represented By Trans Activist Lawyer - WPSD Local 6 - 02.07.23 Jamie Kevin Harold Waller (Abigail Walker)  - Sex offender back in prison after messaging underage girls on Facebook - Yahoo News Canada - 01.24.24 Darren Merager (No trans name)  - Serial flasher just can’t stop exposing his dick to women. This article is about his most recent non-sexual offense arrest last year, but chronicles his long history of indecent exposure in women’s-only spa changing room - California - 12.15.23 Cody D’Entremont (Desiree Anderson)  - Suspect arrested after report of sexual assault at women's shelter   - Ontario, Canada - 04.19.23 No real name (Rachel Queen Burton)  - TikTok transwoman star pleads guilty to child sex abuse offenses - Australia - 02.06.24 The alleged unnamed Saskatoon guy , or maybe transwoman, in the Shaw Centre girls’ changing room - Sasktachewan, Canada - 03/08/23. Allegedly, on January 27th of this year, some male person wandered around naked in the women’s changing room. The Saskatoon Council says the incident was misrepresented on social media, which is entirely possible, but won’t say exactly what did occur. What seems fairly certain, though, is that they’re committed to keeping the changing rooms open to people choosing depending on how they identify. Which sounds like something happened, or maybe it didn’t, but no matter, because if something happens there, or again, the Council will just tell critics to stop being transphobic. Sean Patrick Smith (Shauna Smith)  - Transgender woman charged with voyeurism in Target dressing room - Idaho - 07.14.16 Christopher Hambrook (Jessica)  - A convicted sex offender assaulted women in two Toronto homeless shelters, claiming to be a transwoman. It happened in 2012 so I’m having a hard time finding a reliable source for it (The Toronto Sun seems to have covered it the most but they’re not reliable) but I do find the incident cited in more reliable sources. - Toronto, 2012 Bathroom incidents (No names, high school students)  - After assault, Edmond transgender bathroom policy questioned - Oklahoma - 12.8.22 - An Edmond police report indicates an Oct. 26 assault in the girls’ bathroom at Memorial High School in which a girl was ‘badly beaten’ by a male student who identified as a female. Miguel Martinez (No trans name)  - Transgender man convicted of assaulting a 10-year-old girl in a bathroom - Montana - 10.20.17 No male name (Katie Dolatowski)  - 18-year-old transwoman sexually assaults underage girl in a supermarket bathroom - Scotland - 02.06.19 (Unnamed attacker)  - Woman who fought after transwoman attacker in a public park bathroom tells anti-trans group to stop using her story - Washington - 03.16.17 It’s important to note that TiMs are also attacked in public restrooms. That’s not okay either, regardless of whether they belong there or not. Clearly, the solution to this fiasco is third bathrooms, but certain TiMs don’t want that. Gee, I wonder why they’re not more concerned for their own safety. Like, you know, women are. Criming while trans in prison Strawberry Hampton and Janiah Monroe  - Illinois - Accused of prison rape - WTTW News - 02.19.20 Ramel Blount (Diamond Blount)  - New York - Trans prisoner on Rikers Island - raped female prisoner - Bronx County District Attorney Report (NY) - 04.25.22 Jermaine Gibson (Cyntara)  - New Jersey - TiM accused of raping female prisoner after his repeated sexual harassment - Reduxx - 05.29.23 Jonathan Roberston (Siyaah Skylit)  - California - Female inmates report brutal rape of female inmate by TiM inmate- Reduxx - 05.31.22. Trans allies, including Pink News, had successfully petitioned to move him from an all-male prison  where he lived in fear of his life, allegedly. (Unnamed) - Mexico - Trans-identified male with sexual violence history assaults female inmate  - Reduxx - 08.19.23 Grow Some Labia! is a reader-supported publication. I lean left, but not so far my brains fall out. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Women Speak Out Unisex changing rooms put women in danger of sexual assault, data reveals  - Independent UK - Sunday Times is better but paywalled - 09.02.18 Why transactivists keeping going to bat for rapists and murderers  - Eliza Mondegreen - Substack - 01.26.23 Transgender prison policy:  Women prisoners speak out - Woman’s Place UK - 11.04.21 Female prisoners sue California  for putting TiMs in women's prisons - 04.14.23 Men's Safety, Women's Danger: An Incarcerated Woman Speaks Out  - No sex crimes alleged, just a lot of female prisoner terror - 05.06.23 Other sources: Trans Crime UK  - Extensively documents crimes committed by trans individuals in the UK. Relies heavily on right-wing sources so I would remind you: Copy and paste the names, both birth and trans if the article contains them, into Google and see if you find a better source. The right doesn’t always get it right either. To my knowledge, no transmen are requesting to be sent to male prisons. This isn’t a comprehensive list, but I’ll be adding to it as I run across more stories. 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!

Something we should ask ourselves. Since a lot of speech is protected, ugly or not. Just call me Simone Geezernthal, Nazi Hunter. The Atlantic has been preoccupied with an alleged ‘Nazi problem’ on Substack. If you’re not familiar with the hubbub, Bub, they and their fellow journo lackeys keep writing about how Substack is infested with Nazis. Last fall some guy named Casey Newton on some popular tech newsletter I’m not familiar with left Substack quite raucously in a PR-fueled blaze of incandescent virtue signalling, huffing and puffing that Substack refused to do anything about its ‘Nazi problem’. The Guardian announced that he took ‘more than 170,000 subscribers elsewhere,’ which is a bit hyperbolic as probably most of them stayed put, while following Newton elsewhere for his work, unless they wanted to join the flamboyant anti-Nazi parade out the door. What actually materially departed was Newton’s paying subscribers, which is how Substack makes money. The Nazi naysayers hightailed it to Ghost, a famously highly-decentralized platform which, as Freddie deBoer pointed