Because when Queen Elizabeth I is mis-transed, today's intellectually non-conforming children can't be safe from stereotyping sex changes While it’s unacceptable ever to ‘misgender’ a deluded living person who thinks they’re the opposite sex (or no sex at all), it’s perfectly legitimate in the trans cult to misgender dead people. I was wildly offended when a then-Twitter trending discourse suggested Queen Elizabeth I, Louisa May Alcott and others were ‘trans’. Because, you know, it’s simply not possible for a chickie-boo like Lizzie to be a powerful, competent, confident leader whose first agenda item after ascending the throne was to pull England back from economic ruin. Not to mention bringing—who’da thunk this from a female leader???—a 44-year reign of peace to England and Ireland. She even got the damn Catholics and Protestants to stop killing each other, although it resumed after she died. (Blame a dude, James I, who then went on to revise the Bible.) She defeated the Spanish Armada— the Spanish Armada, fer crissakes!— and patronized world exploration and the arts. While it’s quite questionable she was a lasting ‘Virgin Queen’, she had love affairs with her courtiers, but her modern genderqueer detractors theorize Queen Elizabeth was trans, a ‘transman’, or at the very least ‘non-binary’. Because, come on, a girly can’t run a couple of countries all by her pretty little self, can she? It’s simply inconceivable for the gender-addled for a woman to be that accomplished. Only a man, or a woman ‘born in the wrong body’, infused with a man’s warrior spirit, could be as successful and historically iconic as Queen Elizabeth. Then there’s the curious case of Louisa May Alcott , a suspiciously lesbian and feminist American literature icon who has been ‘transed’ by the living because she often wished she’d been born a male and claimed she felt, “I am more than half-persuaded that I am, by some freak of nature, a man’s soul put into a woman’s body.” Alcott was an outlier for sure; she never married, had close friendships and possibly a relationship or two with men several years younger than herself, but unlike certain other female literary icons, left behind no passionate communications with other women. Her most famous literary character, Jo March, was a ‘tomboy’ in modern parlance; headstrong and assertive and would rather write than take care of children. Jo was based on Alcott herself, of course. Alcott deliberately annoyed her chick-lit fans by refusing to let Jo marry Laurie, the handsome young man in love with her. Instead Alcott married her off to an older, bearded, decidedly unsexy man called Professor Bhaer. It’s glaringly obvious that growing up in the highly strictured Victorian culture may have inclined women like Alcott to long to have been born male simply so they could be free to live the full, rich, and less restrained lives men did. After all, men weren’t excoriated for not getting married and making babies, if they chose to sail the seven seas or seek adventure in African jungles. If Alcott was in fact a lesbian—who “always had more sympathy for & interest in them [males] than in girls,” she may not have had the understanding or vocabulary to verbalize what she was truly feeling—“I’m a woman but I fancy women more than men.” Perhaps wanting to be a man was how it felt if you had no idea what a lesbian was. Or maybe she just wanted the freedom. I can understand the latter theory. This is one reason why I had such an aversion to dresses growing up. My parents loved dressing up their little living doll when I was a toddler and I have vague memories of enjoying it, especially for church with my bonnet and gloves—“Mommy, I can’t go to church without my glubs!’ When I entered grade school I was forever enjoined to not get dirty or mess up my dress, but no one worried about the boys’ clothes. The message was clear: Boys had more fun and freedom. Dressing like a girl was the exact opposite. Dresses were stupid. Trans-ing the stereotypes It’s well-established now that for all their pretensions to ‘queering the normies’, Trans World abhors real gender rebels, not the pretenders in service to the cult. They misgender the rebels who traditionally and historically defied gender stereotypes, the strong, capable women, the chicks with brains, and the men who dared to be soft and feminine, who didn’t care to build cathedrals or trouble themselves with athletics or military pursuits . The Facebook group Transing The Dead takes to task the Rainbow Gang revisionists who comb the annals of history seeking to bolster their bogus sex-changing narratives with ‘examples’ of mavericks, deviants, bohos, and dissenters who didn’t live the strictly gendered lives of their peers. I find it repulsive that people get fired for properly gendering living people who can’t change their sex but get a bogus certificate from the government saying they have, yet get away scot-free with misgendering people who are no longer alive to defend themselves. “Fuck off, you pseudo-bitches! I like chicks, not dicks!” - Louisa May Alcott “Why do you think I need a vagina? What’s so terrible about riding the Hershey Highway?” - Alan Turing Homosexuals are being erased from history and modernity just as women are in Trans World. It leads me to wonder if and when the Next Great Transition Craze will commence—for children, of course. What’s the deal with those ‘smart girls’ and ‘dumb boys’? In accordance with the traditionalist, right-wing, uncritical acceptance in Trans World that women are actually created to be dumbly submissive to men and cater to their every whim, it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a brain, desire, ambition, and motivation, must be in want of a de-sexing. She was born in the wrong body. As is a man or boy who doesn’t do well in school, nor talk and think about sports and beer, who never aspires to resolve once and for all how the universe will end. If he fills his head with ‘silly little things’ like fashion, he must really have been meant to be a woman. Is this the next phase of trans-ing the world? Restoring males firmly back in intellectual jobs and women back at home and hearth where they belong? I have to wonder. Maybe, instead of trying to drag more girlies into STEM fields, we should turn them into boys instead! Because boys are good at math and science, and girls are good at—doing what they’re told. Being ‘good’. Not fretting their pretty little heads about finances and inventing a better mousetrap. Boys with fluffy brains need to be ‘fixed’ so they can become good, compliant little handmaids. Smart, capable chicks and kind, genteel guys are freaks. Historical figures like the equally brilliant Queen Elizabeth and Alan Turing challenge gender stereotypes and remind us not all girls like pink nor are made of sugar and spice; neither are all boys made of snips and snails or like rassling in the dirt with their mates. While I was never surprised, as some are, to find how misogynist ‘progressive’ politics are, I’ll admit I’ve been hornswoggled in the last few years at discovering in progressivism classic, right-wing homophobia. If it was obvious to others, it wasn’t to me. Especially not on Team Rainbow, which was formed, fer pete’s sake, to fight for gay rights when police attacked public bathhouses back in the day (and which would eventually be destroyed not by the law but by the AIDS epidemic). No, I had no idea the far left hated gayfolk so much they were willing to ‘trans’ even small children showing clear signs of homosexuality before they were in pre-school. The woke left, it seems, are not so unlike their compatriots on the far right. And they manage to stereotype non-conformers worse than Team MAGA ever has. The Christian right has long sought to ‘convert’ gay kids through ‘Christian’ counseling, but at least they never went so far as to advocate sex change and attack their genitals. Not since the Victorian period, anyway. As the far left marches into oblivion (which may come sooner with one helluva backlash if the trans-aversive and now assassination attempt hero Donald Trump wins in November), the transgender medical profession must be scrambling to make as much money as they can from 'transing’ children who fail to conform to stereotypes. And surely, a little girl who aspires to become a CEO is really asking to become a male, right? Since how could a silly woman possibly become successful and make billions if she wasn’t a man? The drive to return society to a more traditional world may differ somewhat in vision for the right and left, but both are navigated by misogynist men, embodied on the left by the heterosexual autogynephiles who ultimately want women to stop with their bullshit and grant them sexual satisfaction by accepting them completely as women, and ultimately to do what they’re told without complaint. Just like their Christian friends on the right. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

It's BARBARIC. And puritanical. It legitimizes 'trans' genital surgery today. We need a moratorium on child genital mutilation, period. We’ve got to stop the millennia-long War on Children’s Genitals. It’s non-partisan. It’s as areligious as religious. It’s multicultural. It’s also sexist and misandrist, when we condemn other cultures for Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) but turn a blind eye (and a deaf ear to the screams) of Male Genital Mutilation (MGM). I know—it’s a sacred ‘religious tradition’ for Muslims and Jews. Lots of bad ideas are ‘sacred religious traditions’, which are carte blanche for abusing others and attributing it to some divine being. Like child sacrifice in the ancient pagan days. And murdering heretics and witches in the Middle Ages. Enshrining abuse and submission of women. Blowing up nonbelievers—all very, very bad ideas rooted in spiritual mythology. There are almost zero good reasons for child genital mutilation. Any of it. Especially FGM for which there are simply no health benefits at all. It’s performed exclusively to remove sexual pleasure from the female body. The one convincing MGM health benefit that I can find: Phimosis: The inability of the natural foreskin of the penis to retract properly. This can cause genuine medical problems for males and often justifies medical removal of the foreskin. That’s when one needs circumcision. Uh, that’s about it. Here are some of the alleged benefits that strike me as, frankly, not very persuasive. I drew this from The Canadian Paediatric Society’s 2015 position on MGM, reaffirmed in January of this year: UTI (Urinary tract infection) reduction. Supposedly the foreskin makes a male (especially babies) a bit more susceptible to UTIs, which are painful and sometimes itchy but penicillin handles it. STI (Sexually transmitted infection) reduction. Uncircumcised men may be at higher risk for infection, as HIV targets particular cells on the inner surface of the foreskin, but not if the man wears a condom. Which every woman should insist on, no matter how much he whines. Cancer reduction. Medical professionals love to tout how it prevents penile cancer, a condition rare in developed countries, about 1 in 100,000. It occurs almost exclusively in unshaven