Like Brett Kavanaugh did? And you just didn’t know it? I recently sent an apology to someone for nasty shit I did forty years ago. Better late than never, n'est-ce pas? I was digitizing my life, scanning journals, stories, and photographs, reminding me of silly crap like my first boyfriend, playing 'beerhunter' with friends, the uber-drama of who likes who and who just broke up with who, and dumb private in-jokes whose humor is lost to the annals of time. One afternoon I read a forgotten movie script I'd written for a college class, very thinly based on an uber-drama in my life at the time, and my words reached out from 1984 to gob-smack me in the face with the evidence, in fading black on white with smudgy typos and clumsy ballpoint pen corrections, of what a serious bitch I could be when I was a college student. Okay, I won't mince words, I can be a bitch even today but damn, did I really do that? I laid it down on the coffee table and walked away, so appalled was I at how my friends and I had acted. I had help, but I was the Lead Asshole. I never read the rest. I threw it away without scanning it. What I'd done to Alice gnawed at me. Our inner Brett Kavanaugh This occurred during the Ford/Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings. I half-listened, half-watched a proposed Justice who was a way worse asshole than I had ever been deny everything. At least I never pretended to rape someone and then laughed my ass off when they ran away crying. I listened as the Senate Committee slowly pried Kavanaugh's ancient memories apart. I became convinced that: Ford was telling the absolute truth about what happened that fateful Maryland night thirty-six years previously Kavanaugh was lying through his #$%ing teeth about not remembering--now--but… He really had forgotten about it until Ford came forward, and probably needed to rack his brain, because he clearly had a serious alcohol problem then He #$%ing remembered by the time he sat down to give testimony. Brett Kavanaugh had a moment few of us ever do: He faced consequences for something he’d done a loooooong time ago he’d completely forgotten about, hadn’t thought was a big deal at the time, and now, decades later, it came back to bite a giant chunk out of his ass. He literally had no idea how he’d impacted someone for an entire lifetime. He didn’t get it, and he didn’t want to, because admitting the truth to himself was too soul-shattering for an older, wiser, soberer man. What did it say about him as a person that he ruined a teenage girl’s life with what sounds like a cruel, thoughtless prank? The fact that he and his buddy laughed hysterically when Christine Blasey tore out of the room indicates they really thought it was a big joke. Well. He wasn’t laughing at his hearing. He was Sniffle-upagus, a petulant man-child, the nasty adolescent boy’s face transparent behind the tissue-thin middle-aged man-mask. This wasn’t fair. This happened like a thousand years ago. Why was she trying to screw up his biggest career move? Why was she bringing this up now? It was just a big joke, ya dumb broad! But before you judge the Judge and write him off with ‘he deserved it’, and he did… …What’s your secret Brett Kavanaugh moment? What should you be judged for? Do you even know? Brett Kavanaugh moments are universal, and usually not nearly as serious as a semi-rape attempt. Most of us will never find out about our moment, something we said or did we didn't think was a big deal, except it was. To someone else. We may never find out unless they decide to confront us - via an email, a Facebook post, a snail mail card, maybe a voice mail message. The risk is greater if you become a public figure. We say and do stuff throughout our lives. When we’re teenagers we’re particularly vicious little bastards, half-formed adults and half-baked savages. My worst bully in high school, the only person I ever felt like I could kill, had finally grown up five years after graduation and later got married and had a child at some point. I don’t know if he’s still married as he hasn’t updated his Facebook profile since the early Obama years (yes, I accepted his friend request) but the little boy in the photo must be in college by now. The First Guy To Hit Me Was The Last And here’s why it never happened again I haven’t gone through life cursing Dan, but he still left a lifelong imprint on me. Do you think it was a good one? I could bring him his own minor Brett Kavanaugh moment, if he ever publicly stated he’s never hit a woman. Which will probably never happen, because he’s not a public figure. And… …I wonder if there's my own Christine Blasey Ford out there somewhere, who could tell a story of something perhaps far more thoughtless and cruel than the shit I pulled on Alice in college. Something I've completely forgotten about. The aggrieved have far longer memories than the perpetrators. I'm not worried about Alice, my Ford. She could, at worst, embarrass me a little but not cancel me on Twitter. She'd never do it because she wasn't blameless herself. It doesn't excuse the way I treated her, or the climactic Biff Thing. I don't know if Kavanaugh ever felt remorse for what he discovered he'd done. Maybe you resist more when you've been globally shamed, rather than privately contacted. What struck me was the similarity in our experiences: We both traumatized others and forgot about it, because it didn't happen to us. Brett Kavanaugh had forgotten about Christine Blasey until she smacked him in the face with a giant, thirty-six-year-old wet mackerel of a misdeed and he learned how abominably he’d changed someone’s entire life. She became a psychology professor to better understand her long-term trauma, and explained why she could be certain it was Brett Kavanaugh, and not someone else, to California senator Dianne Feinstein. Without missing a beat. "The way that I'm sure I'm talking to you right now, it's just basic memory functions and also just the level of norepinephrine and epinephrine in the brain. That neurotransmitter encodes memories into the hippocampus so that trauma-related experience is locked there, so other memories just drift." It wasn't a 'big deal' from Kavanaugh's perspective. But it was to her. Alice in Blunderland Alice created dissension for our college crowd by going after everyone's boyfriend, but deciding mine was the one she was destined to marry. It was comical at first as she had commonplace looks and was somewhat unsocialized. She was, however, relentless. She'd fallen madly in love with James and the only thing standing between her and him was me. And the fact that he wasn't into her. But still. When he didn't fend her off sufficiently I felt insecure and threatened. Between the script and my old college journal, I shook my head disparagingly at my mean-girl bullying, how I gossiped about Alice, wouldn't shut up to anyone who would listen as to how much I couldn't stand her, and the childish pranks I instigated. Like wearing a dead aunt's engagement ring my mother had given me on my left hand, whenever Alice was around, to make her think James and I were engaged. My stunt worked, it hurt her, as a friend confirmed, describing the look on her face whenever I flashed it around. Mission accomplished. I joke-formed a fictional 'hit squad' with a few friends, with fictional stories about getting back at the people who'd done us wrong, always starting with Alice. I'm sure at least some of it got back to her sometimes. Alice had been easy enough to get along with until she started chasing James, and then everyone else's boyfriends. She created bad feeling, especially for James and myself, and started fights between couples. She told my roommate she was waiting for me to instigate some 'precipitating event' that would break James and I up, and that she'd 'wait me out forever'. She shares the blame for her troubles. We all had good reason to put an end to her crap. But the way we ultimately handled it was horrible. The way I handled her leading up to it was horrible. I was her worst bully. One of our number - I'll call him Biff - got everyone's agreement on a scheme to rid ourselves of the troublesome Alice once and for all. The plan was to meet up at the weekly gathering of a social group we were all in that met at the university. We'd get her alone, and in front of us - because, Biff emphasized, she needed to see everyone was behind him on this, especially James - he'd yell at her and tell her in no unclear terms she was to leave us all alone, as we didn't want her around anymore. What really makes me cringe is how it didn't go down that way. What was a terrible idea turned out far more humiliating for Alice than we'd intended. We waited in a secluded area while Biff tried to get her to leave the meeting room, where there were many more people. Alice knew he hated her, she must have figured something was up, and when she wouldn't leave he spoke his mind and humiliated her in front of the entire chapter. Until I dug up the old movie script, I'd almost forgotten about this. I'm quite certain Alice hasn't. A bottle of the house poison, please I remember wondering how I or other girls might have reacted to Kavanaugh's and his friend's 'joke'. You never know what negatively impacts another's life forever. Getting raped, for example, ruins some women's lives, and strengthens others. Some emerged from the Holocaust saying, "I won't give the Nazis one more damn minute of my life," while others descended into survivor's guilt-driven madness or committed suicide. I don't know if Alice ever made her own private peace with us over our groupthinked Biff bomb. As I re-read my forty-year-old journal I was struck not just by how abominably I treated her, but genuine anger I held which I revisited dispassionately; I didn't get angry all over again or re-traumatize myself, but I felt some empathy and compassion for the faulty young woman who had begun to fear Alice might really take her boyfriend. Buddhists say anger is a poison we willingly consume. You can't always control how people treat you but you can control how you react, and how much power you're willing to give them, long after the offense. Had Kavanaugh and his buddy picked a different teenage girl, one who brushed things off more easily, his Supreme Court nomination might have gone more smoothly. He could have moved through the rest of his life blissfully ignorant of Ford's and several more black marks against him, as others stepped forward to tell their own Gross Encounters of the Brett Kavanaugh Kind, including one who accused him of actual rape, albeit outside of the statute of limitations. I'm over Alice's malice; I can honestly say I bear no ill will toward her. She's not an unresolved memory popping up when I'm stressed or angry like a bottle of poison I willingly drink so I can mentally upchuck all over myself again. I don't know whether she can say the same for me. James and I broke up a year or so after The Biff Thing and Alice moved to another city where she married a nice guy, although they divorced later. A few years after college I moved to southern New England, she to the north. We ran into each other sometimes at our social organization events and got along well. She'd left an unsuitable religion and adopted Paganism, a far better choice for someone way too intelligent and progressive for the earlier religion. I gave her a ride once at a large annual gathering and we chatted about our lives in New England, never mentioning the past. I looked for her for years. I reached out to her recently on Facebook. I wanted to connect so I could apologize to her and I thought she might accept since we had been cordial with each other in New England. She didn't accept. So I sent her a direct message, unsure if she'd see it or not since I wasn't a connection. I feel like I've done what I can. Brett Kavanaugh's Christine Blasey Ford moment When we women think of Brett Kavanaugh we think ‘man who sexually abused someone and got away with it.’ Except he didn't. Kavanaugh didn't rape teenage Christine Blasey, he only pretended to. There's a gap between a 'joke' and a real rape. Some women would have shrugged it off, perhaps even laughed it off. Not all women react the same way to rape, or ha-ha-jokey-not-rape. But some are heavily traumatized even when no actual rape occurs. You never know how the victim of your 'joke', your bullying, your cruelty, will be impacted. For Blasey Ford, it impelled her toward a psychology career, to better understand what happened. Kavanaugh impacted her life that much. I don't know how much I impacted Alice's life. While The Biff Thing was a group effort, I think I was the ringleader in a nasty longer-term campaign to personally humiliate her. Christine Blasey Ford failed in her attempt to stop Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination, but she returned his favor by traumatizing him - and make no mistake, it's pretty damn traumatizing to be globally shamed. She wasn't the only one whose life and family were threatened during the 2018 hearings; Kavanaugh and his family were subjected to the same anonymous abuse. It's rare for someone with an ancient grievance to return the favor, although social media has made it easier. Kavanaugh didn't get off scot-free; his life will never be as hunky-dory as his critics imagine, and with the recent loss of Roe he may find himself especially in danger. His family will never be the same either. He has two school-age daughters. A controversial 2018 political cartoon depicted a child saying her bedtime prayers…. “Dear God, forgive my angry, lying, alcoholic father for sexually assaulting Dr. Ford.” It was in poor taste and generated the customary backlash. An understandably sympathetic Chelsea Clinton issued a plea to leave Kavanaugh’s daughters alone. But this illustrates how his family will live with his legacy for the rest of their lives. His daughters will forever be tarred as ‘the rapist’s daughters.’ Kids of both genders can be vicious little rhymes-with-runts. Enough has come out about Kavanaugh that they know or suspect the truth about their father, however much they might publicly defend him or privately deny it. While most women, especially Kavanaugh’s critics, don’t think of themselves as bad people and have probably never driven anyone to suicide, or Ford-years of therapy, they don’t know. The bullies rarely remember. The victims do. A few years ago I reconnected with an old boyfriend on Facebook and he mentioned some thoughtless remarks I'd made that clearly stuck with him decades later. I have no memory of them, but I can't say I didn't say them. I defer to his memory, because they stuck in his craw, not mine, and I imagine it's the sort of semi-raw wound that emerges when he's angry, depressed or upset just like everyone else and myself has. We may die not knowing who our Christine Blasey Ford was. Along with Alice, I learned of someone else I hurt as I scanned my so-called life; and like Alice, he wasn't blameless. But I still think I was a real bitch to him, and I wonder: As petty as it all actually is, is there anyone who has a real *bitch* of a story to tell about me? I doubt I ever drove a fragile mind to suicide like the Mean Girls of South Hadley, Massachusetts, but I wonder who may still be drinking a bottle of poison with my face on the label. Before you dismiss your inner Kavanaugh protesting, “I’ve never done anything that bad!”…maybe you didn’t. Or maybe you don’t remember it. Or maybe it was, to you, 'no big deal'. We are all blind Brett Kavanaughs, walking around and living our lives blithely unaware of our personal Christine Blasey Ford. Until maybe one day she emerges and explodes like an IED to tell her truth. Or his. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