out, allows for no central moderation which means it’s pretty surely a hate-orgy free-for-all. Nor, as he notes, is it easy to tell whether a content provider is using Ghost or not, so for all Newton knows, the next time he goes Nazi-hunting, he may not need to leave his own ‘hood. Newton is almost certainly now in the company of far more Nazis and other unsavouries than he was on Substack. I learned about the fascism flap after finding an open letter to Substack encouraging the urge to purge. I was like, “I didn’t know we had any Nazis.” It was probably news to most, and, like me, figured it was just woke snowflake brains melting down over a deadnaming or a positive comment about Tucker Carlson. But no, The Atlantic and other Nazi hunters were talking about real Nazis, people who voice standard Nazi points of view even if you can’t find the verboten N-word in their publications. One pub, from The Atlantic story, and run by a genuine white supremacist, had a Nazi ‘sonnenrad’ profile image (it looks like the world’s most hideous spider). These weren’t woke ‘Nazis’ defined as ‘anyone who disagrees with us’. Substack, in response to the journalistic frenzy, did in fact purge a few genuinely Nazi accounts they claimed violated their Terms of Service, brought to their attention by The Atlantic’s story. I had encountered one pretty suspiciously Nazi dude already, but he found me. He’d called me a ‘kikesucking Zionist asswhore’, responding to a comment I’d left somewhere, sympathetic to post-October 7 Israel. The guy’s response was rife with antisemitism and what I can pretty confidently call some genuine expressions of hardcore, old-school, unquestionable Nazi sympathies. He’d gone through all the comments on the article and flamed others too. I calmly blocked him and had a lovely breakfast with my fellow Zionist asswhores. If there were any other Nazis on Substack, they didn’t show up in my feed. Substack's Terms of Service Like most blogging or social media platforms, Substack feeds its readers undiscovered content based on their tastes. Since my own skew heavily toward rational liberal and conservative thought, I don’t see extremist content. Not even woke crap, which I criticize regularly. Substack really does function rather effectively as an intellectual/ideological bubble. Most Substack writers and readers won’t see nutsy Nazis either. What us First Amendment lovers love about Substack is it’s one of the few blogging platforms left that doesn’t politically censor speech. Every platform has to censor at least a little. But Substack’s idea of protected speech more closely resembles the Constitution’s rather than their more authoritarian ‘woke’ competitors, like Medium, Substack’s biggest competitor. Where the woke rule is where free speech goes to die. Substack’s ToS states, “We host and celebrate a diverse range of thought and discussion,” and as far as I can tell, except for violence-spewing Nazis, that’s true. I’ve not once been called down, taken down, or excoriated by Substack for anything anti-woke I’ve written, and my articles critical of misogynist transactivism would melt down half of Medium memberships’ brains. Substack’s policies on ‘hate speech’ read like most other platforms’ with one key difference: Substack cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes. Offending behavior includes credible threats of physical harm to people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability or medical condition. What’s different is its definition of offending behavior as ‘credible threats of physical harm to people….” Credible threats. Like, “Kill all the gay blind left-handed Mexican trans-plumbers for Jesus,” not criticism of transactivists, Black Lives Matter, atheists, religious fundamentalists, LGBTQ, Fox News, Antifa, or people who love Israel/Palestinians/Hamas more than you think they should. I’m guessing if anyone’s whining to Substack that ‘Grow Some Labia is literally killing transpeople!!! with her g̶e̶n̶d̶e̶r̶ ̶c̶r̶i̶t̶i̶c̶a̶l̶ transphobic articles,’ that Substack support staff, whiskey tumblers at their elbow, are ignoring them, or explaining that I haven’t violated their ToS by literally killing or urging others to literally kill transpeople. I’m an old-school free speech advocate. I want its boundaries to be as narrowly interpreted as our Founding Fathers, and Substack does. My no-nos include “From sea to shining sea, America will be free—of n——rs”, “We’ll pull another Jan 6 if Biden steals another election and this time we burn the fucker down!”, or “So-and-so is a pedophile,” (when they’re not). I got to wondering where the remaining, ToS-abiding Nazis are on Substack. Where have all the Nazis gone, short time passing? I began with the Nazi guy who’d flamed me at Thanksgiving. I found his publication and he is, so far, the most unquestionably blatant Nazi I’ve found. His pub features a hook-nosed Jewish cartoon character with a crazy-ass GIF incorporating a spiral, Satanism, Judaism, and Hillary Clinton. His music tastes indicate I’m not the only ‘kike-sucking Zionist asswhore’; count Miley Cyrus in my company. Substack’s Nazis tend to keep a low profile. Several are sparse on content and subscribers. I kept searching on popular Nazi and white nationalist keywords for ‘posts’, ‘people’ and ‘publications’ and couldn’t find much. I found a few via the original Atlantic/bandwagon-jumpers feeding frenzy. One publication claimed to be “a small professional team of pro-White advocates centred around a single mission: bringing a pro-White perspective to analysis of both foreign and domestic policy.” Lots of anti-Israel content and ‘replacement theory’ white nationalist crapola. Their recommendations led to another publication which complains about wealthy Zionists and the left and offers a dissection of Jewish power. Another recommendation led me straight to a genuine Fascist newsletter, which included book recommendations for the budding Fascist, an article about Christianity and Fascism, and promises analysis and discourse on Third Positionism, a neo-fascist political ideology. The easiest way to find Nazis on Substack is to dig up a Nazi and follow his Recommendations