schvantzes. It also reduces cervical cancer risk in female partners. However, HPV infection raises the penile cancer risk in both the shorn and the unshorn by 80%. But the HPV vaccination in females of all ages greatly reduces the cancer risk, and it likely reduces the risk of penile cancer in men, if enough dudes would take it so that we could get some hard data. Cleanliness. One can get an infection if the prepuce isn’t cleaned. Which is easy enough to do in the shower, just as a woman can scrub her nether regions with water (Don’t use soap! I learned that lesson the hard way when I was four!). Opinions will vary but it strikes me there’s only one good reason for whacking away at a kid’s dick and I seek to challenge those who argue we should. What’s really going on with all those religious and cultural groups who argue MGM is a ‘sacred tradition’? I’m squinting judgmentally at you , Jews, Muslims, Christians, Americans, Africans, Filipinos, South Koreans and Oceanians. What is your problem with male genitalia? The downsides to MGM include, not surprisingly, a great loss of erogenous cells, although sex is still more enjoyable for the genitally mutilated male than it is for the GM’ed female, from whom the clitoris is excised and sometimes the labia as well. MGM is painful, even when an analgesic is applied—including post-operatively. There can be minor bleeding, permanent damage to the penis and cosmetic issues, and a very rare possibility of sepsis. Complication rates are about 1.5% for babies and 6% for older children. ‘Partial re-adherence to the glans,’ is also a possibility, and can resolve itself in puberty, but occasionally needs further treatment. Doctors claim there isn’t much difference in sexual satisfaction and enjoyment from MGM, but some males who were circumcised after becoming sexually active report otherwise. A National Institutes of Health study in 2013 found ‘decreased penile sensitivity’. All this kerfuffle over a ring of skin evolutionarily granted all male mammals for reasons doctors are unsure about, whether it was to enhance sexual pleasure or if there are other protective elements, or whether it’s kind of a penile appendix. All this mischigoss so Jews could establish their covenant with God, as laid down by His Holiness with Abraham in Genesis. All this kalam farghi so Muslims can also express their solidarity of religious community, too. Geez, can’t you all just get a tattoo or something? All this bunkum for Christians who just don’t want to be left out of the sexual hostility, I guess. Christianity has long had a real hate-on for human sexuality and sexual pleasure. Their offered reasons harken back to the Genesis edict and also going in for the alleged health benefits, but also so that ‘Bobby looks like Daddy’, imagining that he’ll be scarred for life if his junior johnson doesn’t resemble Daddy’s pruned pecker. What is this hate-on humanity bears for male sexuality, too? Much hay is made in the human rights world over the unquestionable barbarism of FGM. FGM is a far starker demonstration of humanity’s hate-on for the female orgasm. MGM isn’t nearly as harsh but we really need to examine just how hostile to male genitals we still are, especially in light of what has emerged with this year’s revelations of the medical and scientific bankruptcy behind sex change operations for children—including full castration. If you weren’t horrified already at Jazz Jennings’ perfectly healthy, and, as far as anyone could tell at his early age, properly-functioning penis transmogrified into a fake vagina incapable of orgasm, the divulgence that WPATH’s Standards of Care 8 guidelines included a recognition of the ‘eunuch identity’ for children acknowledging the ‘need’ for castration should be enough to send you directly to the liquor cabinet or to blaze up a massive doobie. Several WPATH members were, it was acknowledged, in connection with a horrific sexual fetishist community of pedophiles who fantasized about castrating little boys. What strikes me as deeply weird about the ‘male circumcision’ debate is just how wedded to the idea of harming genitals so many are. Especially Americans, who can’t seem to shake the spanked MGM monkey off their backs, often arguing for father-and-son Matching Mandingoes or just reverting to the lame argument that ‘everyone else is doing it, so we should attack our baby’s penis too’. Human beings really do have some weird near-universal fetish against sexual pleasure, even when it’s done mano-a-pene in the privacy of one’s bedroom. The ancients couldn’t know that each ejaculation contains up to 150 million sperm, and that the average male can experience up to 8,700 ejaculations in a lifetime which, if you do the math, equals 1,305,000,000,000 - over one billion little swimmers, not exactly a birth dearth in the making. (Oh, go look for the Monty Python song yourself!) And if 8,700 lifetime spurts sounds awfully low to you, as it did to me, I calculated that, if, on average, a male started yanking it at thirteen and continued until he was 90, that equals 112 ejaculations a year, which seems awfully low. Okay, maybe he loses sexual function at 80, that’s still only just under 130 times a year. What’s he doing the other 235 days? I mean, aren’t they at that thing all day long? Some guys can’t let go of it even on the subway ! But, you know, I don’t have a dick so maybe I’m just ignorant. As always, debunk me in the comments if you feel I’m just jerking men around! (Never let it be said I don’t do the hard research for you!) (Huh huh huh, Beavis, she said ‘hard research’!) Trigger warning: Description of a disturbing circumcision research on babies and some ugly descriptions of Victorian ‘preventions’ against masturbation following. You can safely skip down to “The left’s mania for kiddie genital mutilation” which contains only general discussion of bottom surgery and the newer adoption of ‘eunuch’ identity. Don’t touch that! That’s nasty! The history of hostile adults terrified of the Unholy Ejaculation is riven with ugly tortures and treatment of boys who play with themselves. Boys have been threatened historically with ugly operations if they didn’t stop choking the chicken. Victorians devised hideous devices to discourage erections and keep them from nocturnally shining the sheets. Girls weren’t spared clitoridectomies and occasionally oviarotomies if they discovered their particular joy button, but there was very special torture for boys who couldn’t stop polishing the banister. This included circumcision without anesthesia or analgesics in order to teach the immoral miscreant an important lesson, and spiked penis rings to discourage erections. It included “bandaging and caging the genitals; tying the hands to prevent touching; sewing up the foreskin with silver wire to prevent erection and create sufficient discomfort to make sexual impulse unwelcome;” and concluded with the aforementioned anesthesia-free circumcision. The blanket theme over 150 years of all this obsession with junior genitals was masturbation, and preventing the imagined horrors thereof. Refraining from ‘self-abuse’ was a sign of self-control and manliness, of creating stronger men to defend the motherland and harkens back, whether they realized it or not, to ancient beliefs that a woman stole men’s power via his ejaculations. Theda Bara, the original ‘vamp’, like a vampire, stealing a man’s precious essence with her unholy sexual predations. What is this hostility to male genitalia and sexual pleasure? Promoted almost exclusively by other men? I wonder if jealousy plays a role. I had to get circumcised, so everyone should do it! I wonder about the unrecognized and unaddressed psychological trauma for men circumcised as infants, even if they don’t consciously remember it. A Psychology Today article details the research behind the harmful psychological effects of circumcision, including a hideous experiment with a control group of babies who weren’t given analgesics or a local anesthesia, and they had to stop the experiment because the control group was in incredible pain including some that started choking and one that had a seizure. Post-operative pain for all was described as ‘severe’ and ‘persistent’. Who the hell approved this experiment, Josef Mengele? Cortisol, the stress and pain hormone, as the article details, spikes in babies’ brains during circumcision, and while the child may not remember the traumatic event, the body certainly does, and results in greater sensitivity to pain throughout life. Experiments on neonatal animals point to increased anxiety, hyperactivity and attention problems, not to mention a link to mood disorders, which brings into question just how much male behavior considered adverse may be the result of an unnecessary torture when the kid isn’t even ten days old yet. All this to prevent the extremely unlikely event of penile cancer, STIs and UTIs easily preventable or treatable with antibiotics. Gee, maybe we should remove appendixes at birth too, as a preventative in the event it becomes infected and has to be removed. After all, better while the kid is conveniently in the hospital, rather than what may prove to be an inconveniently-timed appendectomy that results in lost school or work time, right? The left’s mania for kiddie genital mutilation One reason why the left may be as amenable to permanently sterilizing and rendering ‘trans’ children sexually incapable of orgasm is because we already legitimize hostility to children’s genitals, rooted in a historical horror of masturbation. The left has been groomed, and often groomed itself to never say no to anything, and for what reason can there be to say no to sex change operations for children when we already engage in a practice designed to prevent sexual pleasure in both males and females? The fact that some transactivists in WPATH are easily persuaded that ‘eunuch’ is a viable ‘identity’ that requires immediate validation should be a massive flapping red flag that there’s something deeply wrong with transactivism, especially aimed at children. A phimotic foreskin can be easily circumcised, most importantly for a boy or man who consents to the procedure because it causes him enough discomfort. Otherwise, millions of uncircumcised men all over the world function as the normal human beings they’re meant to be, untroubled by penile cancer or UTIs and can easily come to regard their natural penis as cosmetically attractive as circumcised penises have come to be regarded. One of the most horrifying images to come out of the transactivism movement is the attacks on healthy genitals in children who aren’t gender dysphoric so much as social media-addled; and enforced by an education system that takes one’s child away if the parents don’t cooperate. The attacks fashioning ridiculous-looking malfunctioning manufactured penises and vaginas, and the removal of healthy breasts in teenage girls, I think is rooted in humanity’s millennia-old hostility to healthy, unobstructed genitals. MGM dates back 8,000 years and FGM 2,200 years, that we know of. Circumcision should always be consented to, and I personally think there should be laws mandating that one must be 18 years of age. Wait until he’s old enough to have learned to question the value himself. There are plenty of holy injunctions we no longer permit because we’ve become civilized enough to recognize how barbaric they are, including human slavery, stoning sinners to death and killing children who make fun of bald men. Progressive societies have come to recognize how cruel religious traditions have been to women and homosexuals as well. So we can afford to tell these groups, ‘No more’. MGM and FGM are relics of barbaric pasts and encourage the modern transactivist barbarians among us. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