#NotAllWomen dislike being objectified. Some encourage it, and then complain about male attention WTF? Was she out of her mind dressing like that? For a website’s trade conference speaker bio? Her tiger-striped too-tight tube top drooped so low on her generous chest, had it slipped another millimeter she would have displayed what a friend of mine called ‘clams on the half-shell’. She had the rack for that outfit, for sure. But as a speaker at a business conference, well — even the extremely casual nature of the cannabis industry made me look askance. Shouldn’t she try to be a tiny bit more business-like? Even if Business Casual might be considered overdressing for this particular event? A woman can dress any damn way she pleases, right? But what if we’re sending mixed messages? In this era of aggressive, in-your-face #MeToo and #TimesUp, maybe we need to think about those messages. And by ‘we’, I mean everyone, not just women. Just imagine if a man, especially one in power, strutted around the office with his shirt unbuttoned low enough to reveal his manly chest, his rock-hard gym thighs encased in tight trousers or perhaps the bike pants he didn’t bother to change out of when he got to work. Would anyone complain? Would anyone feel intimidated? Would they feel brave enough to report to the HR manager the guy who signs her paychecks needs to cover up more and stop sexualizing the office? There’d be private grumbling and maybe a few blog posts deep within the bowels of Da Internetz complaining anonymously about Mr. I’m-Too-Sexy-For-This-Office. But the ones who sexualize the workplace and complain about it the most are women. Maybe the day will come when office workers can dress however sexually they want without making anyone feel uncomfortable, but I don’t think we’re there yet. Not in 2021. Dress for excess Perhaps the most venerable message harking back to the very early days of mammalian pair bonding is I’m sexually available for mating purposes. The best-looking life forms get the cream of the mating picks, whether it’s a more brightly-colored mandrill butt, or supremely rockin’ bird of paradise mating dance moves, or perhaps less hairy cleavage, as was the case for Homo Erectus, who lost their body hair when they moved to the super-hot savannah. Looking babelicious is a literally timeless message meaning, first and foremost, I’m available, Gorgeous! The message is murkier today. A woman can look good without wanting men to attempt pickups. Men shouldn’t assume it’s what she wants, but she shouldn’t assume it won’t happen. The self-objectifying pair-bonding message mixes with the one telling men Treat women in the workplace as colleagues, not sex objects, even as we wander around the office wearing self-sexualizing high skirts and near-illegal cleavage. If the workplace is the place where work gets done, then why dress like you’re going out with your girlfriends? It’s a tetchy, murky subject, with workplace harassment in the spotlight and a woman’s unquestioned right to not be sexually harassed regardless of how she’s dressed. It remains remarkable that some men still have to be reminded constantly not to pursue romantic attachments in the office, particularly with anyone who reports to them. I’m not arguing women ‘bring it on themselves’, but I ask women to consider: If you want to be taken seriously at work, how are you presenting yourself? How you dress sends a message. How seriously would a male colleague be taken if he wore what Wil Ferrell wore in a famous Saturday Night Live sketch? It’s exaggerated but he’s only showing a bit more leg than a mini-skirted woman. Let’s be honest: Some women enjoy being objectified, like the aforementioned Toni the Tiger. They work hard to look really, really good. Great clothes. Great hair. Great makeup. A woman spending that much time on her face and body wants to be looked at and admired. Don’t deny it, Hot Stuff! I don’t fault her for that. The ancient Greeks and Romans got gorgeous. The ancient Egyptians dolled up. Hell, they may have invented makeup. Men self-sexualize too, to send many messages, only one of them being I’m sexually available. It can also mean I’m the alpha male here. I’m the dominant one. I’m the one you have to fight if that don’t sit right with you. I get the desire to look good. But I kept it business casual when I worked in offices, because, well, the workplace isn’t the place for my red-hot sizzling menopausal mow-mow-mow. Now I work from home, and when I wear sexy summer clothes, I throw a wrap on for a Zoom meeting. Neither The Girls nor my bare shoulders belong. The message I want to send is to take me seriously. Workplaces are for work, not sexual advertising. I dare you to not look at these A woman I worked with many years ago sent a hugely contradictory message with the way she dressed at our small IT firm. She had a highly confrontational attitude, in-your-face aggressive defense with male colleagues. I understood why: She’d previously worked in American law firms and auto dealerships, two of the most notoriously misogynist professions. She had to be a badass to survive in traditionally female-sparse offices. Like ours. Except ours wasn’t particularly misogynist. It blew my mind how she dressed every damned day. I don’t know if it’s how she dressed at her previous jobs but every morning I was greeted with her ample chest’s décolletage. The very last thing I would ever wear if I worked in a toxic masculine environment (which our office wasn’t) is something shoving The Girls in everyone’s faces. Then there’s LinkedIn, another professional setting where self-sexualization needs to be downplayed. People, I’d like to remind you Linkedin is NOT Facebook! It’s a PROFESSIONAL networking group and romantic gestures, comments and messages have NO PLACE here!!! Women have a hard enough time being taken seriously in the yaddayaddayadda RANK MISOGYNY of yaddayaddayadda EQUALS TO MEN yaddayaddayadda BAD BEHAVIOR yaddayaddayadda… LinkedIn Himbos—men looking for love in just the wrong place—happen even to old farts like me on occasion. I shrug and message back, “LinkedIn is a business networking site, it’s not a dating service, I’m not interested.” End of story. It’s a minor male faux pas, at worst. Unworthy of the overprivileged First World posting tantrums they customarily spark from outraged Cleavage Queens of Babelonia. It stands to reason someone might mistake a really good-looking social media profile picture for a potential availability signal, especially if a woman puts a lot more effort into looking good than I put into crafting the perfect snarky comment response. A self-sexualizing photo sends a mixed message. No need to publicly eviscerate the miscreant on social media. Save your outrage for stuff like Weinstein’s casting couch or Cosbying someone’s drink. Or, to be fair and non-sexist, being accused by over a dozen men of raping, fondling, and sexually harassing them. Everyone sends messages the way they dress, whether it’s Everyone look at me, I’m God’s gift to wo/men or My mother still dresses me. When I watch a female CEO spend an entire day responding to her LinkedIn himbo tantrum commenters, getting mad at those who don’t support her or tell her to chill, and her photo indicates she spends more money on her hair than I spend on a month of groceries, I think, Oh, enough already! You want to be looked at! Just tell him to eff off and move along! Don’t you have important CEO shit to do? Dressing sexy creates the potential for workplace drama and could be mistaken for sexual overtones. Which happens on both sides of the romantic divide, despite #MeToo. Sometimes women are the sexual predators. I'm-Too-Sexy-For-This-Office With growing educational and economic power comes responsibility. Today’s office ain’t yer grandma’s Mad Men office. There’s still plenty of inequality and sexual harassment, and the power imbalance still skews heavily toward men, but, and this is critical, not as much as it used to. At this particular trade conference, for the infant legal cannabis industry, I saw a fair number of woman-founded and woman-owned businesses. The cannabis industry boasts a higher percentage of women in senior positions (37%), 21% higher than the national average. Yay for….oh, man, I forget! People can dress however they want. But we need to consider the message we send. Men are slowly ceding power to women but we’re nowhere near parity. The woman in the tight dress and best boobs money can buy is not perhaps the best image fighting the ongoing sexualization of women in the #MeToo era. Workplaces are for work, not your cleavage, and that goes for men too. The more we can focus on our jobs and not Ms. Sexpot or Mr. I’m-Too-Sexy-For-This-Office, the more productive we’ll all be. As public debate increasingly puts the ‘coarse’ in ‘discourse’ and humans divide up into their own little More-victimized-than-thou tribes, it’s time to take stock of how much we ourselves contribute to our problems. Not to assign blame and beat ourselves up, but to take responsibility like big boys and girls and resolve to do better. This includes the misunderstandings coming from mixed messages. Mean what you say, and say what you mean, however you communicate it. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

A bunch of chickie-boos registering post-Roe to vote for the very first time points to how we Americans sleepwalk through elections, until we're like, "Whahappentoourdemocracy?" I raised a bit of debate earlier this month on LinkedIn when someone posted a supportive article on Iranian women’s protests against wearing the hijab. Commented I, It's a critical example of an unpleasant fact of life: In order for things to change, the *oppressed* are the ones who will drive it, no one else. Not the ruling class/party, not the government, *the oppressed*. When they've had enough they say the hell with it and *fight back*. It doesn't matter who they are or where they live. It's a universal fact of life. Something to think about in our own highly privileged, victimhood-obsessed cultures. A few pushed back and one inevitably dragged slavery into it (because you can never talk about oppression without bringing up slavery, since we only got rid of it, like, the other day), sarcastically suggesting “..those slaves should have rose up collectively and vanquished their oppressor(s).” To which I noted there were numerous slave rebellions over the centuries and it remained a primary concern for slave owners everywhere. Rebellions fed the narrative along with escaped or freed slaves telling their stories to sympathetic abolitionists, their allies. There are always allies, I pointed out. Humans can’t collectively agree on anything. You may not know who your allies are and they may be afraid to speak up, but eventually a tipping point occurs and the tide turns against the oppressors. Otherwise, many sleepwalk through their lives accepting the status quo, especially when they tolerate the slow, gradual erosion of their rights until one day they wake up and… The girls finally got ‘woke’—up America’s mid-term Congressional election isn’t nearly as sexy as the quadrennial presidential election, but nothing is collectively making women’s hearts go pitter-patter—with fear—as much as the forthcoming mid-term elections next month, four months after the official loss of Roe v. Wade. Absentee Voting Information for citizens living abroad - U.S. State Department Democrats Abroad All reports indicate that women are registering to vote, many for the first time in their lives, in record numbers, and primarily Democrat. Seems many finally woke up from their deep sleep of, like, the last fifty years and realized that oh, hey, OMG I can’t believe Republicans actually pulled it off! They got rid of Roe! WTF are we going to do now? I didn’t think they’d REALLY do it! But they did, and no one can say they didn’t see it coming if they were paying attention. Feminists and women’s rights activists warned about it for decades. The long slow death of Roe began at its birth in 1973 when foes began looking for ways to restrict abortions, beginning with the passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1976 which prohibited any government funds to be spent on any abortion that didn’t result from rape, incest, or when a pregnancy posed a threat to the woman’s life. It was the first real