links. Two more goose-stepping goobers I found via the Atlantic article were described as practically dripping with antisemitism. I didn’t delve deep into the dismal dregs of Deutschblütig drek, and I did find some pretty straightforward antisemitism but I wouldn’t exactly call it a SwastikaSturm. I’m not defending it, and I wouldn’t mind if the Substacker effed off and took his shit to TruthSocial, but finding these and other Nazis was sort of like exploring the city you live in and finding a gang of skinheads in some far corner of town where you never go and probably could never find again unless you saved the coordinates in your GPS. Another publication was run by the notorious white nationalist Richard Spencer and denigrated Einstein as not being all that bright, frankly, while claiming that Aryans were mostly responsible for producing geniuses. There were also some podcast hysterics about Jews in caves in New York, a big not-news story if you missed it, about one actual tunnel underneath a Brooklyn synagogue that had the right wing hyperventilating all over social media. The publication that caused similar respiratory distress for The Atlantic, the one with the big ugly spider image, described itself as a ‘pro-white think tank and publishing house’, denies that valuing and writing about one’s own race is ‘dangerous’ or ‘supremacist’, and notes that Indigenous Americans regularly rally around and support their own communities. What The Atlantic failed to mention was how sparse that publication was, with an interview with some white supremacist dude, an ‘about’ page and another hook-nosed Jew caricature. I’m not sure how much of a ‘Nazi problem’ Substack ever had, really; supposedly, some publications gone bye-bye had thousands of subscribers, including a considerable number of paying ones. I suspect Casey Newton’s departed paid subscriptions hurt more than the Nazi lucre Substack shut down, but I could be wrong. Substack spokescritters have stated they don’t like Nazi content but if it doesn’t violate their Terms of Service they’ll leave it be. That won’t make anyone who viscerally loathes Nazis happy, especially Jewish readers and writers. But it does mean a lot other speech is protected. Including Jews’. And ours. Because we are all someone else’s ‘Nazis’, and some of them are more powerful than The Atlantic. Whose Nazi are you? This is important because censors never stop with genuine Nazis: Eventually, we all become their Nazis. In 2021, Substack was attacked in the popular press for allowing ‘transphobic’ writers, and transactivists launched a campaign to pressure them to remove the writers they found offensive. Transgender Map listed many respected, respectable Substack writers who wrote ‘anti-trans’ (i.e.,, gender critical) content. Substack is one of the few platforms that refused to back down. It’s clear, reviewing the list of ‘anti-trans’ writers, that transactivists’ gripes also include simply anyone who writes contrary to ‘woke’ narratives in general; Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel is mentioned, and he never writes about transgenderism that I’ve ever seen. Transgender Map disapprovingly cites his founding of Heterodox Academy and promotion of ‘intellectual diversity’ and challenging ‘enforced’ academic orthodoxies, which it claims are ‘buzzwords’ for ‘people who want academic freedom without academic responsibility of accountability.’ They also spuriously link him to some sort of ‘cover-up’ of some alleged ‘fabricated case report’ linked to a transsexual researcher they don’t like without explaining exactly what Haidt had to do with it, if anything. These are the ‘Nazis’ of which I am part: Transactivism-critical feminist, defender of free speech and challenger of ‘entrenched orthodoxies’, and who has been deplatformed by Medium, along with Vocal and X-Twitter wannabe CounterSocial for being too trans-critical. We forget that offensive speech is also covered by the First Amendment, as evidenced by the ACLU’s most (in)famous court case, the right of Nazis to protest in Skokie, Illinois in the 1970s, where many Holocaust survivors lived. (They ended up marching in a Chicago park instead by mutual agreement). Damn them all you want - and many of us did back then - but almost certainly, the speech the CensorNazis come for next is your own, and censorship has become much more fashionable for left-wing authoritarians in recent years. The ‘hate speech’ I’ve been banned for was for ‘transphobia’, meaning someone didn’t like my gender-critical commentary—absolutely protected by the First Amendment, but not required for public platforms to abide by. There’s an uncomfortably prescient quote from the story I referenced about the Nazi brouhaha in Illinois nearly fifty years ago. The Jewish Anti-Defamation League argued against the Nazi demonstration in full regalia because it would cause Holocaust survivors to relive their emotional trauma. “We responded,” Nazi defense lawyer David Goldberger—yes, David Goldberger—wrote on the 2020 ACLU memoir of the case, “that no one who objected [to] the Nazis had to attend their demonstration and that if claims of subjective harm could shut down a public assembly then anyone who objected to a controversial demonstration could prevent it by asserting it would inflict emotional harm.” Exactly like many arguments made by woke fragile flowers today to justify shutting down opinions or speech they don’t like, claiming the flimsiest of flimsy pretenses of emotional ‘harm’, as though they could be destroyed by an argument they can’t logically refute. Some of them even believe words can murder, which is where the accusations of ‘literally killing transpeople’ come from, against people who would literally be in jail if they had. Apart from clearly unprotected speech, like advocating violence against others, it’s too easy to say that this speech is fine, but that speech is not, and mission creep sets in. Holocaust survivors, and Jews overall, can argue genuine mental harm for having to tolerate Nazis, but less genuinely trans-identified males, themselves demonstrably abusive, now claim ‘harm’ from feminist resistance to their aggressive