Would you shoot Hitler if you could? What if Biden is the one who will bring ruin? What if a Trump victory means some American lives will be saved? I have to wonder what Donald Trump’s mental state will be like from now on: The man survived an assassination attempt and for the want of two inches, might be dead. Trump was one tortured individual before this happened, and in need of constant distraction from annoying cycling ‘bad thoughts’, at least so say those close to him. Whether you’ve done Buddhist or emotional intelligence work on yourself or not, you must know what the ‘bad thoughts’ are. They’re those unresolved demons that regularly cycle in our head, torturing us: I really hate my father! I really hate my father! He’s such a monster! I really hate him! He’s such a monster…! Now people want to kill Donald Trump. I wonder if his thought cycles turn this way now: What if there is a hell awaiting the unrepentant sinner? I like pondering Trump’s inner life more than my own because I’m struggling with my own bad thought. Shit! If only Thomas Matthew Crooks had shot two inches closer to the left! My inner Crappy Buddhist needs a time-out. Would you kill Hitler? If we decry the historically more-prone-to-violence right, then how can we justify wishing someone, dammit, would please just take out someone else we fear? Didn’t Crooks practice enough? I’ve said over the years, sometimes holding my metaphorical nose, that I wouldn’t wish assassination even on Donald Trump. We don’t have the right to kill others based on what they might do. (How Minority Report !) I was a baby during JFK’s murder, and I don’t remember Martin Luther King’s, but I do remember Bobby Kennedy’s, which was traumatic for a five-year-old grappling with a stranger who shoots a father for no comprehensible reason. I’ve lived through two attempts on Gerald Ford’s life and one near-miss on Ronald Reagan’s. It’s not okay to wish for it. It really isn’t. On a higher spiritual level, we must aspire to rise above our tribalist, animalistic impulses. Allowing negative, hostile thoughts juice our own cycling thoughts and keep us depressed and dangerously angry. If we can put aside the hysterical rhetoric for a moment, Donald Trump may be many things, but he ain’t Hitler. He shares many personality traits with Hitler, as I wrote last year , but so do many others who aren’t Nazis or wannabe mass murderers. Being an otherwise useless, incompetent little narcissist is a trait many share, most of whom never stumble upon the narrow little window of opportunity in which one is enabled to maleficent ‘greatness’. At least for awhile, by the cultural zeitgeist and power-mongers smarter than they, and for whom they serve as a useful idiot because the moronic masses like him, they really like him! If you could go back in time, would you kill Hitler? I pondered that in an as-yet unpublished novel I’ve written about a modern woman transplanted back to the summer of 1968 who hopes to change history and prevent 9/11, when her twin brother died. She considers all the problems inherent in considering how many lives you alter, how many will live and who now won’t, because maybe the Nazis unwittingly killed some mass murderers or, who knows, the next Hitler. Maybe the Jewish protagonist is alive, her hippie friend with whom she engages this question suggests, because some poor bastard who died at Auschwitz might have lived to kill her, or maybe his son would have. Finally I said, “So you don't think it would be a good idea to go back in time and alter history, so that World War II never starts?” He slowly turned his head and opened his eyes. Which were needle-thin slits. “If you had special information that could save sixty million lives right now, would you give it to whoever could stop the deaths?” Of course she would, she replies. I played out my own arguments while writing the conversation, because I myself wasn’t completely sure of the righteous consequences of saving sixty million WWII deaths. Who in the future might not be born? Maybe even myself, even if somehow saving sixty million lives now saved some truly bad actors. It would be much easier to justify travelling back in time to kill Trump if history proved his second term was a massive disaster resulting in the deaths or abject misery of millions of people. But not so much today, especially with the knowledge that liberal hysterics about what his first term would be like didn’t result in the end of democracy or free elections. A recent article in The Free Press about the assassination attempt, and how attempts and successful hit jobs changed the world, notes that, “So central was Hitler’s worldview and decision-making to the war and to the Holocaust that his death at any juncture between 1933 and 1944 would surely have changed the course of history.” How different might America be today if Bobby Kennedy Sr. had gotten elected President rather than Nixon? My old boyfriend and I used to ponder this and other deep questions on his apartment front stoop on warm summer nights. How different might America be today without Watergate? Thomas Crooks did in fact alter history—it’s now all but assured Trump will win, unless the Democrats can convince Sylvester Stallone to replace Biden. (Except he’s a Republican.) For better or for worse, here comes the Trumpocalypse. Again. It’s easier to look back on history with the certainty of an accidental time traveller and say, “Save sixty million people? Piece o’ cake!” than it is to look at the world today and be oh-so-certain bumping off Hitler or Trump will solve all your country’s problems. Maybe Biden, or some other candidate who will ultimately replace him, would be the one who started the nuclear war. Or devastated the country somehow. Maybe with another tidal wave of unfiltered, unmonitored immigrants. Goddess knows Biden’s done untold damage to the U.S. with his open-door policy. Even I will breathe a sigh of relief when Trump shuts the doors and deports illegals. Let’s see how much the crime rate goes down, shall we? How many American lives will be saved once the criminals are sent home? Or prevented from entering during Biden, Part Deux? Maybe you or someone you love will live because of a Trump victory. Or maybe Crooks has sealed our fate, and Trump will destroy democracy as the hysterics claim. Never mind that dictatorships aren’t built in a day, or even eight years as one Turk who lived through a democracy-to-dictatorship scenario recounts. Who died and made you God? Or the Ultimate Arbiter of Fates? I don’t like my Crappy Buddhist’s inner impulse. Assassinations prevent us from seeing the road not taken. Spoiler alert: Skip down to “Safe spoiler space” if you haven’t yet read Stephen King’s novel 11/23/63. Last chance! Last chance! Last chance! Scroll down now! Stephen King pondered the difference in an assassin’s bullet in his novel 11/23/63, where a time traveller plans to kill Lee Harvey Oswald, and does. He expects a much better world if John F. Kennedy escapes the bullet. He returns to 2011 to discover his world now devastated by a nuclear war, the Civil Rights Bill having never passed, Jonestown incidents happening more frequently and with higher death tolls, and never-ending wars. It’s a nightmare. A mess. He realizes he has to go back in time and fix it—let Kennedy be assassinated. Spoiler end Spoiler end Spoiler end Spoiler end Safe spoiler space! It’s understandable to want to see Trump dead. He’s a detestable human being, if you’re not part of the cult. I feel less guilty wishing, as I did when he was President, that he killed himself with a Big Mac heart attack. It’s amazing to me he’s still alive. I have Trump Fatigue Syndrome from all the hysterics about how he’s going to destroy everything good in the universe. I know the MAGAs are doing the same to themselves, hyperventilating over a second Biden term. They may look ridiculous to us, but Trump hysterics look equally as ridiculous to them, and I look back at the first Trump term and think, “Well, we did get through it. He didn’t destroy democracy. We had another free election despite the liberal media’s naysayers. The Republic still stood. And, we have less free speech now after four years of woke Democratic reign than when Trump left. So, like, is Trump really the only threat?” Trump can do a LOT of damage, especially if he finishes turning the Supreme Court into a fundamentalist Christian wet dream. Project 2025 is troubling, but there are a helluva lot of courts its policies would have to clear first, and Congressional mid-terms that could throw ice water on that little wank fantasy. Of course, it’ll be interesting to see the God-based fundamentalists face off against their arch-nemeses, the woke social justice fundamentalists, who are no less authoritarian anymore, who worship DEI rather than Jesus. I don’t think it’s our job to shoot people we think are dangerous. Trump is dangerous. So is a foggy old man surrounded by more cogent people I don’t trust any more than the MAGAs. Thomas Crooks’s established profile was as a potential school shooter; liberals would be far more condemnatory of his sharpshooting if he’d gone after Joe Biden. Just as they shout on X far more quietly when a mass shooter is ‘trans’ or ‘non-binary’ than when he leaves an online manifesto expressing emotional orgasms over far-right leaders and causes. If it’s wrong to exult when mass shooters bump off people they don’t like—gay nightclub attendees, music lovers at a festival, blacks, Jews, Indians, or Muslims—it’s not okay when they shoot people we don’t like. Assassinating a political candidate who hasn’t yet killed lots of people, that we don’t know will ever do that, is a lot different from, theoretically, bumping off someone you know will do something truly earth-shattering. I found myself lying in bed last Sunday morning pondering the ending of a movie I really feel compelled to watch again: David Cronenberg’s excellent 1983 movie adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, about a man who comes out of a years-long coma to find that when he touches people he sees their future. Absolutely don’t watch the video clip here if you haven’t seen the movie; it’s got one of the greatest plot twists ever. But it harkens to the question the protagonist faces: Dare I murder a currently innocent man? Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