shot back across the bow and continued throughout the country as Republicans, conservatives, and the religious right worked hard at the federal, state, and local levels to roll back the hard-won right to make choices about one’s own body. “This will result in the loss of Roe if you don’t stop them now!” feminists kept yammering. America’s women weren’t listening. They had shit to do. Like jobs, and families, and keeping up on Dallas and Dynasty. Later, they distracted themselves with social media and Netflix, ironically with The Handmaid’s Tale. “Wouldn’t that suck if it happened here?” some asked while others gave them the side-eye and thought, “WTF do you think is happening under Trump, you dizzy broads?” Three Supreme Court justice picks later and - a total of five liars under oath who said they’d preserve Roe - the joke’s on you, chickie-boos! Ha ha ha! Gaslit ya, bitches! If this November turns into another Blue Wave, like the last mid-terms which saw a record number of women elected to Congress, the next two years could be interesting, if President Biden and the other Democrats have the balls and labia to get some real shit done, damn what the Red Caps want. Don’t count on it, but women can dream. Not all the new voters are motivated by fear of the new Republican lordship over their wombs. Some will be driven by fear that women who value agency will chip away the right’s hard-won victory over female autonomy. The blue wave may be lighter or darker than the last, but it will likely be purple in some places, or simply a lighter shade of red. The question after the election is: Will women learn their lesson? Democracy is like a marriage. You can’t slip the ring on - or sign the Constitution - and then go back to sleep. “I don’t have to try anymore. I don’t have to vote to keep this alive.” Too many women sleptwalked through the latter part of the twentieth century thinking all was well with abortion rights, even as its enemies patiently turned up the heat. You could always get an abortion somewhere, even though it might be more of an inconvenience. Mostly middle-class and white women could afford to think this way, not the poor who might barely scrape up the money for the abortion, let alone the bus or train ticket to elsewhere. Now a woman can, will, and is going to jail if she has an abortion, even if she travels to a legal state. Unless she’s fucking Herschel Walker, who will find a clinic somewhere on the Q.T. You want to be a resident of this Jesus-stan state? You keep your damn legs closed until marriage or menopause and if someone rapes you and you get pregnant, deal with it, you filthy whore! You made him do it with your slutty, womanly ways! This is how Gilead starts for women: Not with the highly improbable sudden American coup d’état of the book, but by incrementally boiling the pretty little froggies. We let it happen. We allowed Republicans to do this. We permitted them to erode away our right to make decisions about our own bodies. Women have power, and sometimes we choose to give that power back to the original holders. So we will turn out to vote in Roevember, but what’s not on the ballot is the return of Roe v. Wade. Whether that takes another constitutional amendment or perhaps some new federal laws that survive Supreme Court challenges, we will likely see a slow, gradual return to eventual abortion rights. What’s the timeline? I don’t know, but it took 49 years to drive a stake through Roe’s heart. Some have called for the impeachment of the five Supreme Court justices who lied under oath about preserving Roe, but that’s not likely to happen, for good reasons. As justified as it would be, we’re already facing a much bigger crisis of state if Donald Trump and his cohorts-in-coup d’état get indicted. There’s hell to pay if he is, and hell to pay if he isn’t. And the side who will bring holy hell if he is is much better armed and more inclined to use violence. Eliminating over half the Court would be truly unprecedented and terrible, terrible optics for any sitting President. Remember, progressives, these things work both ways. What does this mean for the rest of America? Women who paid attention and cared about preserving their rights voted Democrat, or for any Republican or other candidate who declared their commitment to abortion rights. Those who sleptwalked through the end of Roe weren’t registered or didn’t vote and we can thank them as much for Roe’s demise as we can the Handmaids and their Commanders who actively fought and voted against abortion rights. ‘T’warn’t all just the Republicans, after all. What has happened to women is a lesson for the rest of our nation of zombies. Since the ascent of Ronald Reagan in 1981, we sleptwalked as a nation as he destroyed unions beginning with the PATCO air traffic controllers strike the same year he was inaugurated. We snoozed while he nationally deinstitutionalized the mentally ill and created a homelessness crisis, and subsequent crime spike, which continues to this day. The C-average college student granted ill-thought-out tax breaks to everyone, increasing the national debt and destroying budgets. When the nation’s unemployment rate was over 10% in 1982, Reagan’s primary objective was to promote school prayer. It was the kind of silly-ass culture war we have today, and illustrates how a largely overstated grievance underlines a sinister agenda by one political wing to impose a particular way of life on everyone else. We woke up in 1984 to re-elect The Great Obfuscator in a landslide and snored as he undermined civil rights, escalated the Cold War and drove the Doomsday Clock three minutes to midnight, pushing it back to six minutes in December 1987 with the INF Treaty with the then-Soviet Union. We shut our ears to warnings during the Bush II era that income inequality was a serious problem and the middle class was disappearing. We had more important things to think about, like how the hell we were going to find another good-paying job in the latest recession and whether we were going to get murdered in workplace mass shootings. Now here we are in 2022 and we can’t agree on what’s a secure, honest election or even collectively condemn a violent attempted overthrow of a democratic government. At least in 1974, Republicans grudgingly came to agree that Richard Nixon had to go. We still point our fingers at ‘shithole countries’ and tell each other, Yeah, we’re not like that. Not even close! Those damn libtards just hate ‘Murica! Sleeping beauties and their new transfer of body autonomy to male control are the canary in the coal mine for American voters. I won’t even quote Pastor Neimoller, we all know what he said. We don’t care. We have shit to do. Gotta catch the Jeffrey Dahmer series on Netflix tonight! Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

The latest 'No news here' study on men's undateability ignores the problems with women, and how we continue to raise boys In more nothing-news-here from the 'Water Is Wet' department, a recent study on dating determined that the number of chronically single men continues to grow as women say "Nuh-uh," to any who have consistently failed to meet what they've been saying they want for literally several decades: Emotional connection, ability to communicate, shared similar values. The yeah-duh conclusion that women are now pickier and not 'settling' for men also notes that marriage/partnership often benefits men more than women, and that women, especially single, childless ones, are leading happier lives without men or children. Having vowed never again to set foot in the online dating world, which has been an utter 21-year waste of time, I decided to never-say-never earlier this year and give Facebook Dating a try. It's the I'm-already-on-Facebook lazy lady's choice. I can report nothing has changed since 2001. Men remain consistently clueless about women and regularly put their most snooze-inducing foot forward. With the exception of one slightly weird guy, the rest still couldn't make conversation, and still don't grasp the concept of basic common courtesy. Were they just lazy? Makes it easy to filter the time-wasters down to two or three who weren't egregiously mediocre. Even the scammers couldn't be arsed to ask for money. Sometimes I gave the suspects some rope in case they were truly some English-challenged guy living in Toronto. Many wanted to move to WhatsApp where I figured they'd start the scam but they never did. The only person who acted like a scammer wasn't--the weird guy effusive with compliments, even when I told him they made me uncomfortable. He kept talking about how much he was thinking of me and wanted me to text him photos of myself in summer clothes (No, find your wank material on YouPorn). He was classically flakey, like failing to confirm a text asking if we were still on for our first meeting (so I didn't go) and that was the end of that. Later he resurfaced and denied having having blow me off and I said, "Review the text thread." Google proved he was real, though, living in the area. He was different, at least. It's not all 'toxic masculinity', although that's where it starts - the masculine notion that what defines a 'real man' is being as unlike women as you can possibly be. The women's movement has propelled women's autonomy and independence to the point where we no longer rely on men anymore to survive, at least until we all vote for Gilead. Men haven't evolved nearly as fast, and it's not all their fault, either. The fault, dear Brutus, lies not just in men, but in women, too, that we are as remarkably un-self-aware. Dazed and confused by divorce Many men, after decades of marriage, get blindsided by divorce, especially as they inch closer toward retirement. They eagerly anticipate the end of their desolate office drone days and can stay home with the gal who's been bitching for years about his lack of availability. She's finally getting her wish! But What's-Her-Name's had enough of the last forty years' drudgery too. The kids are gone and she's done with the whole marriage thing. Guess what departing wives cite as their reasons for wanting The Big Split? Emotional unavailability and lack of communication. Which they've been providing as the good supportive wife for all their marriage. Traditional masculinity dictates men should depend solely on women for it. One writer called it ‘emotional gold-digging.’ The deal, as men understood it in the '70s and '80s and '90s when they got married, was that their responsibility was to provide for the family and be a good father. The diff was that men have never been, and still aren't, much concerned with equality of work at home. The old Enjoli perfume ad from the 1970s lied like Donald Trump to the National Archives about how women can 'have it all', with a job and a family. The biggest lie is the man's off-camera voice volunteering to cook for the kids. The problem of clueless masculinity doesn't reside solely with males. Female Problem #1: Many men want to be more emotionally available and communicative, but don't know how or women won't let them Women sometimes react to emotionally vulnerable men by shaming or rejecting them. Research shows that boys are about the same as girls at expressing their emotions until about age four, when they begin to learn to shut down their emotions and not be so 'girly'. They come to rely on logic and 'rationalism' while girls are left free to be as emotional as they want. The result is men become too reliant on skills that aren't always applicable to human, emotional problems, and women fail to develop their logic and rationalism skills which would serve them better rather than reacting to everything emotionally and 'irrationally' - one of men's top (valid!) complaints about women. I can certainly see the disconnect between what women say they want and what they really want. I had a friend when I was a young hedonistic clubber who said she wanted a man who wouldn't hit her, and who would treat her well, but--she found the 'nice guys' too boring. She liked macho he-men who thought women were their personal property. It's an evolutionary trade-off: Hercules was great for protecting you from harm, but today he's more likely to be the source of the harm. Women who want emotionally available men might need to consider who they find attractive. 