misogyny. Although I rarely run across actual transactivists on Substack, I did happen across a ‘woke’ one the other day bitterly lamenting Pamela Paul’s courageous article (for the otherwise trans-submissive New York Times) focusing on detransitioning kids and questioning whether their initial hasty transitions were justified. Transactivists know the jig is almost up. I doubt the whiny trans guy knows I even exist, and I’m not going to go poking his bear. I’m his ‘Nazi’, and on a different platform, he and his kind have successfully petitioned to censor this ‘transphobe’ writer and her ‘hateful’ content (all of which you can find here), as they have to so many others like me who offend not just the trans set but other cherished woke dogma. The folks who want to deplatform Nazis are almost always the same ones looking to deplatform anyone who runs afoul of their extremist illiberal worldview. Nazis are the easy target but they’re only the first shot across the bow. I blocked the kook-sucking anti-Zionist asswhore who besmirched our comment threads; he slimed back to the grody grotto he oozed out from. I’m done hunting Nazis and I’m quite grateful to Substack for upholding free speech standards. It’s comforting to know that unless the Woke Pod People leave pods in Substack’s founders’ beds one night, I’ll be able to snark my way through wokeness, MAGAs, transactivism, the Paw-Paws election, fluffy-brained feminism and even Hitler himself. In fact, making fun of our enemies is the best way to take their power. Thankfully, Substack’s got our backs. Real-life Jew Dick Shawn camps up hippie Hitler on stage in 1968’s The Producers, which made fun of Hitler and Nazis. It was made by a whole bunch of Jews including producer Mel Brooks, starring fellow Jews Gene Wilder, Zero Mostel, Kenneth Mars (who played the Hitler-worshipping ex-Nazi) Renee Taylor, and Jehovah knows who else. 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!

Gay activists brought this on themselves with over-inclusivity. They need to set some boundaries, and NOW. “My husband isn’t behind gay rights,” Janie, our church organist said back in my teen years. “He wonders if it’s a slippery slope. What’s next, necrophilia? Sex with animals? Sex with children?” “It would never go that far,” I replied. “That other stuff is just gross. Dead bodies and animals are against the law! And no one thinks it’s okay to have sex with children!” Forgive me my lack of prescience, it was 1980, and I was 17. Fast-forward forty-three years and things have changed. Rather a lot. Gay rights activists are having a come-to-Jesus moment, if you’ll pardon the expression. They need to draw some clear boundaries, and fast. Because conservatives, and especially Christians, have never been down with going down on thy fellow man, and gay men’s cruelest adversaries have for many decades spread what we might call the ‘blood libel’ for gay men, the old conservative canard that they’re out to seduce and convert kids to gayism. They’re not, but the optics aren’t good now, thanks to transactivists. LGBTQ has acquired persistent grooming accusations in the last several years, although it’s important to note that grooming can also include manipulating another for one’s own personal purposes , not necessarily sexual. But transactivism’s aggressive focus on children makes many look suspiciously pedo-y. LGBTQ is no more prone to pedophilia than straight people, regardless of how they dress, but they have to deal with this ugly resurrected optic. The historical liberal inability to say No to anyone persuaded the alphabet soup gang to allow the one letter heretofore prohibited - the ‘H’. This permitted entry, unintentionally or not, of a fair number of heterosexual male-to-female (M2F) transwomen, not all of whom were ‘gender dysphoric’, regardless of what they claimed. Historically, a particular male sexual fetish called autogynephilia has accounted for a fair number of transsexuals (now identifying as transgender) according to transsexualism research by pioneers Dr. Raymond Blanchard and Dr. Michael Bailey, author of The Man Who Would Be Queen . It’s much easier to garner public acceptance of a ‘dysphoria’ than for a sexual fetish. Particularly when kids are around. Related: Conservative Men In Conservative Dresses: The Article That Described Today’s Trans Movement Over 20 Years Ago - The Distance, Eva Kurilova The unintended consequence of this inclusivity unwittingly opened the door to certain heterosexual men unconcerned with how their child-focused behavior might be interpreted or affect the movement at large. It bat-signalled pedophiles to prepare to breach the LGBTQ fortress—again. Because guess what, this shit has happened before. Gay activists and other progressives are slow learners. Transactivists, with their queer-positive agenda, are the reason the optics aren’t good, as indoctrination and grooming is clearly present. Grooming isn’t always about sex with children. Catholic families have ‘groomed’ sons to become priests. One can groom (or attempt to) another for many different objectives. But it’s become closely associated with grooming children for sexual purposes, and that’s an image most LGBTQ know to stay miles away from. To be clear: Neither transactivism nor the transgender community is a hellhole of undercover pedophiles, with one exception: The prison system, where, in Canada, 44% of transwomen prisoners have a history of sexual offenses, nearly half in England and Wales, and half in the United States . But that’s a different story since male prisoners often identify after conviction in order to get admitted to women’s prisons. Apart from that, there’s no data to indicate non-prisoner transactivists, drag queens or gay men are especially attracted to children. No more than straight men who wear dude clothes and do dude stuff. Bring in the fetishists In the early years, the rainbow acronym wasn’t longer than George Santos’s impressive resume. In the beginning, it was LGB - Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual - but over the years, it’s grown into a late night comedian’s joke - LGBTQIA2+, and it now includes, indirectly, the least marginalized