An ex-friend pulled a Mean Girl on both myself and another friend, so we devised a way to avoid hurt feelings with better conflict resolution. It works very well! We call it the ‘Sheila Agreement’. Its purpose is to manage the disagreement that happens in any friendship or relationship. Named for the ex-friend who handled conflict like an eight-year-old (and wasn’t honest why she de-friended us on and offline), the Sheila Agreement outlines how Melissa and I handle conflict in divided times where the definition of a sundress can ignite a global flame war. Sheila pushed us both out of her sizeable friends group a few years ago. First she ejected Melissa, then, a year later, me and my good friend David. We don’t know why. Sheila never tells you because she’d rather bite off her own arm than engage in confrontation. She gives weird vague nonsensical reasons. It was Year 2 of the pandemic. Everyone had gone batspit nuts, as (continuously) did American politics; she and her husband are Americans and all us Yanks were on edge. I felt Sheila had been deliberately hurtful to us both; Melissa doesn’t think it was anything personal. Post-Sheila, Melissa started to worry about me. I’m not always the most attentive friend. I’m always writing, reading, researching, or catching up on things I’ve put off. I spend little time on social media. Or email. Sometimes Melissa would message me and I’d take awhile to get back. It made her a little crazy. Am I getting Sheila’ed? What did I do??? Or she wouldn’t respond to me and I’d comb back through my Facebook messages wondering, Did I say something to upset her? Melissa’s sensitive about certain things and maybe I made a joke that fell flat. Does she hate me??? Such are the thought patterns of biologically-born females. We’re wired for friendships, relationships and emotional connection. We’d rather bite off our own arms and suffer a slight in simmering silence than confront a friend with it. The cruelest thing you can do to a female of any age is cut her out of the friendship group. It’s done deliberately to spite and hurt another. It happens from the sandbox to the grave. It’s childish, but we live in an age where many are grown-ass children and what passes for grown-ass feminism is a reversion to the mass Mean Girlism of cancel culture and campus protests. But it’s also fair to note just how critically everyday social relations have degraded for decades, especially during the pandemic and the George Floyd protests, radicalizing both political sides further. Melissa is conflict-aversive to begin with and only speaks up if something is super-critically important. I think a lot of us are the same way. Very few enjoy conflict unless they’re abusive jerks. But biting your tongue is a recipe for a Big Blowup later which is how friendships end and feelings get far more hurt than if the two of you could just hash them out. I suspect that’s what happened with Sheila: She bit her tongue because she hates conflict. To be fair, I have a temper and a sharp, sarcastic tongue; but she also was there when I began exploring Buddhism and made a conscious effort with real progress to de-trigger myself, cut down the sarcasm, and find better ways to communicate with others. It’s one way we bonded; she discovered Buddhism before we met. As for Melissa, she is, in my experience, one of the kindest, most even-keeled people I know, so Sheila had less reason to fear working out a conflict with her. But hey, even Buddhists can be crap at handling conflict, n’est-ce pas? Melissa and I have done a lot of inner work on ourselves to be Better Grownups, so after multiple instances of her worrying I was mad at her I said, “We need a Sheila Agreement to handle conflict intelligently and maturely. The purpose is to work out misunderstandings and disagreements like big girls, rather than a third-grader.” The basic precepts: When one of us is unhappy with the other, we will bring it up to that person calmly, once we’re out of our anger phase The other person needs to listen calmly, and do their best not to get defensive The first person needs to say what they didn’t like in kind, non-emotional language. No swearing. No insults. No unfair judgements. “You think I—” never nails what the other person is thinking. The offender needs to listen (or read) politely and respond calmly and rationally, once again not in anger. Maybe step away from the computer or put down the mobile and cogitate for awhile. One great method is the Sandwich Approach: Say something good and positive about the other person, then offer the grievance, then finish with something positive. In this way you relieve some of the negative feelings criticism can’t avoid generating by observing the good things about the other person too. Melissa has a few points for basic communication overall that she uses with her husband: No ‘should’ing - no telling someone else what they should do or how they should feel No minimizing, diminishing, deflecting or invalidating the other's feelings. You may not agree with them, but their feelings still deserve to be heard and respected. Use ‘I’ statements to describe how you feel and the effect someone's words or actions had on you, not attacks regarding what they said or did. “I felt hurt when you said this.” Not “You did this, you did that.”  No personal, character, or ad hominem attacks No blaming, shaming, criticizing, labeling, attributing motives Stick to the point at hand. Period. No add-on insults, generalizations, blanket statements, absolutes, or references to the past or to others No aggression, violent language, profanity, or name-calling Only communicate when calm So far, so good! Melissa and I don’t argue much, but we have the typical misunderstandings or minor communication offenses between busy and sometimes inattentive friends. We’ve both invoked the Sheila Agreement on occasion and it’s worked out very well. Most recently we had a serious political disagreement and we invoked it on each other when it got a little heated. It’s the sort of disagreement that might break up a lot of friends or family members. We got through it okay without anyone nearing Facebook Block of Death mode. I’m really proud of us both! Later, I introduced it to David, my close buddy who had gotten ejected from Sheila’s friend group along with me and then later invited back in a classic Mean Girl move intentionally designed to twist the knife in my back. Sheila had offered one criticism of us that rang true: She complained we squabbled too much. It was her one moment of honesty. “She’s right,” I told David, “and I’m tired of it too. Melissa and I came up with something we call the Sheila Agreement and I think you and I should do this too. Let me explain it and see what you think.” He agreed, and we don’t argue anymore. It’s rather a relief, as we’d argued about stupid crap for years. We even had a break in the friendship for a few months several years ago. We get along much better now, and can even discuss politics without wanting to kill each other. I’m genuinely grateful to Sheila for that, at least. I introduced the Sheila Agreement to my neighbor. She’s socially anxious and worries that she’s offended me or put me out in some way. I sometimes worry the same. So we invoked the Sheila Agreement and now we explain things like, “You can text me a few times during the day; don’t expect an immediate response as I’m working, but don’t text a lot because the beeping can be distracting.” She’s told me that when I don’t get an immediate response from her not to take it personally either. We have fewer misunderstandings now. A Sheila Agreement returns the basic rules of courtesy sorely lacking in our deteriorating culture. We can’t blame Trump or the pandemic; I lost friends years ago for being ‘insufficiently liberal’. I didn’t move right; these ex-friends moved farther left. ( They defriended me. ) Perhaps others can forge their own Sheila Agreement with their remaining friends and family. It could be altered to lay down the guidelines of engagement (I don’t like rules ), for example, for discussing politics. A Sheila Agreement requires a certain level of social maturity that may be difficult to stick to at first. Melissa has a degree in psychology and works a job in which she teaches people to communicate better with each other. Buddhist philosophy years ago taught me to actively de-trigger myself and not react so quickly with anger when someone disagrees with me or calls me a nasty name. I understand now it says far more about them than it does me. I find conflict with my Sheila Agreement friends is less stressful. The heart of success is to keep your emotions in check. That can be hard to do when we’re angry, but in anger is when we say the worst things we can’t take back or hurl accusations or judgements not easily forgotten. You need to consider that you might be wrong about something or at least acknowledge how the other person feels. And talk about it. Maybe you messed up. Maybe they misinterpreted something or are being overly-emotional. I find apologizing can be empowering. I’m being a Big Girl! I hope others can benefit from their own version of the Sheila Agreement so we can get along better and not sunder what few friendships we have left. Life is far more peaceful, and you have a better sense of which of your friends you can truly trust. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

Your imperfect body was born into 'woke' Original Sin. Abhor yourself and your detestable healthy body because misery loves company. How dare you be happy in your own skin, sinner! In the mid-’90s the speculation began:   Did teenage Britney Spears really get a boob job? Britney denied it, or wouldn’t talk about it, but Rolling Stone revealed in 2008 that her mother allowed her to get implants even though her breasts were still growing. Later, allegedly, Spears regretted the decision and had them removed. Beautiful, talented, and deeply distressed Britney Spears thought, and was probably told by soulless music executives, that she wasn’t ‘good enough’. Maybe it was a good career move, but often body modifications are a signal you’re not happy with the body you were born in; that it’s imperfect, not good enough, even when it’s healthy and not nearly as unattractive as mass and social media tell you. We fail to appreciate just what a ‘miracle of life’ we truly are. How wondrously human we were born, how marvelous our complex bodies, and especially our magnificently evolved brains. How amazing  it is that we were ever born,  regardless of the circumstances of conception. I learned a fascinating tidbit about how my brother and I came to be on this planet that I didn’t know until he told the story at our mother’s funeral last year. I knew Mom and Dad met on a blind date but what I hadn’t known is the extrapolated story Dad told my brother: Mom was a ‘third string’ and last-ditch choice! Dad needed a date for a boating trip with some married friends. They set him up with a woman, but she cancelled as the trip approached. “Don’t worry,” the friend told Dad, “I’ve got another one for you!” And that was set up and— she  bailed. “Oh man, I’m sorry about this,” the friend said. “Listen, I’ve got one more gal I can think of. I hope she can make it.” She was, and she didn’t bag on my dad. My brother and I exist because two other women cancelled! There’s an additional challenge to my own existence. Mom