'Alpha' males may be incredibly hot but should you take them home to Mother? Many crave power and control and that includes over her. Is she willing to make that trade-off? Case study #1: Nicole Simpson. Case study #2: Rachel Evan Wood. Men who can communicate and be more emotionally supportive are what angry incels call 'beta males', if said males aren't angry incels. When I watched hypermasculine action hero movies, the heroine rode (never drove) or walked hand in hand with the hero into the sunrise or sunset, and if Stallone was the star it was clear communications skills would never manifest in their relationship. I pondered the real 'happily ever after' in which she was miserable with him after the relationship luster wore off. When she's struggling with her demons late at night, where is he? Can he hold her and tell her it's all right? Can he sympathize with her? Or does he pull away because he's tired and there she goes again... There are men who are up for the task, but women don't always notice them, or appreciate them. Granted, these men may be hiding themselves well behind an ill-considered dating profile of mediocrity. Many could use a crash course in self-marketing/self-promotion. Women who are tired of emotional islands must change their value system to appreciate and find attractive men who exhibit more self-awareness than your average rock, or clueless, toxic feminist. Men need gentle, supportive help in getting in touch with their emotional life more. We owe it to them. Women have escaped the bondage of toxic femininity since First Wave feminism, much of which has been accomplished with the help of numerous male allies who've mentored us, recognized the challenges we faced, and if they didn't always 'get it', they got it a lot more than the ones who bitch on social media that 'feminism ruined everything'. The modern world demands a lot of everyone. Men are trying to adjust to a world in which women share the jobs, financial management, and political power. Women are trying to adjust to a new world of female agency and power. Not all are ready for it, including many on the left who pay it lip service, but would rather do anything except manage their own life as though they had agency. Thousands of years of patriarchy doesn't change overnight, and women still have a long way to go before we eliminate it between our own ears. Male allies have mentored us, pushed us, prodded us to become the best person we can be, and we have to do the same for them. Men are really, really good at seeking and receiving power. Which, let's face it, women are still quite uncomfortable with. We're really, really good at communication and emotional vulnerability. And men will play catchup for awhile. We've proven we can learn. So can they. Neither of us is smarter than the other. Female Problem #2: We are still raising misogynist boys Women, as a whole, continue to unconsciously collaborate with misogyny and 'the patriarchy'. I've written about the woman who aided and abetted sex trafficking (who wasn't Ghislaine Maxwell), the women who enable rapists, perpetuate rape culture, who make it harder to believe women, who make excuses for abuse, and worst of all, continue to raise misogynist boys. Collaboration with The Patriarchy (dun-dun-DUUUNNNN!!!) starts when they're babies, when we don't crush the budding misogyny that's probably at least a little wired into their brains after thousands of years of it being the norm, and what they learn from mass culture. We don't challenge four-year-olds expressing hostility to femininity and saying they don't like girls. Even as a small child, I wondered why mothers weren't more offended by their baby misogynists' attitudes. "I'm a girl," I'd have reminded my son if I had one. "You got a problem with that?" When he was old enough I'd remind him he's here because of a girl, and that no male enters this world without one - the parent who does the most work in conceiving a baby, since she gestates it and pushes it out between her legs, then feeds it with her body. If I had been my aunt when my male cousin prohibited me from joining him in his treehouse because, 'No girls allowed,' I would have told him - even a small child - that the laws of this country dictate no discrimination on the basis of sex, and if his treehouse doesn't allow girls, then it doesn't allow boys either, and to get down RIGHT NOW until he's rethought his policy - and if he doesn't, his father and I will dismantle the treehouse. You'd be surprised how fast you can crush misogyny when there are real consequences. Nothing has changed since I was growing up. New parents can find plenty of advice on dealing with misogyny in boys - and how to raise non-misogynist boys - on Google. But when I Googled 'How to raise a non-misandrist daughter' and 'How to raise a daughter who doesn't hate men' I found nothing about how to raise girls without toxic feminism. A certain prominent feminist, author of several books and returning talking head on the news with the loss of Roe v. Wade, was someone I found on the blogging platform Medium and who I quickly muted. Almost everything she wrote was whiny victimist crap, and she said she was raising her young daughter to be a 'feminist'. I rolled my eyes thinking how much this kid would grow up hating men like her mother who never met a woman who was responsible for her actions, or a man who wasn't. Women aid and abet misogyny by feeding it with misandry, the way some antiracist and transgender activists chase off their allies with their own bigotry and hatred. As we challenge men to be better men and to support women more, we need to become better at supporting those men who genuinely want to ally with women - not just against sexism but against the very real threats we face together - climate change, economic inequality, the outsized power of billionaires to dictate and fund toxic government policies, and most of all...freedom from male violence. Toxic masculinity fuels unhealthy emotional denial in men, and toxic feminism encourages an enduring false feeling of powerlessness and victimhood. We'd do well to ask ourselves how much we are the problem with undateable men, too. Because I'd call most of these guys 'clueless' masculine rather than 'toxic' masculine. Trying to escape your own prison can feel like getting lost in a video game where you can't find your way out to the next level. If we're so sure we want emotionally available, communicative men, maybe we'd better start considering whether we want them as much as we say, or perhaps not like my old friend. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Getting shamed, flamed, and filleted on Twitter ten years ago reshaped the actress's view on hate. Then she rejected it. Ann Hathaway is so over being your bitch. The Oscar winner for her 2012 role as Fantine in Les Miserables reflected recently on the social media hate she began to receive after her big win. Although I've never been a Hathaway fan I've always liked her, and I missed all the social media hate a decade ago. I guess I had shit to do or something. Really, people hated on the woman with the Carly Simon-wide smile and big brown eyes that seem to go halfway around her face? Who charmed me in The Devil Wore Prada, a movie I'd made my friend Vik attend with me because he'd talked me into seeing Nacho Libre the week before and I told him this was the only way I could ever forgive him? So why Ann and not, I don't know, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who makes it a point to believe six implausible things before breakfast, or Gwyneth Paltrow, who's turned vapid celebritydumb into a billion-dollar business and consciously-ironically sells a candle called This Smells Like My Vagina? (The killer cooch almost set fire to someone's house!) I guess people didn't like Hathaway's Oscars speech, or her Golden Globes award speech (okay, that one did run on for about a week and a half) and okay I guess she likes to say, "This is actually happening!" the way Mia Farrow did when she wakes up and realizes she's getting it on with Satan. I mean, Hathaway's an actress. She's on stage a lot. Being so surprised, every time, to find herself on yet another one in front of a whack of people is like that woman with pretty eyes you see on LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook who's always posting pictures of herself looking surprised, as though she just beamed down from some planet with no cameras. So yeah all right, I get why Annie's annoying, but still...hate? "It's a thing" Not surprisingly, it did quite a number on Hathaway. Strangers all across the world expressed their hatred for no other reason than, as she put it recently at Elle Magazine's Women of the World gathering, 'simply for existing'. She wasn't cancelled, she hadn't made a joke in 1986 that fell flat in 2013, she hadn't done blackface, she hadn't gone DefCon 3 on the Jews. Critics picked apart her Prada dress, her ten million dollar necklace, her rehearsed-sounding Oscar speech. Some have noted her Oscar arrived just as she'd hit peak popularity, the point at which the audience begins to take you down. One critic called her a 'classic theatre kid'. She talks like a little girl. Maybe she was just overexposed. And probably there was at least a little jealousy involved. But listening to her October speech at ELLE’s 29th annual Women in Hollywood event, Hathaway had decided not to let the 'HathaHate' destroy her. She described how she relied on her husband and friends for support and looked at the online hate with a new perspective. She realized the hate wasn't so much directed at her as reflected back to her. That the very first person to engage in HathaHate was herself, long before she became a star. “When your self-inflicted pain is suddenly somehow amplified back at you at, say, the full volume of the Internet--it’s a thing.” You don't have to do anything wrong to offend the social media hate mobs; they're looking for anyone, anything to pick apart. Twitter has become Gotham City: A social media metropolis of uncontrolled toxic personalities and anonymous psychopathy, where mental illness and derangement is amplified by insular bubbles and, for Americans, a daily reminder that the American dream is a big lie. The 'supervillains' are mostly ordinary people subjected to relentless witch hunts for overblown, catastrophized minor faux pas's since there aren't enough real villains - Weinstein, Cosby, R. Kelly the Proud Boys - to satisfy the woke mob's intellectually dishonest bloodlust. Or as Hunter S. Thompson put it in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "We can't stop here, this is bat country!" Hearing out the haters Ann Hathaway had the labia to confront the hate. Although she had learned not to type her own name into Google, she did when she decided to hear out her critics. How much courage did that take? We mortals can do it and probably not find much; when you're a celebrity, it's a far different experience. Hathaway isn't 'problematic' the way many celebrities are. She doesn't regularly have to walk back tweets like Amy Schumer or address jokes she made in a different decade that don't wear so well today. She's not terribly political, she hasn't raped multiple women in Hollywood and Goddess knows she's no Ye. Like everyone else, she has quirks and expressions and a manner that sometimes get on others' nerves. Before the Internet, she would merely be occasionally annoying; in the social media age, with two generations - Millennials and Gen Z - raised to eschew childhood to workworkwork for an eventual high-paying job which never materialized, they vent their fury at Ann Hathaway or Dave Chappelle, who at least courted their wrath by speaking truth to power with 'transphobic' jokes that made fun of the entitled, privileged masculine personalities masquerading as women. In such a toxic soup, hate goes from DEFCON 5 to 1 overnight, or even in a matter of hours. Hathaway confronted the hate, then went within and explored why these comments hurt so much. She emerged more self-aware, realizing she'd been a HathaHater herself, "since I was 7." "When it happened to me, I realized that this wasn't it. This wasn't the spot," she said. "When what happened, happened, I realized I had no desire to have anything to do with this line of energy. On any level. I would no longer create art from this place. I would no longer hold space for it, live in fear of it, nor speak its language for any reason. To anyone. Including myself." She rejected the hatred she saw. The ugliness she encountered online, the dark corners of the human psyche, she understood expressed the haters themselves. She called it out as "a culture of misplaced hate, unhealed hurt, and the toxicity that is the byproduct of both." She rejected it, and vowed not to let it tarnish her art anymore. The positive lessons she drew from her experience was that if we can learn to hate, we can unlearn the hate, and we can learn to love, or love again, if we make that choice. Hathaway displayed courage her haters don't: She looked within and addressed the unhealed hurt that drives all our lives. She came to recognize her haters were nevertheless fallible humans like herself, that "There is a brain there. I hope they give themselves a chance to relearn love." There's one learning she drew that we've all heard a million times, which we almost uniformly ignore because it sounds so trite and cliche: That you have to learn to love yourself in order to take back your power from those whose ugly statements you believe. We say we love ourselves when in fact we don't. We can take joy from our accomplishments or our relationships or whatever makes our life meaningful, but still be destroyed by an anonymous online hate mob, or even just one nasty comment, who'd rather ruin others' lives than to have the balls or the labia to address their own ancient hurts and grievances, as Hathaway has. Our reluctance may be attempting to avoid the rampant narcissism that has come to define two generations who were raised to believe everything they did was trophy-worthy and that their own feelings about anything outweigh anyone else's. If nothing else, we may ask, don't we suffer from too much self-love? It's not self-love so much as self-delusion. With suicide rates skyrocketing in all demographics since the early 1990s and Millennials described as the most depressed generation in history ever, maybe the alleged self-lovers simply deny to themselves what they know deep down is true. “We don’t have enough time to discuss all the myriad causes of the violent language of hatred, and the imperative need to end it," Hathaway said in her speech. "Because there is a difference between existence and behavior. You can judge behavior. You can forgive behavior or not. But you do not have the right to judge — and especially not hate — someone for existing. And if you do, you’re not where it’s at.” This is what's especially noteworthy about Hathaway's experience: It had less to do with her behavior than her very existence. I wish her language was more direct and less Hollywood-fluffy, and I hope she'll develop more confident, direct speech if she chooses to evolve and express herself in the direction she's begun. What I noticed about Hathaway's old awards speeches as I watched them on YouTube is that she might have been annoying, but she was highly supportive of her fellow actresses. She regularly named, praised and looked at them while she spoke. Her Oscar speech sounded 'rehearsed', I believe, because she'd thought carefully about all the people she wanted to thank and had memorized a long list so she didn't accidentally leave anyone out. Celebrity hate-offs, especially for women, are a regular 'thing' on the Internet and often start with slags and slough-offs from speeches or quotes in gossip magazines. Paris hated Nicole; Kim hates Sarah Jessica; Miley hates Nicki. In the olden days, Joan hated Bette, William Randolph hated Orson, Sophia hated Jayne. Maybe what the HathaHaters hate most about Hathaway is she refuses to hate back. There's nothing more irritating than a target who refuses to be triggered. Maybe Hathaway has learned to truly love herself, and not let the haters who merely pay lip service to self-love, who run like scared children from spiders from their own imperfect, injured souls, rule her own soul anymore. Along the way, she's taken a hard look at how women are treated in Hollywood, and how they treat each other, and rejected that negative energy, too. "Be happy for women. Period. Especially be happy for high-achieving women. Like, it's not that hard," she told the Elle conference. Ann Hathaway no longer cares. She's taken back her power. Deal with it, haters. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