group ever - H(etorosexual) men. Related: We’re Running Out Of Letters Of The Alphabet! - Anthony Eichenberger, Medium M2F transwomen attracted to women aren’t the only heterosexuals in the movement. F2M transmen, especially young former teenage girls, exploded exponentially in the past twelve years, which included a fair number of budding lesbians. Many detransitioned teens have claimed they realized later they were simply gay. But we don’t hear too much from F2Ms, gay or heterosexual. The activism is primarily on the biological male (M2F) side. LGB activists’ introduction of ‘T’ - Transsexual or today, Transgender - around 2000 brought the pedophile image problem back to gay men by association in a roundabout way. Perhaps it was progressive worship of holy political correctness, ‘inclusivity’, or simply pressure to conform and belong. Gay Pride parades have openly displayed sexual fetishism they share with heteros for many years - ‘kink’, ‘bears’, puppy hoods, ponyboys, BDSM. Perhaps gay activists didn’t realize just how hetero transsexualism was, heavily populated by autogynephiles and cross-dressers . Gay men have always been hypersensitive to the conservative smear that they seduce children, an image not helped with a four-decades-long Catholic priest scandal, which is far less gay than one might think. Not all male-on-male perpetrators are gay, especially in the Church. But fifty-four years after Stonewall launched the gay rights movement, ‘inclusivity’, ‘tolerance’, and ‘non-judgmentalism’, coupled with some monumental past pedophile screwups, leave homosexual men facing renewed allegations of sexual grooming, thanks to Trans, and here’s how. Pedos, Part Un In the late ‘80s the International Lesbian/Gay Association idiotically admitted NAMBLA to their ranks, later discovered and busted by ultra-conservative Republican US Senator Jesse Helms (1994). Embarrassment ensued. Pedos, Part Deux Britain’s Paedophile Information Exchange for ten years lobbied for the abolition of the age of sexual consent. Its founder was a gay college student who didn’t identify as a pedophile, but whose affair with a 15-year-old gay teenager revealed to him that perhaps they needed to legalize laws allowing older men to have sex with underage boys (or maybe girls too, but EWWWW! ) (Note: Adults who like teenagers are not pedophiles, but hebephiles, which may or may not be legal depending on age of consent laws in their area.) PIE was pretty closely associated with gay UK culture. One member’s pro-pedophile speech at a 1975 gay rights conference raised a few eyebrows, not to mention a minor media shitstorm when it argued for the ‘sexual liberation’ of children . A survey in the late ‘70s revealed that its members mostly favoured sex with girls aged 8-11 and boys aged 11-15. Charges of ‘gay recruitment’ tailed the gay rights movement like an obsessed private investigator for many years after. Liberal Feminists: Some child molesters aren’t as bad as others For sixteen years organized gangs of U.K. Pakistani Muslim men sexually abused and exploited young white girls, teaching liberals that the only thing worse than raping kids is ‘stigmatizing’ dark-skinned rapists. While this scandal didn’t include homosexuality or LGBTQ, ‘progressive’ feminists, customary LGBTQ ‘allies’, normalized heterosexual pedophilia that was, shall we say, less condemnatory than it would have been for ‘non-marginalized’ [ie., white] perpetrators. Makes you wonder who else is getting away with molesting kids because 'progressives’ are afraid to be called the dreaded ‘R(acist)’ word. Ladies, if you’re going to be raped, make sure it’s by white men, or ‘progressive’ feminists will ignore you. Social media, Part Un Not much later in the U.S., the ‘T’s Ed Wood-reminiscent straight men aggressively lobbied for increased trans rights. Trans grooming began on social media but wasn’t about adult-child sex; it was to promote and spread trans/gender ideology, primarily by teens and young adults, not older ones. Transactivists groomed malleable feminists and progressives to accept (undercover) male desires. It’s a long, slow, but largely dependable process. Then the schools… This is where grooming adults, especially parents, really got started. Transactivists introduced gender ideology into public education, teaching kids in elementary school they have to figure out what sex they are despite millions of years of baby humans not requiring any assistance from the Genderbread Person. Transactivists pushed an aggressive agenda based on queer theory and indoctrinated mostly progressive parents to go along. If any resisted , education activists called them ‘ right wingers’ and ‘fascists ’ and told kids not to tell mommy and daddy if they wanted new pronouns or to be treated as something they’re not. Just imagine how those same ‘progressive’ parents would react if they found there was a similarly aggressive push by Christian fundamentalists to instill literalist Bible ideology in their kids, especially if it was offered as a counterpoint to gender ideology indoctrination. Teachers, principals and education administrators colluded by not informing the parents if or when their child wished to be treated differently. Slowly education’s transactivist ‘ally’ foot soldiers have been chipping away at parents’ right to know , which has led to lawsuits in Maine , California , Michigan and Wyoming , along with red states banning or pulling back on ‘gender-affirming care’ for children, and a 1 Million March For Children across Canada in September. Meanwhile, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association is fighting a requirement for parental permission before teachers use chosen pronouns. Then there’s the controversial right-left censorship tug-of-war over the kid’s book Genderqueer , which includes many ridiculously inappropriate images including one guy giving another a blowjob. Yes really . No, nothing recruit-y to see here. Social media, Part Deux Social media-induced gender dysphoria has played a huge role in the explosion of trans people. Tumblr pioneered the plethora of labels and pronoun sets and churned out new ‘genders’ and identities, while YouTube