and Dad had a hard time conceiving. Three years into the marriage and no pregnancy. The doctor said everything was normal; finally a highly frustrated Mom conceived and my parents rejoiced. Then, Mom lost the baby. She was devastated. “Keep trying!” the doctor told them. “Your hormone count is really high! It’ll be easy to get pregnant again!” They did. I have long marveled at how, in a sort of sad sense, ‘lucky’ I was to be born when another was conceived before me. I might not be here if Mom hadn’t lost the first baby. Or would I? Ajahn Brahm, a teacher and monk with the Western Australian Buddhist Society , (he’s hilarious! ), tells the story of a young couple he once counseled who wanted a baby, and finally they got pregnant. They were so excited; so was he. But their darling, much-wanted baby boy was stillborn. They were near-inconsolable but they were going to try again and Ajahn Brahm told them to take a ballpoint pen and draw a mark on the lifeless baby, which they did. They drew a line a few inches long on one of the baby’s tiny heels, and then they buried him. A short time later, they got pregnant again and, like my mother, this time they delivered a strong healthy child—this one a baby girl. And she had a curious birthmark on one of her heels—a thin line a few inches long. The baby came back, said Ajahn Brahm. It was a revelation to me. I don’t know whether I believe the story or not but I don’t think he’d lie. It could be coincidence that the baby had a birthmark resembling the line they drew on the first one’s heel. But now I wonder: Maybe that was me Mom miscarried, and I came back. I relate these stories because it’s deeply disturbing how many critical mental health challenges Gen Z presents as they strive to be anyone other than who they were born to be. Are they really any more disturbed than previous generations, or are we simply obsessed with children? Every human being with a functioning brain has their dysfunctions and demons, and not everyone’s life is easy enough that they can still be glad to have been born. I’ve heard a few wish their mother had gotten an abortion. But I don’t know that any generation has ever been as guided, pushed, or pressured as much as later Millennials and Gen Z to fix the false notion that they were ‘born in the wrong body’. Is there any idea more destructive than that you’re defective at birth? That nature is so stupid it’s forever sending you into the world incorrectly? Not just, “You’re not pretty/handsome enough,” you’re not good enough from birth. Especially if you’re ‘cis-heteronormative’: The woke Original Sin. Or white birth. Or male birth. So many damned at birth. The toxic message you’re ‘not good enough’ has been with us since Cain slew Abel after a slight from God. (God is not a vegan!) My mother’s generation grew up watching beautiful sirens on the silver screen they could never match; although Mom, a beautiful woman in her own right, only ever expressed jealousy over Shirley Temple, whom she resented for being prettier. I grew up knowing I would never be as beautiful as The Love Boat goddesses and still, in some shameful secret place deep within me, want to be as beautiful as Barbi Benton, Judy Landers or Morgan Brittany. (No, not Morgan Fairchild, whose nose was too pointed for me and who looked like the bitch she always portrayed, although I understand she’s a very nice lady in real life.) Plastic surgery though, was now available to fix that, first for women and their tragically normal-sized breasts, then it came for the men (“Build up your pecs! Masculinize your jawline! Chisel that manly waistline with rib removal! Buy a penis so large you’ll have to cart it around in a wheelbarrow!”) I eschew plastic surgery, and laugh at women who spend huge sums of money and harm their bodies to please men, and those incels who fantasize or raise the money to do the same for women (shallow losers aren’t only female!) But I can’t laugh at ‘sex-changers’. It’s just too, too tragic, even when it’s emotionally disrupted adults rather than innocent lambs led to the slaughter by so-called ‘responsible’ adults. ‘Be authentic’ is what the Boomers and Xers told each other. ‘Be yourself!’ Strip yourself of society’s ideas of what you’re ‘supposed’ to be. Challenge the stereotypes and roles you’re ‘assigned’, especially when you’re male or female. Subvert the dominant paradigm! To some degree, that’s what the trans/queer movement has done—challenged those roles, questioned whether we need to define ourselves as binarily as we were raised, and that’s a good thing. But Big Surgery came for the kids since authentic people don’t buy anal bleaches  and pec jobs. Big Pharma had run out of pill-popping adults. Kids were groomed to become lifelong medical patients, for both Big Surgery and Big Pharma, told they were ‘born in the wrong body’. Not even that they weren’t photogenic enough, but nature fucked up and made everyone the wrong sex! And gay kids became anathema. The left continues to damn Christian ‘gay conversion therapy’ while they themselves mutilate, sterilize, and ruin the ability to orgasm because they’re terrified of children happy in their own skin. So much for Barney the Dinosaur’s positive, affirming  message in the ‘90s. Sure, it was maudlin, but don’t you wish he’d return? No, I can’t possible love you, you’re not good enough! The woke left needs more hugging and kissing and a lot less judgementalism and sourpussed guilt trips over how imperfect everyone else is. Of course  we’re imperfect; we’re human beings. Religions, philosophies and self-improvement regimes focus on what we can and should change: The way we act, think, talk and behave. We harm others far more with our behavior than how we biologically exist. Each one of us should acknowledge, if even only to ourselves, that we must try harder to treat others well, not obsess about our mostly silly-ass problems (which leads to us acting like assholes). What would Jesus do? What would Gandhi do? What would Superman do? We’d be better off without scrutinizing ourselves in the mirror and blaming all our problems on a conveniently scapegoated meat package. The body positivity movement, for all its obvious health-denying bullshit, does have a point that it wouldn’t kill us to accept ourselves and our wonderfully varied bodies for what they are. Especially if it functions more reliably than your car. Heart beating okay? Lungs drawing air in and out without a lot of phlegmatic drama? Legs support you and walk great distances? Eyes seeing the beauty of a sunrise or your child’s brilliant smile? No frightening weird lumps anywhere? Congratulations! You have a functioning, healthy body! Rejoice! Not everyone does, and life quality takes a hit when you can’t do what others do, go where others go, live the life you see others living denied you. People who choose sex change surgery buy into a lifetime of medical industry dependence, are further tormented by unaddressed psychological problems, and a heightened risk of suicide. What troubles me is how much children are taught almost from birth that they were born  imperfectly, ‘in the wrong body’, and that if they don’t love the right people (anyone except the opposite sex unless those people are properly not-cis-heteronormative), they’re bad, awful oppressors. You’re no longer ‘free to be me’. Be anyone other than yourself, because you were born inherently wrong! The hell with authenticity. The far left hates it. Isn’t this the message from the Christian Right we Good Liberals have been taught to eschew? Original sin is bullshit! Adam and Eve never existed! And if they did, more power to them for rebelling against the White Patriarchal Supremacist Oppressor in the sky as they yelled, “We WILL partake of the forbidden fruit! How dare you prohibit us from seeking knowledge! Who are You  to colonize it all for Yourself?” (I actually kinda like this myth for its rebellious spirit. Also I like the Jewish addendum of Adam’s first wife Lilith, who refused to accept Adam’s demand for a constant military sexual position, and wouldn’t put up with his lord-and-master patriarchal bullshit, so she went off on her own. God then created Eve, but he still fucked up the submission function.) Original sin is now whiteness; maleness; cis-heteronormativeness. The way we were born. In original left-wing sin. Authenticity is for right-wing jerks, I guess. (Which it’s not; inauthenticity is an inalienable human fault.) If there’s one thing we all have a problem with, it’s living comfortably in our own skin. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. - Corinthians 6:19-20 The New Testament abjures using the body for ‘harlotry’ and other sexual sins—whaddaya expect, the famously misogynist and sexophobic St. Paul wrote it—and it’s pretty well established in the 2,000 or years or so that followed that restricting sexual activity is a fool’s game. It doesn’t work for society, and it doesn’t work for many individuals. But there may be a modern lesson for us still: Be grateful for what you’ve got and stop longing for the other side of the fence, which is never as beauteous and problem-free as you imagine it. Yeah, we all aren’t happy with our bodies for one reason or another. Nor were the patrons of the Photoshoppers of centuries past: Court painters, who depicted their patrons as handsomer, more beauteous, than they actually were. We have no idea who was ‘the fairest one of all’ because they all painted themselves with toxic white lead and vinegar like kabuki players. Women wore bustles to make their hips and asses bigger, and corsets to make their waistlines smaller. Men availed themselves of painful high heels and wore whalebone corsets to keep them straighter and taller (I remember Vincent Price complaining about this when he was a guest speaker at our university; I think he portrayed Prince Albert onstage and the whalebone corset caused him much discomfort). Transgenderism or transsexualism is merely another form of body modification, and should be legal for grownups, just like tattoos and boob jobs (unless you’re Britney Spears’s mother). Humans alter their bodies for many different reasons, not always because Snapchat shows them they’re not pretty enough to be an influencer. But please, force the schools to tell children the truth: That it’s okay to be you. You were born in the right  body. Teach them the evolution science that offends and terrifies the woke: That we evolved sexually dimorphically to reproduce, whether we choose to do so or not, because life seeks to perpetuate more life. That you can’t change your immutable sex and that there’s nothing wrong with being a boy or a girl! There’s nothing wrong with boys who like girls and girls who like boys! Or who like both! Most of all, teach them to be deeply grateful for their healthy bodies, and for all the wonderful things it can do (even if some parts of it don’t work like everyone else’s). And be grateful for the gift of life. I love you, you love me. Be free to be you! Be yourself! As I’m fond of saying, “I have to be me. No one else would take this stupid job!” Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also podcasts  of more recent articles there too!