What if we acknowledged genetic diversity with friendlier (and delicious!) labels? Oh no! Not another 'Race is a social construct' debate! Yet there I was once again, this time on Substack, debating with my fellow writer SteveQJ whether 'race' is a social construct or not. Scientists, for sure, don't talk about 'race' anymore, they speak of 'ancestry', like 'Sub-Saharan African' or 'Northern European'. But still. It's a thing. "So," sez I, since no one can ever answer this question, "What's undeniable is that our skin colors are different. We've customarily called it 'race', but if not that, then what?" Since most of us don't parse genetic hairs like scientists. Steve, a really reasonable, rational, middle-of-the-road black writer on race issues, was the most recent in a long line of others who couldn't offer any better labels. Do we even need any? Of course we do. In a neutral sense, we discriminate between differences. It's not 'speciesist', for example, to point out penguins are different from ostriches and canaries, yet they're all birds. Chances are, if I say the word 'bird', the first image that pops into your mind is a generic small flying critter, since that's what's customarily flying around our 'hoods. That's quite stereotypical, you speciesist! Penguins, ostriches, kiwis, and flamingoes are canceling you on Twitter right now! There may truly be no such thing as 'race', but there are clear superficial evolutionary human differences. You know this by the questions of small children, who often ask, as I did as a little kid in a park, why 'those children over there have slanty eyes', leading my mother to talk to me on the ride home about 'Oriental' people as we called them back then and how you must never say 'slanty' eyes and why. World War II, Japan, 'slant-eyes', etc. A kinder, tastier vocabulary Leave it to a sugar hound like me to suggest 'flavors' as a replacement for 'race' or 'color'. I submit dessert flavors as a friendlier, gentler way to refer to clearly different humans. 'Flavor' is such a friendly word, rarely used in a pejorative sense. Maybe in Harry Potter, where Bettie Botts All-Flavour Beans occasionally come in Vomit, Dirt, Ear Wax, Booger and Rotten Egg. When we speak of flavors we're thinking positively: "7-Eleven Slurpees: Now featuring Tutti-Frutti, Tangerine and Pina Colada!" When I think of human varieties I think of ice cream: Chocolate, vanilla, caramel and butterscotch! What's the diff between caramel and butterscotch? Thank you for asking. Butterscotch is Asians, Caramel is those between Butterscotch and Chocolate. And Rocky Road for those who are brown and white and a little nutty! Or Neapolitan for the more-than-two-flavors multiracial. We can't forget Jews, who feature heavily in fevered white supremacist nightmares but whose skin color defies categorization. So I've assigned them Honey, since honey cakes are a big Rosh Hashanah staple. Stupidifying racism Racist language sounds a lot sillier when the labels sound friendlier. "If we do not stand now and perform our god given duty to keep OUR country clean of all the ̶B̶l̶a̶c̶k̶s̶, Chocolates, ̶J̶e̶w̶s̶ Honeys, and ̶Y̶e̶l̶l̶o̶w̶ Butterscotch scum from Asia, WE are just as bad as the enemy, if not worse. We are trading our race for that of an inferior form of trash." - Protocols of the Elders of Zing Vanilla supremacy? Trust, me no one wants vanilla to rule the world. It's just too boring. And butterscotch 'scum'? I don't know if there's any such thing, but I'll bet it's delicious, just like the chocolate scum at the bottom of a Bosco's bottle. "Slowly fear and the Marxist weapon of ̶J̶e̶w̶r̶y̶ Honeyists descend like a nightmare on the mind and soul of decent vanillas." - Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampfeecake Mmmm, waffles with honey and ice cream! Now let's hear from racism's Ground Zero, Twitter: "Obama only won because he's ̶b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶ chocolate. Romney would have made a much better president as he actually has morals unlike ̶n̶-̶-̶-̶-̶r̶ nutter Obama." - Madonna "It's a Friday, it's raining, almost a perfect combination. I'm staying away from ̶A̶s̶i̶a̶n̶ butterscotch drivers." - Plastic Jesus on Twitter "Who's the more annoying #Raptors fan? Drake, or the fat ̶I̶n̶d̶i̶a̶n̶ caramel guy with the underwear on his head?" - KB58 on Twitter "I'm a bit sleepy but when I wake up I'm going DefCon 3 on ̶J̶E̶W̶I̶S̶H̶ ̶P̶E̶O̶P̶L̶E̶ HONEY PEOPLE. The funny thing is I can't actually be anti- ̶S̶e̶m̶i̶t̶i̶c̶ schmendrick because ̶b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶ chocolate people are actually ̶J̶e̶w̶ Honey also. You guys have toyed with me and tried to chocolateball anyone who opposes your agenda." - Kanye West And now, from butterscotch San Francisco police officer Jason Lai, busted in 2016 for being a flavorist asshole: “I hate that ̶b̶e̶a̶n̶e̶r̶ caramel, but I think the ̶n̶i̶g̶ choc is worse.... [Indian] ̶p̶p̶l̶ caramels are disgusting....F--k that ̶n̶i̶g̶ choc." Lai didn't like gay officers either, describing them as 'flames' or 'flaming'. So, while we're assigning flavors, let's go off-color for a moment and suggest Rainbow, since LGBTs get about as much hate as non-vanillas. Humans: We're magically delicious! I'll admit my association with flavors to humanity may be rooted in an early childhood experience. I was maybe three or four years old and my parents and I were at the beach. I saw a black lady on a lounge chair, slathered in oil and stretched out to catch the rays. She reminded me of a chocolate Easter bunny. My mother had talked to me about race and racism, or 'prejudice' as we called it back then, and I understood color differences and why black people should be treated the same as others. (In Orlando at the time, there were almost no caramel or butterscotch people). I thought of her for the rest of the day as the 'chocolate lady'. As an adult, I used to be friendly with a guy who, I admit, made me hungry for devil's food cake. And others who made my mouth water for Bit O' Honey, Kraft caramels and butterscotch toffee ice cream. Look, sorry, I'm from a French family, and everything reminds us of food. Most of you eat to live, we live to eat! I'll admit I've never met a white person who made me long for vanilla ice cream, but does anyone ever long for that? Maybe Howard Johnson's vanilla, which was actually worth eating on its own in my childhood, without toppings to jazz it up. Don't know if it's still around, or still as good. Anyway, there are very, very few genuinely white people. Maybe South Africans. Or Michael Jackson, shortly before he died. But they never made me think, "Mmmmm, Howard Johnson's!" I do have a fondness for French Vanilla, which is less ethnocentric than it sounds. French vanilla is close to my HoJo memories of yore, pretty damn good on its own. I occasionally call myself French Vanilla. That's definitely ethnocentric. Our conversations about ̶r̶a̶c̶e̶ flavor are schizophrenic. We used to strive to be 'flavor-blind', but Critical Flavor Theorists decided that's impossible because of 'implicit biases' and 'vanilla privilege', which is like original sin or something. Claiming you're 'flavor-blind' is usually found on every far-left chocolate 'antiflavorist's list of annoying things vanilla people say. 'Identity politics', once the purview of vanilla supremacists, has now been adopted and reconstituted on the left and is fine as long as you discriminate against vanillas only. I'm reminded of that famous chocolate leader who wanted his kids to be judged not by the flavor of their skin but by their ooey-gooey goodness inside. True colors It's disingenuous to expect people to not talk about color because it's not 'politically correct' anymore. There's too much baggage in everyone's past, and not just slavery legacies (although that's one almost certainly everyone's family shares, so pervasive is one of the earliest human rights abuses). People suck, and always have. We've found countless ways to abuse and hate on each other as a convenient excuse to destroy others. The earliest known murder victim is some poor Neanderthal schmuck who suffered 'deliberately inflicted blunt force trauma' to the head in a Spanish cave 430,000 years ago. I wonder if he called someone a bad name, or suggested his mama was from the 'wrong side' of the Atapuerca Mountains. While it's paramount to acknowledge the mistakes of the past we need to focus on the present and the future which we still have the power to change. Instead of pretending The Social Construct Formerly Known As Race (or Color) doesn't exist, because the differences are there regardless of what you call it, let's create a friendlier language that unites rather than divides us. Pretty much everyone can agree that things that taste good are, well, good things. Even if you don't like sweets, perhaps you've got your own set of fave tastes--potato chips or smoothies or deep-dish pizzas. Our color differences exist, and if we use friendlier terms, the natural good feelings we harbor for tasty flavors create positive associations in our brains for our fellow humans. No one much cares if you prefer chocolate ice cream to vanilla or rainbow sherbet over everything else. With friendlier labels, we may find ourselves reacting less negatively to implicit biases. Instead of reacting on some subconscious level with fear at a 'black' guy [night, darkness, predators, fear], we can speak of color differences without setting Twitter aflame (that's now Elon Musk's new job until Trump returns). No one will ever believe again that 'vanilla' should be supreme. I just Googled it: Howard Johnson's vanilla ice cream, which really was superlative on its own, is gone, along with the other 27 flavors of my birthday celebrations. Case closed on vanilla supremacy. It's harder to believe that 15 million Honeys actually rule the world clandestinely or that Caramels are all rapists. And ye shall know the homophobes among you by those who refuse do oral with multicolored sherbet. Flavor differences are as plain as the cone, cup or bowl under which they rest, regardless of whether you call it 'race', 'color,' or 'flavor'. The wokenati think they can erase discrimination by pretending clear biological differences don't exist and it's flavorist to say otherwise; yet people are undeniably different and instead of denying reality like a MAGA on January 6th, it's time to drag the 'woke' kicking and screaming back to Reality World to confront the evidence of their own denying eyes. Buddhists say the only way to rid yourself of your harmful mental constructs is to confront them, see them, label them and challenge them. Then throw them away because they're useless now. Or better yet, embrace flavorism as the most awesome social construct ever! Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Joking about differences knit us into tight, supportive teams. We need to bring that back before the left’s Fragile Flowers destroy us. Oh, you can’t do this today. Before the tyranny of oh-so-politically-correct social media run amok, I worked at two highly politically incorrect companies. Now you can lose your job over something you said and did before anyone even heard of the Internet, but back then the world wasn’t yet ruled by unemployed, mentally unstable fragile flowers. In a past article I weighed in on the Dave Chappelle The Closer controversy and analyzed a dying type of humor Chappelle employed. I don’t know if there’s a commonly-used label for it, but I call it ‘humorous bigotry appropriation’, for lack of a better term. We employed it at both companies. Before the humophobic ‘woke’ replaced Christian fundamentalists as the world’s leading judgmental sourpusses, humorists like Dave Chappelle — or people working in an office that wasn’t on TV every week — helped us bond by making fun of differences. It’s dicey to do it with strangers, but once you get to know, like, and accept your colleagues, you can make jokes outsiders might find offensive but which unite rather than divide. Not a good idea today given everyone’s growing hostility to everybody — declining civility, COVID Brain, police brutality, growing inequality, precarious living, and the moral degeneracy of Trumpism and the Republican Party. That last blossoming like a corpse flower on the left now, too. Chappelle sarcastically employed it when he joked about pushing his transwoman friend away from a hug ‘because I’m transphobic’, and feminists needed him to be their leader and all they needed to do in return is ‘suck my dick,’ and blithely dismissed his dogmatic trans-extremist critics by announcing proudly, ‘I’m Team TERF,’ for stating inconvenient biological trans truths. Humor making fun of bigotry, delivered with a winking sardonicism, by humorously appropriating those bigotries is what I call ‘humorous bigotry appropriation’. It’s only for those with strong, healthy egos, and it unites rather than divides. Its mortal enemy is the Fragile Flower. Years ago I worked at a Canadian IT company with a diverse team. It was startup-small and tight. Everyone had a great sense