offered what appear to be borderline trans recruitment videos with generalities offered for why one might be ‘trans’. A non-binary person notes that ‘discomfort with puberty’ and feeling like ‘you might be different’ are signs you might be trans. Somehow, older generations went through this too without requiring hormone blockers or surgery. Online activists encourage children to question whether they were ‘born in the right body’ and teach them how to approach their parents with this ‘problem’, and what to do if they encounter resistance. ( Threaten to commit suicide! ) Some position themselves as a child’s alternative ‘family’, one they could leave their birth family for if they aren’t supportive. The many types of grooming It’s not hard to understand why people conflate kid-focused transactivism with pedo grooming. The two agendas have several common elements, like teaching parents to accept authority that’s not theirs, to not question the adults who influence their children, to encourage their children not to tell Mommy and Daddy ‘secrets’ they won’t like, to help them source forbidden items like chest binders and puberty blockers, and using persuasive rhetoric to isolate children from their families, encouraging them to trust the stranger in the YouTube or TikTok video rather than the people who love them. The media has twisted its BVDs and Victoria’s Secrets into bunches trying to explain why transactivists aren’t actually ‘grooming’ kids for some nefarious sexual purpose. PolitiFact, an otherwise excellent resource for fact-checking the media and politicians, seems not to understand that grooming doesn’t only apply to describing pedo tactics, although that’s where it originated and is still strongly associated with it. It quoted David Finkelhor , a sociology professor and director of Crimes Against Children Research who defined grooming strictly as “a set of behaviors and manipulations that adults use to make it easier to introduce and complete sexual interactions with a child, without having to use physical force.” It misses that grooming can take other forms, sometimes connecting indirectly with pedophile objectives . One could argue that conservative religion grooms children by perpetuating a patriarchal structure that serves males by teaching young people to submit to male authority. While it’s not specifically about having sex with children, its norms nevertheless discourage young people from reporting sexual abuse by adults, especially those in direct authority like religious leaders or their aides. Another example might be child beauty pageants, long accused of grooming little girls and toddlers to sexualize themselves, offering what many regard as highly inappropriate performances that would be the envy of any drag queen. JonBenet Ramsey’s sexual abuse and murder is still unsolved 27 years later, and recent police attention has focused once again on a pedophile living in her neighborhood who may have been obsessed with the child who looked six going on twenty-six. The grooming image problem lies in the fact that transactivists have quite clearly been grooming children and parents to fit a murky gender agenda with unclear objectives. Some may be pedophiles with their own motives, but what’s much clearer is that with or without transactivist cooperation, pedophiles are busy rebranding while waiting for the right opportunity to apply for acceptability again, and transactivist narrative has groomed parents not to question their children, not to wonder whether an eight-year-old can know he’s ‘not supposed to be’ a boy, and that parents have no right to say no to or set boundaries for and around their own children. ‘MAPs’ A controversial doctor named Jacob Breslow on the board of a U.K. transchildren charity was forced to resign when a scandal erupted over a presentation he gave to a pedophile support group, in which he redefined pedophiles as ‘Minor Attracted Persons’ or MAPs. He compared masturbating and ‘cumming’ with a shoe to doing the same with a child, adding that it “requires a rethinking of both the child and of the person for whom the child is a sexual fantasy or partner." The charity, meanwhile, sent even underage kids breast binders on the sly, along with same-day cross-sex hormones, for kids with recalcitrant parents. Dr. Breslow’s pedo-friendly work sanitizing attraction to children may intersect shortly with parents groomed not to say No to their children. Parents have been taught to unquestioningly believe their children ‘know’ what’s allegedly best for themselves, and that they must accept new pronouns, names, and potentially fertility-destroying drugs and surgeries. The dangerous lesson primes parents to be ready for the day when they’re told, ‘It’s not your place to tell your child they can’t have sex with me. Children know what they want and need. Butt out.” [See: PIE, above.] And this just in: A pro-pedophile German activist group is demanding lesbians be removed from a Berlin Gay Museum exhibit claiming they have “submitted in every way to the anti-pedophile zeitgeist of the heterosexual mainstream.” Well at least lesbians can be counted on to defend kids, if not straight progressive feminists. The loudest voices in a large LGBTQ community where many are trans but neither activist, recruity nor groomy—have been encouraging us all to be more accepting, which is fine, transfolk have rights too, but it shouldn’t include a new class of sexual predators who already are a real threat to women and children, and especially female prisoners , where newly-transferred, newly-self-identified ‘transwoman’ prisoners exhibit high rates of prior sexual assault . ‘Woke’ initiatives to ‘respect’ male prisoners’ sudden trans identity has resulted in a spike in new ‘transwomen’ drawn directly from sexual predators. If these guys get out of prison and don’t drop the trans persona and offend again, it’s going to drive up trans sex crime statistics and greater public fear of transwomen. It’s unfortunate, because cross-dressers and autogynephiles may be fetishists, but their paraphilias have nothing to do with kids. Pedophilia is its own paraphilia, which can co-exist with others, but