What if the Western world was forced to 'celebrate' Christian Supremacy for a month after having shoved Rainbow Supremacy down everyone's throats? “Would you like to donate two dollars to Pride?” asked the store cashier last Saturday. “No thank you,” I replied. In times past, I donated. This time I didn’t. It’s no longer a worthy cause. Not going to the ‘gayborhood’ to celebrate and enjoy the drag-queenier-than-thou. Not going to the Parade. Not flying the flag. I’m done with this public virtue-signalling circle jerk of enforced Rainbow Supremacy. Marginalized my ass. Live how you want to live, but don’t yank it in my bathroom, guys. Pride events around North America are experiencing more backlash than ever. MSNBC talked to a Pride reporter about Pride flags slashed, graffiti sprayed on LGBTQ-friendly church walls, and other acts of vandalism attributed to ‘right-wing backlash’. Um, how do they know it’s specifically ‘right-wing’? Have all the perpetrators been arrested and their politics accounted for? The interviewer didn’t ask, and the reporter didn’t say. If there’s a ‘backlash’, why? DO NOT ASK. And why is tearing down a Pride flag ‘vandalism’, but a statue is ‘protest’? As the King of Siam would say, “Is a puzzlement.” How is it these reporters remain so blithely unaware of how much growing dislike for Pride there is on the left, with whom it has lost its former popular goodwill? News to these bozos. Remaining as ignorant about the entire Pride movement as they can be without induced coma is their raison d’etre. What would Christian Pride Month look like? USA Today reports that brands this year are pulling back on Pride displays and merch as they claim they’re targeted by ‘conservative groups’ who boycotted their businesses and for once, it seems to have worked. I’m more inclined to believe they’ve correctly identified ‘conservative groups’, because they’re engaging in lawful protest, unlike Pride flag destroyers who run ‘n’ hide since they’re breaking vandalism laws. No one seems to ask why there was a kerfuffle last year over a Hershey bar promo for International Women’s Day featuring a biological man who looks vaguely like a woman. At least no journalistic investigation beyond, Transphobia is the only explanation. You’re hard-pressed to find any gay people featured in Pride promos anymore. Fabulous dudes and even hot lesbians are out. Trans-identified men—far less trans-identified women—are the Pride stars now. No one asked whether the anti-woke backlash against trans-identified man and social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney was all right-wing or whether the public in general is fed up with woke values and fake women constantly shoved down their throats. Including plenty of liberals. How come I know liberals and left-leaners sick of transactivist extremism but the left-wing media doesn’t even know we exist? Then again, when I search for ‘WPATH Files’ and ‘Cass Review’ on MSNBC I find nothing, so maybe I expect too much journalistic integrity from people who know everything they need to know about trans from their Gender Studies classes at Columbia University. USA Today has nothing on the WPATH Files but does at least mention the Cass Review in a few articles. Transactivism ignores and cancels those who dare to challenge and criticize the erasure of biological women and gay people, and especially critics of the ‘progressive’ conversion of gay kids to more socially ‘acceptable’ heterosexuality. Pride groups shut down free speech and get people they don’t like fired . They’ve pushed their ideology into public education and woe to any parent who dares to protest. Left-wing do-gooders will take your children if you don’t get in line and goose-step the new step for a movement so awash in bright reassuring colours you could be blinded on a sunny day or wonder who slipped the Yellow Sunshine into your morning coffee. Spiked calls the ‘unbearable annoyingness of Pride’ ‘flag-shagging’. So I wonder as we wrap up yet another Pride Month: What if the next month was ‘Christian Pride Month’, was mostly organized by fanatical fundamentalist Christians, and whose support was as socially enforced as June’s Pride Month? Libraries would feature ‘Christian month’ book displays including works by C. S. Lewis, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, St. Augustine, the Left Behind series and actress Lisa Whelchel’s (‘Blair’ from The Facts of Life ) parental help books on how you can abuse your children in the most Christian manner possible. Books by Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens and Michael Shermer would be banned. National brands would include the fish logo on all their products as an easy way to virtue-signal allyship with Jesus-believers without having to do anything actually Christian, like give money to the poor or orphans. Attention hound Jesus supporters and their allies would flamboyantly dress like Jesus, Mary, Joseph, random disciples, Catholic saints, Crusaders and the most famous Christian in America, Donald Trump. Cities around the world would celebrate with Christian Pride Parades in which local companies would be pressured to provide gaudy floats depicting famous Bible stories. Like Kiddie Jesus teaching the rabbis, the Last Supper, the Passion, the Resurrection, Mary being informed she was gonna have to do some ‘splainin’ soon to her fiance, the deaths of the Apostles, St. Paul experiencing a Keanu Reeves moment on the road to Damascus (“Whhhoooooaaaa!!!! Look at that, like, flaming Cross, man!), John the Baptist’s head on a platter with lots and lots of dripping fake blood, and some really awesome wicked cool Revelation floats best viewed on three tabs of acid or a couple of ‘shrooms. Children would learn incessantly about Jesus and Christianity in all public schools and be constantly asked, “Are you sure you’re a Muslim or a Hindu? Many people are born into the wrong religion and you can change it! There’s nothing wrong with changing your religion; if you feel sad or depressed it’s not because you’re dealing with a lot of stress or your grandmother died; it’s because you were meant to be a Christian! You can change it right now! Look at my Genesisbread Man!” Any parent who disagreed with extreme Christian indoctrination and identified it as a sick, toxic cult would have their children forcibly removed and protected from their Christophobia because everyone knows that children, once they know they’re the wrong religion and need to transition to the right one, will commit suicide in a day and a half if you stop them, or even try to talk to them about it. Groups purporting to ‘help’ and ‘protect’ children would secretly mail them things they wanted that their parents had forbidden—crosses, Bibles, Communion wafers, swords of vengeance, Wal-Mart Biblical action figures , Jesus and Mary butt plugs . All right-thinking inclusive people would uncritically support this because children were essentially little adults who knew what was best for them, and the parents’ job was to get out of the way and let Little Moishe Brother Ezekiel become the pint-sized Bible-thumper he knew he was truly born to be. It’s not his fault his family is a bunch of liberal whackos and hate jobs who accept their gay cousin and teach their kids to hate doctrines like love and tolerance and the health benefits of quinoa. Churches everywhere will report hundreds, even thousands of children all applying to change their religion as soon as possible. Social media would be rampant with Christian ‘Warriors of God’ canceling and issuing rape and crucifixion threats to anyone who dared critique them. They’d seek to have liberals arrested, jailed, or at least banned from X for the ‘hate crime’ of pointing out there’s no evidence of God or for speaking out in favor of abortion and helping the poor. Anonymous young Christian losers with no jobs and no future would excavate the social media posts of anyone trying to accomplish anything seeking RATs (Radical Atheist Terrorists) damaging children with their scurrilous lessons that people can live moral lives without religion. Famously Christophobic Massachusetts would pass a ‘Don’t Say J’ law after the horror of Walt Disney’s annual Jesus Days inviting all those who love Jesus, warning Christophobes that this might not be the best weekend to take little Ahmed or little Parvati there, who might be subjected to blatant Christian love right there in front of Cinderella’s Chapel. Critics of Christian Pride Month would be denounced as Christophobic Nazarenis with crosses and fish spray-painted on their houses at night. Christian activists would attack any non-Christian trying to speak at a library or a hotel conference room and try to shut it all down, arguing that Christophobic hate speech was not protected by the Constitution. Christian activists would demand the right to be allowed into places formerly forbidden to Christians for safety purposes—synagogues, mosques, temples, Native reserves and reservations. Christian Pride Parade critics would complain about how gorier and kinkier the floats with Jesus’s suffering had become. I kid, but we’ve seen this before The cultiness and Orwellian Thought Police authoritarianism we condemn on the ‘woke’ social just-us left is the same we saw forty-three years ago with the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of the so-called Religious Right, with one key exception: The Christian Right never attained the level of power and governmental infiltration the Regressive Left has achieved. It wasn’t for lack of trying, and the Right came damn close. Reagan’s election unleashed America’s right-wing kooks. I’m not sure if there’s a specific person or event that unleashed America’s left-wing kooks more recently, but theories