of humor and confidence and we joked about everything. Including race and culture and all the other now-taboo topics. (Oh hell, they were taboo even then!) Making fun of ideas, people, or things that scare us is a time-honored way of dealing with them. Humor can defuse a tense situation. It can be employed self-deprecatingly to show others you’re not scary and can take a joke. I call myself the ‘middle-aged dumb blonde’ when I make a mistake. In our office, the Jamaican guy was the ja-mon weedhead, even though he didn’t smoke weed and had lived so long in Canada he had no accent. The Pakistani guy was ‘the terrorist’. He also claimed Jewish and black heritage and occasionally called himself ‘the colored guy’. His Jewish and black heritage were debatable. I pressed him on his alleged blackness once and concluded, “Essentially, your African ancestors and mine are so far back in time they hunted together in Olduvai Gorge!” The Jamaican guy didn’t even look black. He was so mixed-race even he wasn’t sure how much he was of anything. I was the violent sarcastic American gun crazy, despite never owning a gun in my life. One guy was a genuine privileged white guy, but self-aware about it, another was the horny European. Later, a visible black guy joined us, and I taunted the Pakistani — “Ha ha, you’re not the staff black guy anymore! We have a REAL black guy now!” The new guy fit in perfectly, jests and jokes flying all day long. No one got offended. No one complained to their manager. (We were too small for HR). One day something went missing and the black guy joked, “Yeah, I bet everyone thinks it was me!” I responded, “We don’t think you’re a thief because you’re black. We think you’re a thief because you steal stuff!” “Okay,” he said, “that’s fine, as long as you’re not being racist!” Double whammy — dissing the stereotype by pretending to meet it and poking fun at the progressive view that there’s no worse crime than being a racist. The Pakistani guy was the most outrageous. I’ll never forget the day he freaked out the Xerox lady, before the black guy joined us. She visited to demonstrate the office’s new multifunctional printer. We gathered around while she conducted the demo and noted as part of her spiel that you can’t use it to counterfeit money. It was simply impossible with this printer. “Oh yeah, everyone thinks the colored guy is going to do it!” the Pakistani guy exclaimed and everyone burst out laughing. Except for the Xerox lady. She froze in absolute horror, rigid, eyes wide. “Daniel, stop freaking out the Xerox lady!” I said and we laughed again. “I’m sorry,” I said to her. “He promised to be good if we let him out of his cage!” I turned to Daniel. “You can’t behave yourself for even one minute!” and everyone laughed again. We explained we were a tight team who made jokes like this all the time and she relaxed and allowed herself a cautious smile. The other IT office was homogenously white and American. It was pre-9/11's less divided era. We didn’t talk about social -phobias and divisions the way we do today. We were a small tight office with a great supportive culture encouraging office-wide teamwork. None of us were hyper-sensitive. I was a Pagan, so my Catholic co-worker called me the Satanist and the baby-eater and I called him the Demon Papist, in the style of historical Protestant critics, a remnant of my days in a medieval re-creation organization, the Society for Creative Anachronism. One guy got hammered for being a pervert, even though there was nothing perverted about him. We didn’t stop teasing him about being a perv even after he became our boss. His wife, one of our technicians, was half-French Canadian and got teased about being a ‘Frog’, although, as someone half European French, I claimed she wasn’t a real Frog, she was that fake Canadian crap, who couldn’t even speak real French, but that silly-ass Quebecois gibberish. I was the real Frog around here, and don’t anyone forget it! We hammered each other all day long and the very few times anyone crossed the line we handled it with each other rather than telling a manager (we had no HR department here either). We made lasting friendships, so tight we attended en masse the funeral of one co-worker’s grandmother which greatly surprised and touched his family. We attended after-office functions together at local bars and our Christmas parties were lawsuit-free. Our headquarters in another state wished their office was as much fun as ours. They loved visiting us for special projects. The Canadian office’s camaraderie was the same. It was more hard-drinking than any American one but both were the most fun ever because of the tightness of our team. The bonding we experienced with humor making fun of bigotry was racism vs racist humor, sexism vs sexist humor, religious bigotry vs bigotry against religion. The first kind unites and makes fun of bigotry, the second divides and reinforces it. That’s why ‘the woke’ don’t understand Dave Chappelle. There’s a thick cloud of censorship hanging over any attempts at humor today. Maybe we’re less in the mood for jokes with a never-ending pandemic and its conveyor belt of viral variant hits (“Are you ready for the new Delta? Coming soon to a mouth near you — bigger, badder, more transmissible, possibly featuring the long-anticipated Zombie Mutation!”), not to mention on ongoing War on Democracy launched by a treasonous former President with an attempted coup d’état by a violent terrorist mob. Then again, the far left had been growing increasingly humorless long before either. Dave Chappelle commented in The Closer that he didn’t like the modern gays — they’re too ‘sensitive and brittle’ — which I thought applied to far more than only LGBTQ. The far left, or the ‘woke’ (which means what? We woke up and realized someone somewhere was having a good time and we vowed to crush it?), have declared a War On Humor. Humor targets something. It could be a person, a group, a place, a thing, an idea, a concept — or, in the edgiest humor, hypocrisy. The left’s initially well-intentioned drive to become more tolerant, more sensitive to the feelings of others, more civil and more inclusive in an ever more divided society has inverted itself and become the enemy. A growing portion of the left has lost its self-awareness for knowing when it’s going too far. Gen Y is the ‘Self-Esteem Generation’ raised to believe everything revolves around them and only their feelings matter. Their anti-apotheosis is Joe Rogan and “Fuck your feelings!”. Love or hate Rogan, even progressives still in possession of rational thought occasionally wonder whether there’s too much emphasis on feelings and not enough on facts. It’s why we urge the Fragile Flowers to lighten up a bit. Learn to laugh at yourself as well as the foibles of others. We’re human beings; we’re hilarious! Collective personal fragility is a genuine obstacle in an increasingly critical battle against growing aggression, ‘acceptable’ xenophobia, and a willingness to tolerate lunatic theories and delusional thinking on the right. Fragility is moral and spiritual weakness, and you can’t fight an enemy armed to the teeth with real weaponry when you fall apart at a simple joke. I’m serious about this. Left-wing fragility is in no condition to fight the far right. It’s too busy destroying its own side. The enemy thanks them. Humor about race, culture, religion, sex, gender, politics and anything else related to the human condition can, for sure, be mean-spirited and hurtful. But it depends on the context and the company you’re with. It also depends on the time period. What’s offensive today wasn’t twenty or thirty years ago. Keep that in mind the next time you open your mouth to say something that will offend an as-yet-unborn generation. Today, people take offense under the pretense of looking out for others (taking, ironically, a fairly patronizing view of them) when in fact they object to the poke at that group’s hypocrisies. Hypocrisy is always fair game for humor. When everyone is in on the joke, when everyone genuinely accepts others and all their imperfections, we can all laugh together. It’s why my favorite comedian is the Canadian Russell Peters, who grew up in Toronto in an Indian immigrant family. They moved to middle-class Brampton, a nearby suburb commonly known as ‘Bramladesh’ for its large Indian and Middle Eastern population. The Greater Toronto Area is one of the most multicultural and diverse cities in the world, with over 140 different languages. He’s had plenty of time to mix and mingle with a lot of different people, and he knows everyone hands-down. My favorite Peters routines are the ones making fun of white people. Why? Because he freaking nails us! As he does everyone else. I don’t get mad because he’s part of my tribe — a humorist. Someone who can laugh at everything. A friend tells me how her husband laughed uproariously when Peters joked about the Chinese, including the way they spoke English (he’s great with accents) and their mannerisms. “That’s exactly what we’re like!” her husband guffawed. Peters’s audiences are diverse too. He singles people out and jokes with them, employing humorous bigotry appropriation with stereotypes. We laugh not because he’s reinforcing racism, or ethnicism, or sexism, but because he’s making fun of all of it. The ‘brittle’ don’t get this. I don’t feel more hatred for people who aren’t like me when I listen to Peters, I feel a kinship with them. We’re all funny. We’ve all got quirks, mannerisms, values, judgments and actions that don’t always make sense to others, but we can laugh about them. Together. When you can laugh at stereotypes, they cease to hold power over you. There’s vicious, ugly bigotry disguised as humor, but there’s a great case to be made for the Fragile Flowers of all generations to lighten the fuck up. Removing the ability to laugh together and bond, with a constant threat of ‘cancellation’ hanging over everyone’s heads, divides the world as effectively as a MAGA rally. It’s silencing when you become afraid to speak your mind or debate ideas the same way you can’t in Communist or Islamic-dominated countries or the Fascist regimes of World War II. Proponents can call it a defense against offense all they want, but we can also call it something else: Censorship. And it stinks as much from the left as it does from the right. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Charge $8/month to be anonymous, and bring credibility back to the blue check mark Elon Musk is a supersized Molotov cocktail who threw himself into the already-raging discourse dumpster fire that was Twitter. The richest, not to mention arguably the whitest man in the world, widely described as a 'genius' for bringing us electric cars and throwing his space helmet into the ring of billionaires taking humanity where no government can get the public financial support to go, took over the most up-to-the-nano-second breaking news platform and the world's most vicious public square, resulting in mass chaos. You know things are bad when Trent Reznor heads for the exit. Anyone who's seen this movie before - you may well remember the colossal prequel about the narcissistic malignant psychopathic manchild who persuaded enough people to give him the reins of government for four years (Spoiler alert: Hilarity ensued, but only if you were a late-night comedian) - predated the corporate swashbuckler The Musk of Zero and critics claimed it would end the same way Fail-Safe did, with everything going up in flames. Musk, after all, hasn't exactly inspired confidence as being the most stable genius ever, if any true genius can be. Musk's more irrational pre-Twitter antics include: Suggesting humans might be part of an existential video game; accusing a hero, with no justification, of being a pedophile; and of stating that 'population collapse' is a bigger problem than people realize (it's quite the opposite!) leading one to wonder whether he's just trying to make sure he has enough customers willing to live on his forthcoming Mars colony. So no one was surprised when Elon exhibited a Musk of contradictions in what he intended to do with the platform: Eliminate fake news, and on his first day tweeted a debunked conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton; Claimed he wouldn't allow Twitter to turn into a 'hellscape' of hate speech, yet exactly that skyrocketed, unchallenged, in his first week. People tested it to see how far they could go and discovered you could say the 'n-word' again; in the meantime, over the weekend, Twitter's Head Brainiac allowed Donald Trump free reign on Twitter again after another squeaker of a vote, this time on Twitter (Trump is incapable of just winning with clearly enough votes) leading some to start office pools as to when the last advertiser leaves and Musk himself declares bankruptcy; Claimed he didn't want 'impersonation' on Twitter, began handing out the blue verification check mark to any asshole with $8/month, and impersonations made the hyperspace jump. Some were funny, like blue-checked celebrities changing their account name to Elon Musk and tweeting and sharing Democratic vote-blue content days before the American midterms, while others used the opportunity to fake being LeBron James and Eli Lilley for fraudulent purposes. Says he wanted to uphold, albeit change, Twitter's content moderation policies, which he demonstrated by firing everyone in charge of moderating fake news, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and violent/hate speech. Who replaced them? Presumably the 50 former Tesla employees he hired who know about as much about how to run a mammoth media platform as the brainiac who paid $44B for it. Blamed 'activists' for a Biblical-proportions mass exodus of advertisers rather than noting they'd been worried for months about whether it would be good for their brands to stay on a platform if it was in fact taken over by the notoriously erratic, ADHD Tesla leader. They were joined by numerous senior executives who departed faster than Trump administration