there’s no data to suggest other fetishes incline one towards children. In fact, the primary source of pedo-breeding may be freely-available kiddie porn , not LGBTQ membership. In the world outside prison, it’s the ‘T’, not the gay dudes, making the movement look predatory by association. It’s they who demand entrance to women’s-only safe spaces like bathrooms and changing rooms . The aggressive push by transactivists demonstrates how indisputably heterosexual male that corner of the trans movement is, as gay men have zero interest in seeing naked ladies, nor do they feel so ‘unsafe’ they need to use the ladies’ loo. I believe it’s also part of a greater political movement to force women to conform to male desires, which predatory heterosexual men have lost with modern feminism. Their allies are woke, illiberal and regressive ‘feminists’, easily manipulated by sexual predators. The LGBTQ ‘grooming’ problem isn’t just right-wing paranoia or moral panic. Many on the left have noted the similarities too. I’ve argued in the past that drag queens need to be mindful of similar concerns about themselves, and now those optics are focused on LGBTQ at large. It would greatly help if these transactivists were more respectful of parents’ rights to determine what education and socialization their child gets and not assume every parent who keeps a child home on Pride Day is necessarily raising a homophobe or transphobe-in-training. Grooming optics are a problem LGBTQ have created for themselves, and they can un-create it if they so choose. They need to know when to say No to aggressive transactivism. Or even kick out the ‘T’. They’ll get lots of support from unwoke feminists. And lesbians. I just gave my Pride flag, purchased at the 2010 Pride Parade, to a thrift shop as I find myself sort of embarrassed to have it now. I’m happy to re-adopt it someday if the movement cleans up its act. In the meantime, if you liked this post and want 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!

The two bodies politic on the left and right have unleashed the dogs of hate on their two least favorite groups It was a feeling of déjà vu. Or maybe déjà Ju. Like, “There it is, now for the Jews.” The left’s cheerleaders for the Hamas attack seemed frighteningly familiar, even though I’m not Jewish. Oct. 7 unleashed the ugly boil of anti-Semitism that I’ve always known has festered beneath the surface of the left, just as Donald Trump unleashed it on the right with Charlottesville. I never truly recognized the depth of lefty Jew-hatred, but neither am I surprised by it. The left’s historical too-uncritical support for Palestinian ‘freedom’ has never seemed to have taken into account how deeply anti-Semitic they are, long before 1948, and that too many Palestinians believe they can’t be ‘free’ until all Jews are removed from their homeland (which is also the Jews’ homeland). The left’s commitment to antiracism and Indigenous rights has never seemed to include Jews. But racism is hunky-dory when they’re doing the Hamas happy dance, mislabeling Jews as white, conflating the Palestinians with historically enslaved American blacks, and wrapped up with growing illiberal racism against white people, including self-hating, guilt-ridden white progressives. I’ve never felt comfortable with the West’s ‘Palestinian freedom’ rap. It’s always seemed too suspiciously like a thin veneer for anti-Semitism. And now, here it is. Still, Israel isn’t above reproach I understand why many think the Palestinians have been abused, and how religious Zionism has sometimes veered into dangerous Jewish nationalism and anti-Islamism. I understand many on the Israeli right would rather see Palestinians pushed out from the river to the sea, and that Israel is primarily responsible for the humanitarian crisis that has emerged in Gaza, and that they keep telling Gazan civilians to evacuate somewhere else, and then shell that somewhere else. I understand that Netanyahu is a right-wing whack job and when he was re-elected last year, I thought, Ohhhh, this can’t be good for anyone, WTF, Israelis? Are you trying to start a war? Is 17,000+ dead Gazans and counting, only a third of which were enemy combatants, enough recompense for 1,200 horribly murdered Jewish civilians in early October? Apparently not. Can it all be blamed on Hamas’s human shields defense? Nuh-uh. Israel is reacting out of rage, with no one to reign them in. I remember reading about George Bush’s reaction on 9/11. I’m paraphrasing, but it came down to Let’s nuke the snot out of them, right fucking now. I understood his rage; I felt it myself, we all did; but I was still glad that cooler heads in his Cabinet reined him in. No, that’s not the right response. We can’t respond with rage. We have to be careful, think this thing through. Israel didn’t think this thing through. Bush could have started World War III that week, just as Israel and Hamas still might. What wasn’t clear to me before Oct. 7, though, is that the left had become so hateful that they could support Hamas. Yes, I expected they’d make the usual tugboat sounds— “Butbutbutbut all the ways Israelis have discriminated against or mistreated the Palestinians!”—yet it never occurred to me to believe they’d blame Israelis for a horrific attack of such diabolically considered cruelty, by a terrorist group who stands for everything progressive liberalism supposedly doesn’t. I guess I’ve been more naive about lefty anti-Semitism than righty anti-Semitism. Charlottesville didn’t surprise me. I understood how aligned with far-right nationalism and genuine white supremacy the Trump gang was and is. I always knew the left could be anti-Semitic, I just hadn’t realized they’d become virtually indistinguishable from the MAGAs. Maybe I just didn’t want to see the festering cesspool on my side of the political divide. The reason why a non-Jew like me is getting a sense of déjà vu is because something similar happened on the left for women several years ago: The gross, intense eruption of misogyny I’d underestimated on my own side as well. It’s always acceptable, for everyone, to throw Jews—and women—under the bus. The rise of transmisogyny I still have