are welcome in the comments. Conservative Christians in the ‘80s organized and strategized how to infiltrate the new, Christian-friendly government. They began, sensibly, bottom-up rather than top-down. They got elected to boring political positions no one cared about: City councillors and school boards. The ‘textbook wars’ began with a Texas couple named Mel and Norma Gabler, who sought to ‘cleanse’ America’s textbooks of anything they considered anti-family, anti-God or anti-American. They abhorred any teaching that contradicted conservative values or Christian mythologies. They hated evolution. Conservative Christians began chipping away at the eight-year-old Roe v. Wade decision. They wrote angry letters to the editor denouncing liberal values and accusing their critics of hating God, America and the family, which, admittedly, looks somewhat less insane today as the Queer movement has explicitly stated it has no use for the nuclear family anymore and campus protesters hate on the capitalism that privileged them enough to go to college and bite the hands that fed and raised them. The Christian Right always hated sex—mostly for females. Their lopsided calls for more sexual morality and purity forced us liberals to keep reminding them it takes two to make a baby, and if a woman is having sex she shouldn’t be, shouldn’t the man she’s having it with be rebuked as well? “Yeah, that’s wrong too,” they’d say and return to fulminating about wicked temptresses and Jezebels. Wayward dicks never bothered them as much as inviting vaginas. Because sexual morality was always the woman’s fault or responsibility, just as it is today in the Middle East and many other parts of the world. They never even stressed much when Christian Republican dicks found their ways into male mouths and anuses, which they frequently did , especially with Religious Right politicians. What men did with their penis was of no business for women, as far as they were concerned. The Christian Right worked their way slowly and patiently to the top echelons of political power, taking control first of the Republican Party and then Congress. Déjà vu. We’ve seen the rise of one fun-demented-list cult seizing the hearts and minds of Americans and now we’re seeing it again—from the other side. If today’s Christian Right is perturbed by the success of the woke social just-us cult, they wrote the vision and playbook themselves. Although Canada has never seen a religious right-wing authoritarian takeover attempt like the U.S. once did, we’re now seeing the rise in left-wing authoritarianism exemplified by our formerly feminist and liberal Prime Minister and his allies who are more concerned about ‘protecting’ trans people (men) from the mostly exaggerated stories of violence against transpeople than they are about protecting women from transactivist violence and hate speech, which is far more common. Karma has come back to bite conservative extremism in the ass. This is on you, Christies. It makes for strange bedfellows, as liberals like me ally with them on preventing ‘gender-affirming’ sex change operations for kids. We can’t otherwise stand them, knowing they share many common values with their hated enemies the far left— hatred of Jews and women , cult indoctrination in the schools, and shoving their values down everyone’s throats. And they all want women to stop saying No to penises. These are the people who got rid of Roe v. Wade and will sexually shackle our vaginas if given one-tenth of an opportunity. Shag the dog According to The Free Press, sex therapists are now advocating for the right to have sex with animals, even acknowledging that animals can’t consent to anything, but if we’re hunting them, breeding them, corralling them, murdering them with anal electroshock and eating them, what the hell, let’s fuck ‘em too! Don’t ‘yuck someone’s area of interest,’ sez one eloquent X guru. Now, I’m not so sure I even want to see the Rainbow Mafia’s Pride Month anymore. Call me when you’ve exorcised all the heterosexual straight dudes taking advantage of your movement to normalize their sexual fetishes. And if you want to fight the Rainbow Supremacists, the Old State Saloon in Idaho is featuring June as “Heterosexual Awesomeness Month.” They’ve got merch in case you want to rub it in everyone’s faces that you’re straight, and Hetero Male Monday in which you get a free pint if you’re a heterosexual male dressed as a straight, heterosexual male. Could I get a free beer at the Saloon if I came in dressed as a straight, heterosexual male? How do they know the men dressed as straight, heterosexual males are actually girly-fuckers, and not butch gay men (is there a lie detector test?) Well anyway if you liked this post, and wanted 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! There are also podcasts of more recent articles there too!

Big Pharma and doctors will literally say and do anything commercialist propaganda tells them to. La plus ça change. Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt Against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharms, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life , by psychiatrist and DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) contributor Dr. Allen Frances, was published in 2013, during the infancy of the social media-induced transgender mania we see today. Therefore, transgenderism isn’t mentioned at all, but it’s interesting that he didn’t think to include it in Chapter 6, Fads of the Future, in which he predicts the next targets of overdiagnosing, overtreating medical doctors and Big Pharma drug peddlers. He thought to include mood dysregulation disorder, formerly known as ‘tantrums’ in small children, neurocognitive mental disorder, formerly known as ‘normal slight mental decline in people who age’, ‘binge-eating disorder’, formerly known as ‘overeating’, adult ADHD (real, but overdiagnosed) and major depressive disorder, formerly known as ‘customary grief’. By 2013, the early signs of transgenderism had been around since the late oughts, but maybe he didn’t spend enough time on the Internet to notice that Tumblr was pioneering all the goofy labels to describe every maladaptive ‘gender difference’ unemployed, unemployable, infantilized young people could imagine. Frances argues that psychiatry is guilty of over-medicalizing, over-diagnosing, and over-treating what are often normal life stresses and problems for which they slap on some silly-ass label (perhaps there’s a coterie of unemployed psychiatrists on Tumblr?) to sell treatments and drugs to people who don’t actually need them. He argues for a return to recognizing that certain stresses and unpleasant feelings are perfectly normal and don’t require specialized treatment. He laments how psychiatric profession abuses have fueled the over-negativity of certain anti-psychiatry groups. He defends his profession when warranted, but the book is about all the crazes psychiatry has fueled over the years, and a pill-popping society trained for addiction with promised, but rarely delivered, quick fixes. He recounts the mental illness fads of years and centuries past: the ‘neurasthenia’ fad of the late 19th and early 20th century (vaguely, ‘weak nerves’, which served to ‘explain’ everything wrong with female complaints about anything), hysteria/conversion disorder from the same time period, the ‘70s and ‘80s MPD fad (Multiple Personality Disorder, which psychiatry now regards as bullshit) and the late 20th-century child sex abuse scandal witch hunts (unfounded ritual abuse allegations such as the McMartin Daycare and the Wee Care Nursery School cases, and overall ‘Satanic Panic’). The public was willing and ready to jump on any fad promoted by doctors eager to make a name for themselves and to make a quick buck from neurotics. Saving Normal describes the rise of Big Pharma and how it gained the power to medicalize anything negative a human being could feel. First they lobbied to change laws allowing them to market drugs directly to consumers, then by doubling the life of their patents by making only minor changes, like by tinkering with existing compounds a bit, to create a slightly different but patent-friendly drug to extend monopoly protection. When they needed a new market, the medicalization of children germinated. Primarily for behavioral issues. Frances says Big Pharma’s claims to putting billions into research is mostly bogus; where they put their dollars is marketing and lobbying for friendly changes to the existent laws prohibiting them from untethered profit-making. Gender critics will recognize the blueprint: Buying politicians; hijacking the medical profession to influence or pressure “doctors, patients, scientists, journals, professional associations, consumer advocacy groups, pharmacists, insurance companies, politicians, bureaucrats and administrators.” That certainly answers the question so many gender critics have asked: How did so many institutions get hijacked by the transgender revenue-driven complex? It happened before most of us had ever even met a so-called ‘transgender’ person. ‘Gender dysphoria’ is the new autism, ADHD and ‘aging as a disease’. As I read about the ways Big Pharma and the medical profession have vastly overblown the very real diagnosis ADHD, I considered how gender doctors are handling puberty as though it was some sort of mental disease. Normal life milestones are not ‘conditions’ to be treated. I remembered something my doctor said to me twenty years ago when I worried I might be hitting early menopause. “Don’t worry,” he said, “when the time comes we’ll be ready to treat you.” What had concerned me was that I was approaching forty and misunderstanding the normal signs of aging as something amiss. I came to realize