hires. Good times at Twitter, Inc. Advertisers fled because no one wanted Twitter's rogue algorithms to decide their brand seemed to be particularly popular with white supremacists or gynophobic trans-activists or people who were still going on about a 'stolen election'. Musk now warns Twitter may face bankruptcy which wasn't a problem before October 28th. His hastily-conceived new blue check policy (now suspended until he can figure out What Went Wrong) was meant to stanch the profits the platform giant hemorrhaged after advertisers' worst fears came true. Now the blue check might be back, and with responsibility for identity on November 29th, but that's over a week away and God knows what the impetuous boy will decide in the interim. Musk is mystified because he misses what is actually Twitter's primary attraction: It's the best place to be an asshole with impunity. How to make it affordable for everyone to be an asshole Former SDNY Attorney General Preet Bharara tweeted that Musk should make people pay to be anonymous. That struck me as an awesome idea to combat the half-of-Twitter's-problem the old regime left standing after they banned Trump, the Proud Boys, and other extremist groups who'd plotted a coup d'etat in plain sight on Twitter and other platforms. They banned the worst of the right, but left the worst of the left, probably because they didn't have much justification, seeing as the left had little, if anything to do with the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Unlike Musk, I've never been a 'free speech absolutist' but I was close to it until the last several years when the ugly hatred that poisons America made it clear that perhaps there should be limits on free speech our founders hadn't thought of. It's an established fact they were way far too busy birthing the first kinda-democracy in two thousand years to manage a Facebook account or tweet anonymous flames about the British monarchy #KingGeorgePeesBlue #KingGeorgeTheCruel #StampOutTheStampAct #NotMyQueen #BribesandGiftsGate #HolyShit15Kids. Twitter did become less toxic post-ban but the far left Reign of Terror continued unabated with 'cancel culture' and vicious attacks on anyone who disagreed with the 'wokenati'. Women in particular could get banned for standing up to trans-activists and 'misgendering' women in identity only. The easiest way to do this was via the indisputably worst curse of social media: The anonymous account. Defenders claim some can't 'tell their truths', especially about traumatic events, without serious backlash if they do it under their true identities, a valid point. Unfortunately, anonymity adopted even with the best intentions can seduce you to the Dark Side. It's just too easy to be an asshole, especially when you're triggered. I know; I had an anonymous Twitter profile several years ago, to challenge the Second Amendment set, and it turned me into an asshole. I got rid of the account, telling myself, "Be a woman and speak your mind under your real name; if you can't do that, then it's not worth saying." Instead of paying for a blue check, make people pay to be anonymous assholes! The system could work on a month-to-month for those who can't afford the monthly fee. If you need to be anonymous to tell your story, pay for one month with the option to renew. At the end of thirty days your anonymous account is suspended until you pay again. It would be interesting to see how much this cuts down on toxic debate and outright flame wars. How committed are assholes to their free speech? How badly do they want to cancel someone for something they said back in 1996, if that person can dig into their own tweets and get their ass fired? If they can't afford the moolah their only option is to tweet like a wo/man/adult other, under their own identifiable blue-checked profile. Blue checks should be free and mandatory for everyone, not just the rich and famous. Anonymity has been a major driving force behind the worldwide social breakdown. When you can say what you like with impunity, when there's no rein on your fingers, you can cut loose on someone in a way you'd never do to their face. You can call them a n----r, a c--t, or worse. Anonymity has been the bane of human existence for all eternity, from the anonymous allegations made centuries ago that led to others' arrest, imprisonment, torture and death to the early days of the Internet in the dark text-only universe of a UNIX shell account. Anonymity and fake accounts made it easy to exchange kiddie porn on Usenet and discuss the forbidden. Before social media, anonymous users left unfiltered comments on news websites, secure their Jewish boss would never stumble upon their horrifically anti-Semitic comments. The Internet started The Plague but social media boosted its virality. What would social media look like if everyone was held accountable? If the public square truly was public, everyone who spouted off on their soapbox would be seen by all, including many who knew their name. Would they be as inclined to take out their personal hostilities on strangers if they in turn could be Googled? What if strangers could swat, dox, or stalk the cybertroll in return, and the feminist he wants to threaten with gang rape can report him to his local police? Neither the left nor the right holds the upper hand in the erosion of courtesy, decency, compassion, or honest debate. Everyone has an inner asshole, and it's time to rein all of us in. Elon Musk, make people pay to be assholes! Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Nearly 60 years ago, Bill Cosby put America's Black men in danger. Let's talk about that. Finally. Bill Cosby is back in the news, getting sued by five accusers who claim he raped them many years ago. No new allegants, just five from the sixty-ish who've accused him so far. New York has passed an Adult Survivors Act giving victims of sexual abuse whose silence has exceeded the statute of limitations a year to file lawsuit. It remains to be seen whether any of his other accusers will follow (law)suit. Snowblinded Bill Cosby was 'America's Dad' and a clean, funny role model to millions until he was unmasked as a serial rapist. Google 'Cosby rape case' and 'racism' eight years after a comedian called attention to the predator in plain sight, and you will still find mostly articles and opinion pieces about the inherent racism of going after one of America's most successful Black men. Cosby himself made 'systemic racism' the perpetrator in his sexual assault trial, and himself the victim. Not the 58 accusers who claimed he slipped them Quaaludes and sexually assaulted them. Not the receipts for the drugs or even his acknowledgment that he regularly gave 'ludes to women, and still claimed what happened later was 'consensual'. Bill Cosby validated the ugliest racist stereotype about Black men, one that's gotten countless innocent ones tortured, castrated, and strung up in trees: He went after White women. The compilation photo includes a few better-tanned victims, but it's unquestionable he preferred his extramarital affairs, consensual or not, light-skinned. Cosby's rapes demonstrate a level of ballsiness otherwise inconceivable in early civil rights America, a man whose wealth and celebrity privilege superseded his victims' White privilege, demonstrating a power over them that also endangered others. What Black America doesn't talk about How do you know when a White woman is telling the truth about a Black man raping her? When she doesn't accuse him until years or decades later. White America has a long established history of White women lying about sexual advances by a Black man or several. If there's a single case of a lynched Black man actually raping a White woman before the civil rights movement, I can't find it. American history is filled with shameful accounts of trumped-up excuses for inflicting countless horrendous evils on Black people, many of which involve alleged sexual interest or contact with White women by alleged hyper-sexual Black men. What I fail to find several years later on Google, blogs, articles, or even poorly-written YouTube comments is how much potential danger Bill Cosby put America's Black men in sixty years ago. The man with a penchant for the fair-skinned couldn't have married a White woman at the time he married Camille Olivia Hanks. America's anti-miscegenation laws blocked that route. Instead, Coz satisfied his desire for forbidden fruit with Quaaludes and his growing celebrity. The difference between Cosby and generations of 'Strange Fruit' is no likely guilty parties with the latter. A Black man would have to have been bugspit insane to show any sort of interest in a White woman in the '60s. Everyone knew what happened to Black men who 'forgot their place'. Perhaps the civil rights environment encouraged Cosby to think he could get away with it, and he was right. It amazes me how he found, and I mean this in the most pejorative sense, the courage to do what he did. We have to remember courage is the resolution and fortitude to do something extremely difficult, at great personal risk to one's self, or certain personal risk as exemplified by the 9/11 hijackers who were all ready to die as horribly as their victims. Bill Maher lost his TV show when he stated in the aftermath, "Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, not cowardly." We forget courage works both ways, like The Force. It takes as much courage to commit great acts of evil as it does acts of heroism. And I continue to marvel, eight years later, at the size of Cosby's brass balls. In the 1960s. Bill Cosby put his own life, and Black male Americans', in serious danger when he began drugging and raping White women in 1965 (that we know of). Not only could a Black person not marry a White person back then, but civil rights leaders were getting murdered in the South, Black churches were burning, and four Black girls got murdered by a KKK bombing at a Birmingham church in 1964. Black men were still getting lynched, but it had gone more undercover with the civil rights movement. Nineteen-sixty-five was also the year Cosby's first TV series debuted. Had it been exposed back then the up-and-coming Black celebrity had raped a White woman or two, I'm not sure Cosby could have crossed the Mason-Dixon line for years. Southern White boys would have looooooved to 'avenge' their women on a real embodiment of their most fevered fantasies. What if Cosby's earliest accusers had spoken out? Curiously, none did for the same reasons women today don't accuse their rapists, celebrity or not. America may have a long, ugly, established position of automatically believing White women's claims of Black rape, but when it actually happened, it seems all the White women were afraid they wouldn't be believed. They were told they wouldn't be believed. 'Patriarchy' reigned supreme, even with a Black skin. America also has a long, ugly, established history of not believing rape victims. It seems in civil rights America, White women knew they could get away with false rape accusations against Black men, but didn't trust America to believe them when it actually happened. Especially not a celebrity like young comedian Bill Cosby. In 1960s America, a Black man was more likely to get lynched for not raping a White woman than raping one. And a White woman was more likely to be believed only if she lied about the rape. Why wouldn't White America believe these women? Why would their accusations be any different from the others? Black lynchings were witch hunts; all you needed was an accusation, no evidence required. A dead Bill Cosby would have become a martyr for the civil rights movement, his name perhaps spoken a few years later in Martin Luther King's 'I Have A Dream' speech. Maybe King would have invoked the image of the promising, funny comedian's body being pulled out of a muddy river, his wrists tied behind his back, his skull crushed, his body a testament to the torture he endured before he died. And perhaps White (liberal) America would have accepted the martyr, assuming he must be innocent because he got lynched, and you know, White women lie. But his earliest victims didn't tell. Somehow, Cosby knew they wouldn't. In fact, he was bold enough to make a statement of power to them. "Their [the other victims'] stories are all the same. Suddenly, I was passed out, and the next thing I know, there he is. It’s almost like he wants you awake. He waits," said Kristina Ruehli, Cosby's alleged earliest victim, from her 1965 encounter with him. She told her boyfriend at the time, but never considered going to the police. "It was not like I was traumatized," she told People Magazine. "There were no rape kits. He had not violated or penetrated me. No one would have believed me.” [Italics mine] No, she had just woken up to find him trying to stick his penis into her mouth. Ruehli didn't tell because she was "...embarassed. How did that happen? I was embarrassed that I had put myself in that position, because the woman always blames herself, right?" His next known victim was a Playboy bunny named Karla in 1967, now the wife of Lou Ferrigno, a/k/a The Incredible Hulk, before she met her husband. She didn't tell, either. Later victims claimed they didn't go to the police or tell anyone because guess what, they didn't think they'd be believed, and were told by others they wouldn't be. By then, with an established actor and comedian, they might have been right. Accusing the rich and powerful comes with great personal risk, regardless of skin color. No color matters more in America than the color of one's money. If you have enough green, you can get away with pretty much anything. (Ask O.J. And arguably, Trump.) How much could America have believed Fat Albert could rape women? The Jell-O pudding fan? Dr. Huxtable? Ghost Dad? America's Dad? No one, it seems, until some male comedian made a joke and finally, America woke up, rather a lot like Cosby's victims. "Wha---? Whaaahappen?" Then people began to believe accusations. Once a man bestowed his prima facie accusation at a far more beloved comedian than himself, suddenly, now, finally, the women were believed. In the early 21st century, Black men don't get lynched anymore for 'messing with White women'. But women still don't tell, or report, because they don't think they'll be believed. La plus ça change... This is a pared-down version of the original, longer article which you can see on Substack. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