not yet come to grips with how much the ‘progressive’ left hates women. But it’s frighteningly clear they’re no more our allies than the Trumpers. They fancy themselves ‘feminist’ because they’re appalled at the destruction of Roe v. Wade. We share that much in common, still. Although I’m no longer certain if progressive men want it back because they believe women have a right to corporeal autonomy, or because it makes it easier for women to end a paternal inconvenience. The progressive left agrees that some men can be skeazeballs and need to rein in sexual harassment or objectification. But not all leftyboys are as feminist as advertised. Male ‘feminism’ can be an acquired mantle for horny dudes to score chicks. Certain men have built their own workaround for satisfying their sexual urges without women’s consent: The trans movement, powered primarily by adult human males appropriating womanhood. They’ve seized the opportunity to demand and then force women to submit to their sexual desires just as women mostly had to before ‘feminism ruined everything’. ‘Transwomen’ fight for access to women’s-only spaces. Like bathrooms, because they claim they’re not safe in male restrooms. So how come gay dudes can use them? Countless cases of transwomen using female-only spaces to gain access to potential sexual assault victims or to satisfy their fetishes have been documented: Domestic violence shelters, public restrooms, rape crisis centers and even women’s prisons. Crappy male athletes have successfully campaigned to join female sports teams and it’s not the Trumpers, the MAGAs, or the Charlottesville gang trying to destroy Title IX, it’s so-called progressive liberals. The ‘woke’. To cadge a favorite word from the illiberal left, and particularly its men, they’re perfectly comfortable colonizing women’s spaces, prioritizing men’s desires over women’s safety and privacy when the former claim to be the latter. Can someone please explain to me why it’s wrong for right-wing men to dictate who can access female bodies, but it’s fine when left-wing men do it? Transgenderism, or transsexualism as it was called fifty years ago, has always been heavily populated by fetishists, as documented by early classic books like Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire and Dr. Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen. Autogynephiles and other fetishists are primarily behind the aggressive drive to force themselves into women’s spaces. Women can’t even hold a women’s-only rock concert without men pushing for entrance and forcing themselves in without consent. Yeah, there’s a rape analogy there. The left fancies itself the champions of the oppressed—and, before wokeism radicalized and cadged hate models and violence as political expression from the right, they were. They never supported all oppressed and marginalized people, like, those harmed by globalism and runaway immigration on the right, but they still spoke for a lot of voices that couldn’t. Now they communicate the language of hate. Now they pontificate like the privileged, entitled elitists so derided by the right. Now they call women ‘transphobic’ and ‘TERF’ for daring to challenge and lay boundaries around aggressive sexual predators, as truly progressive feminists have done since the birth of Second Wave feminism. There have always been two exceptions to the left’s no-hate rule. Women, and Jews. I’m not sure where it went wrong, whether the left stopped realizing, or ever realized, that Jews have been hated and marginalized for thousands of years, before woke antiracism was invented, but it’s no mystery why they hate women. It all comes down to The Penis One thing I’ve learned in the last few years is just how committed to specialized male sexual pleasure some men can be, even without being sexual predators or pickup artists. I hadn’t understood before the power of the fetish, rooted in the Latin word facticius meaning an object made with supernatural powers, or which grants the ability of power over others. It then became the Portuguese word feitiço, and then the French word fétiche. Later it came to denote a sexual attraction to an object (like balloons, velvet or cheese) or non-genital body parts like feet or necks. In other words, something that had sexual power over a person. What I’ve also learned is how far The Bro Code will go to protect sexual fetishes, including for others, even if one is not particularly fetishistic himself. As Oct. 7 released the ugly dogs of anti-Semitism on the left, the trans movement made misogyny acceptable again for Good Liberals. Certain ‘Feminist’ ‘liberal’ men, along with self-hating, misogyny-internalizing fauxminists, have returned to the horndogs among them the ‘right’ to demand sexual pleasure from women. It’s not yet gotten to demanding and requiring women directly submit to sexual service, but I believe it’s heading that way, from both the left and the right. The largely male, self-obsessed trans movement, and particularly its violent transactivists (their rage largely directed at ‘TERFs’) have re-normalized misogyny on the left. The ‘Free Palestine’ pack, sporting the ‘progressive’s swastika—the kaffiyeh—has done the same for anti-Semitism. Women who aren’t easily gaslit by manipulative fetishists must stand with Jews against the hate speech we all receive from the right and the left. What used to be ‘our side’ are now ex-liberals who’ve turned on progressivism, just as Trump’s cult has turned on true conservatism. Many Trumpers embraced fascism, and I think we’re witnessing a concurrent emerging proto-fascism and authoritarianism on the left. They each have their religious extremism faves: Christian fascism on the right, and Islamic fascism on the left. Those of us who haven’t yet been subsumed with racism, hate, and misogyny must understand this: If there’s one thing women and Jews have always known, is that even when they’re not actively persecuting us, they still hate us. And we can always count on everyone to throw us under the bus. It’s always acceptable to hate women and Jews. 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. 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