his comment offended me. Why did menopause need to be ‘treated’, unless one was having very severe and life-impacting symptoms? I bought a book, instead about how to treat menopausal symptoms naturally through herbal and other natural products. As it turned out, I never needed it; I got lucky and my eventual menopause (perfectly on schedule) was remarkably easy. This is why I’m concerned about the mania to ‘trans’ kids who have to ‘put off’ puberty or they’ll ‘become suicidal’. Puberty, like menopause, is a perfectly natural physiological milestone; it doesn’t usually need to be ‘treated’ although it certainly requires plenty of guidance as it’s not an easy time for anyone. Puberty marks the end of childhood and a permanent push into adulthood, whether it’s welcome or not, and I suspect a lot of kids are agreeing to the highly damaging puberty blockers simply because they don’t want to grow up. Dr. Frances warns about paraphilias, which will one day contribute heavily to the transgender craze, as ‘a minefield of unintended consequences’. While he contributed to the DSM-IV, his concern was that the section on paraphilias (primarily male), was poorly worded and ‘allowed the widespread unconstitutional abuse of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization’. Since publication of his book, he has little to say about the transgender craze, which of course begs the question of whether he’s afraid of subjecting his family to physical threats by hateful transactivists. Can you blame him? For pete’s sake, science mag Nature is doubling down on trans pseudoscience, terrified of new research scientists are supposed to pursue, it’s their friggin’ job, but the woke social justice kiddies who manage Nature are afraid certain scientific inquiry might ‘pathologize’ and ‘harm’ the trans community. Read: Shed further light on uncomfortable truths that will permanently halt the Trans Train at the Zanyville station. Researchers are looking for a biological basis for trans-identity, and what if—they don’t find one? Interesting how terrified Team Trans is of exploring this theory, since a positive link would be very much in transactivists’ best interests if they could argue ‘incontrovertibly’ that ‘people are born trans’. It would be a mega-boon to the medical industry which is making untold billions off butchering children in service to The Boardroom. Team Greed is setting their financial futures for life: Creating permanent dependent patients of all ages with treatments and required supplements, never mind that one day said patients may find they can no longer pay for it themselves if Republicans take over and stop forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for genderwoo delusions. It will be too easy to argue that most of these people were born into perfectly healthy bodies, and made the decision to butcher themselves and render their bodies largely broken. I do wish Dr. Frances would speak out on this issue but he’s at retirement age and perhaps he’s hoping for a nice quiet life which he and his wife will never have if they have to field death threats and other harassment by speaking out on a subject backed by real science. Another issue Saving Normal acknowledges that bears directly on the transgender craze is how historically doctors have often ignored or not even bothered to explore the psychological problems or conditions a presenting patient may have, often in service to the fad du jour. He describes Mindy, a young woman during the Hippie Sixties who was institutionalized and treated for the then-faddish schizophrenia by a young doctor who only realized after she was discharged that her problem wasn’t schizophrenia, but the street drug abuse quite common at the time. Mindy was put through hospital hell with some similarity to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest . Dr. Frances admits that the young doctor prone to all-the-other-doctors-are-diagnosing-schizophrenia-so-it-must-be-cool was himself. Mindy didn’t have a childhood filled with trauma, but she turned into the moody, self-conscious, self-critical teenager many children do. Her problems with drug abuse stemmed from what appears to be the normal challenges of adolescence, and an ‘overpowering’ mother. If she wasn’t traumatized before, she was after she got drunk or high and passed out in stairwells only to find filthy toughs shoving their hands down her pants. “She taught me,” Frances writes, “to look for what’s fundamentally normal in people, not just what appears to be sick.” Frances decries how quickly doctors are willing to shove pills at their patients rather than take any time to explore issues in their lives. Is a doctor’s job only to do something, however quick-fix or piecemeal, to make someone feel better, or should it also include telling someone what they’re feeling is normal and that it will pass? Could G.P.s, I myself wonder, be better-trained in recognizing the difference between genuine psychiatric problems versus people who simply don’t know how to handle their emotional responses? Instead of trying to ‘treat’ puberty with blockers and other often permanently harmful snake oil, why not recommend resources for children to explore to ensure they’re not making a very bad decision from which there are no do-overs? Not likely something doctors are willing to do when TransPharma is selling and indoctrinating them to uncritically treat ‘gender dysphoria’ with pills and blockers and here, have some free samples! Give them to your young patients and tell them to come back for a prescription! Just repeat the hoary lie, “They’ll commit suicide, like, yesterday, if you don’t!” Saving Normal was published eleven years ago but proves itself as trenchantly critical of the newer transgender psychiatric fad as any previous ones. It’s well worth a read if you want to understand how the medical professions, both physical and psychiatric, were so easily hijacked by one of the most scientifically bankrupt medical crazes in centuries. The mentally ill were often treated with torture and execution in times past but at least the ancients could argue they didn’t know demons didn’t exist or that the human brain is the most complex creation ever. We moderns in the 21st century have reams of data from the Scientific Revolution and the lessons of the same mistakes made over and over and over again. And yet we fall for it Every. Single. Time. The medical and psychiatric professions weren’t so much ‘hijacked’ by transactivism as guided down a familiar path, and each new fad cements the process of uncritical thinking further. Fads come and go, but the psychiatric community abides by over-treatment and misdiagnosis forever. The real crime, as Frances notes, is that when ‘normal’ is pathologized, people who don’t need help receive treatment that harms rather than helps, and those who need psychiatric help the most don’t receive it. I think of the crazy indigent guy wildly accusing my friend of following him around every Toronto subway station a few years ago when he saw us talking. He turned threatening and I was scared for both of us as he is exactly the sort of person who’s not getting the help he desperately needs. Meanwhile, around the city, countless children and confused young adults are being ‘transitioned’ by medical professionals who vow to ‘do no harm’, but do— aided, encouraged, and pressured by large pharmaceutical companies whose prime directive is not to explore pre-existing psychological co-morbidities and address them, but to make quicker, ever-more insane profits. According to a new research study, the sex reassignment surgery market is expected to grow from $2.90B in 2022 to $6.3B in 2030. I wouldn’t invest just yet, though, if you’re a human psychopath seeking to strike it big in the stock market no matter how; the WPATH Files, the Cass Review , and the dialing-back of transgender medicine in Europe points very strongly toward a North American Day of Reckoning, always behind the rest of the Western world. It’s highly questionable just how lucrative this industry will be in a few more years, especially if there’s a Republican takeover in the U.S. in November. I predict bad times ahead for the transgender industrial complex. I don’t think transgenderism is going away entirely, nor do I think it should; I’ve argued in the past it can be undertaken for various good reasons, including even genuine but, I suspect, exceedingly rare gender dysphoria. Right now I’m reading a fascinating book by a trans-identified woman on what it’s like to become a man. (Expect an article eventually). He apparently is a quite passable man but ironically, still writes like a woman. So far, it’s not rah-rah-transgender-I-hate-TERFs, mostly because he transitioned before today’s trans-fashionistas were born. In fact, I chose to read it because it’s not political; I’m hoping for some interesting insights into the neuroscientific and cultural differences between men and women from someone who’s played both sides of the field. What I want to see tamed like a wild horse is the deeply dysfunctional, horribly harmful transgender medical industry, which has ruined so many lives already, and split up so many families , and often on the taxpayer’s dime. Let the delusionals pay for it themselves. Although honestly, a good shrink, an honest one still in possession of their critical thinking skills, divorced from the ‘woke social justice’ madness with which so many have already been infected , would be a better investment. I’d be more willing, as a taxpayer, to pay for that! 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!

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. 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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!