We're all on the narcissism spectrum. Aspire to be in the right place, and practice healthy self-love. No one wants to be labeled A Narcissist. For fifteen years we’ve been inundated by cascades of pop-psychology scare content about narcissism, the malignancy of narcissists, and how to tell if your least favorite person is a narcissist (Your ex! Your ex!). We’ve also seen countless articles on Imposter Syndrome, low self-esteem, self-hatred and social media-induced mental illness in teenagers, especially girls. Do we love ourselves too much, or not enough? We meditate, we pray, we engage in self-improvement, we journal our gratitude, and we seek happiness, but not, hopefully, at the expense of others. (Unless, of course, we’re that sort of narcissist.) We seek love, but the experts tell us finding love starts at the mirror. ‘Self-love’. There’s something a little scary-sounding about it. If there are some who love too much as a bestselling self-help book in the 1980s labeled it, clearly there are people who love themselves too much. Are you a narcissist? No, you say, shaking your head. I’m not like that! I’m not perfect, and I can be selfish and egotistical, but I’m not a narcissist! When I blogged on Medium a few years ago, the platform overflowed with young women convinced their ex was a narcissist. The stories of evil, awful, selfish, egotistical, abusive narcissist partners cascaded through my daily newsletter and the Medium landing page. Genuine Narcissistic Personality Disorder afflicts about 4% of the population, and Medium’s female writers had dated all of them. These guys got more tail than Herschel Walker. Many of the stories described guys who were typical young, self-involved, inconsiderate jerks, but hardly narcissistic. You know, like a lot of women can be, too. I began to wonder if perhaps some of the ladies themselves were narcissists, angry at their exes for not recognizing their glorious greatness. Eventually someone wrote a useful article on narcissism. It was based on the book Rethinking Narcissism: The Secret to Recognizing and Coping with Narcissists by Dr. Craig Malkin. I borrowed the book from the library. Malkin noted that more recent psychological research and understanding had drawn psychology professionals to understanding narcissism as a spectrum that all human beings are on. Narcissism, they note, isn’t all bad, and you want to be in the right place - with neither too much nor too little. Which Kind Of Narcissist Are You? The book details how the narcissists preoccupying self-appointed experts fall on the higher end (8-10) of the scale. We think immediately of famous narcissists like Donald Trump, the ‘gold standard’ of the most malignant narcissism, the way Hitler is held as the ‘gold standard’ of evil. At the opposite end of the scale, 0-2, are what sounds like the prisoners detailed in psychologist James Gilligan’s books about violence inside and outside the prison system. He describes people whose spirit has been psychologically ‘murdered’, often by a lifetime marked at birth by abuse, viciousness, cruelty, and utter lack of love. I’m quite sure it has always sucked to be Donald Trump, even well before he began being held to account. But if I had to make a choice between being a one or a ten on the narcissism scale, I’d choose ten. I might make everyone around me insanely miserable, but I probably wouldn’t have murdered anyone, and I’d likely be compensated for my mental and spiritual anguish by being a rich asshole who can get away with a lot because I’m such a manipulative fuck. LinkedIn, home of the humblebrag There’s no better place to observe narcissism in the wild than the professional social media platform. Self-esteem and professional pride die scrolling the LinkedIn feed. LinkedIn is famous for the ‘humblebrag’, self-aggrandizing posts sharing how wonderful and awesome you are while maintaining a veneer of humility so you don’t sound like an asshole. “I am humbled and grateful to accept the role of Chief Emperor at Some Company, having been given the trust that I can fill the massive shoes of Joe Blow, who is retiring. I hope I can prove worthy of this role, bringing 47 years of experience to widget production, along with my thirteen certificates in AI, my eighteen Ph.Ds, my three globally viral TED talks and having made the Forbes Thirty Under Thirty list for fifteen years straight until I reached my 30th birthday.” A few years ago I got flamed and lambasted on LinkedIn for calling out a humblebrag by a Millennial military veteran who posted that she wasn’t sure why everyone was always thanking her for her service to her country when she did it for the flag, God, her family, democracy, and more mealy-mouthed blah blah blah. She clearly sought praise the way only famously self-involved Millennials can do and others took the bait, showering her with compliments, and I called out her validation neediness and virtue signalling. When one older gentlemen defended her - he thought she was just The Awesome - I suggestede he was currying favor because she was very pretty (she included a particularly lovely photo of her lovely loveliness). I caught holy hell all day long and hoped my employer didn’t notice (no one said anything anyway). It WAS a humblebrag. But never call out the Holy Sacred Military Veteran. At least not a beautiful young woman. If ever there’s an unhealthy vision of Narcissism Gone Wild it’s LinkedIn. If you’re not inclined to brag about yourself, scrolling through the LinkedIn feed will convince you you’re a loser. Everyone else must be doing better than you because they’re accepting new roles, getting degrees, or touting their super-smart daughter or son who just graduated from college and they got perfect grades all throughout and I’m oh-so-proud of them. A few years back, Millennials had taken to treating LinkedIn like Facebook and posted endless photos of themselves looking hot to get people to tell them how pretty they were (yeah, guess which gender did it a lot more!). Way to go sexualizing the workplace, children. I’m not accusing people on LinkedIn of being raging narcissists, not even the humblebraggers. Remember, we’re all on the scale somewhere. But social media particularly encourages our inner narcissist to step forward, spread our wings and let our Inner Trump out of the cage for at least a few moments. Far fewer will ever admit to their inner Imposter Syndrome. Self-love vs narcissism Self-love is on the narcissism spectrum, but the latter’s got so much negative baggage attached to it. Self-love levels aren’t immutable. We may or may not be born with propensity toward a particular place on the scale but we can move up and down it our entire lives. There are times when we might score higher and others when we score lower. We can be arrogant and egotistical when things are going great and the world is our oyster, and feel low and useless, like when emerging from a bad relationship or losing a job. People falling at the lower end of the scale, past the healthy region, aren’t easy to live with either. They too need constant validation but they seek it in subtler ways and will still suck your energy if you let them. I said to a friend of mine last week, “I made one New Year’s resolution this year. I want to learn how to love myself.” “Wow, that’s a tough one,” he said. “I’d like to know how to do that too.” The easiest person to dislike is yourself, and to distrust anyone who tells you otherwise, since we each know what an eff-up we are. We’re crystal-clear on every mistake we’ve ever made, every time we hurt someone, what our faults are - and we can exaggerate all of them into monstrous proportions. We torture ourselves with the woulda-shoulda-couldas. To paraphrase Stanley Kowalski, “I coulda been the Chief Emperah! I coulda been someone!” All it takes is for some random asshole to put us down and we believe it, or let it ruin our day, or take up residence in our head. But if someone says something complimentary to us? We might smile and say, “Thank you,” but inside we’re blowing it off because the other person doesn’t know us like we do. A few years ago I was talking with a friend. I forget what it was about but I think I was saying something like, “I’m such an idiot! I can’t believe I did that! How could I have been so stupid?” And he said to me, “Stop talking about my friend Nicole like that! I know her really well and I don’t appreciate you putting her down! She’s an awesome person!” It stopped me in my tracks. Sometimes when I catch myself beating myself up for something, I remember what Sam said: “Stop picking on Nicole! Don’t you dare talk about her like that!” Maybe too much self-knowledge is a bad thing. While I beat myself up over things I’ve done wrong, said wrong, screwed up, or cost myself, I totally forget the good things I did, the people I’ve helped, the times I’ve put myself out for someone else. What if we made more of an effort to remember the good things we’ve done, the compliments we’ve received, and wrote them down in case we forget them? I have a file on my computer desktop called Nice Things People Have Said About Me. When I get a really heart-warming compliment, I put it in the document. Then when I’m feeling low (“I’m the most incompetent salesperson in the world!”) I open it up and review it, especially the kind comments from sales clients who loved my work, and supportive comments from my boss. When I think my weekly articles are going to waste, the document reminds me of a few commenters on Medium who said my articles had really changed the way they think. Last week I received a beautiful white calcite crystal cluster from a campaign client who wanted to thank me for all my hard work promoting their products. So I guess I don’t suck. Treat yourself as well as you do others It strikes me what what we need more in the world is not less self-love, but more genuine self-love. And you know who needs it most? Actual narcissists. The ones everyone writes about. If you really are ‘all that and a bag of chips’, as a friend of mine used to say, you don’t have to humblebrag constantly, seeking validation from others. Donald Trump may be a world-class narcissist, but I’d bet my bottom dollar somewhere, not too deep inside, he hates himself. Why didn’t he want the world to see his tax returns? Now we know the truth: It illuminates he’s such a failure as a businessman. Why has he threatened to sue any school he attended who releases his grades, since he claims to be a ‘stable genius’? Things that make you go hmmmmmm. Healthy self-love is treating yourself the way you know to treat others. Telling yourself you’re not an idiot when you do something poorly thought-out. Boosting yourself when you’re down, and reminding yourself of the kind things people have said to you. And believing them. Only this past week, when I did something monumentally bone-headed, and had to remind myself not to beat myself up over it, and looked for the elements I couldn’t have known about, and analyzed how my anxiety led me to take an action before I had all the facts, did I finally think, “I really have to practice self-love. Someone who loves herself won’t lead herself astray like I did.” There’s a Promised Land of greater happiness for those who can practice genuine self-love, without moving into narcissism territory. Forgiveness. Compassion. Kindness. Can anyone argue we don’t need more of this in the world? We can be both humble and proud of ourselves at the same time. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

A teenage activist outs Andrew Tate, the Internet's most insecure manchild, and teaches us how to pwn these guys ourselves Queen of the Zingers she ain’t, but prompting toxic masculinity influencer Andrew Tate to make a global idiot of himself just before before he got arrested for alleged human trafficking brings major kudos to the biggest stick up his butt, professional perma-scold Greta Thunberg. She triggered the swaggering ‘entrepreneur’ whose greatest skill is offering third-rate getrichquick schemes to clueless men, with a fairly unremarkable tweet about his ‘small dick energy’ when he tried to pick a fight with her after Christmas. I’d never heard of him. Apparently he’s this global phenomenon douchebag, whose skills also include teaching men to be misogynist, and how to invest in cryptocurrency. How’s that working out, fanboys? Are ya rich yet? December 27th: The only mildly interesting element of Thunberg’s tweet is ‘small dick energy’. Tate may have only seen the ‘small dick’ part, or was likely unaware that ‘small dick energy’ doesn’t refer to actual penis size, but is slang for people (not just men) who overcompensate with a lot of cockiness and swagger while covering up some embarrassing secret. Who knew misogynist men were so easily triggered? Tate’s embarrassing secret Andrew Tate demonstrated he does, in fact, have small dick energy, exposing his deep masculinity insecurity. There’s an important learning within the whole Tate-Thunberg affair. The 36-year-old man who tried to start a fight with the pinch-faced activist nearly half his age responded to her mildly amusing tweet with over-the-top rage. Had he let it go, what became one of the most retweeted tweets in Twitter history might have trended for a few hours and died. But no, his failure to elicit the attention he wanted from the activist who advocates for a cleaner, safer planet to live on impelled him to let loose a torrent of abusive invective at Thunberg, who ignored him. She had shit to do, man. She’s saving the world! After a few hours of Twitter twitting him, trending Andrew Tate and #smalldickenergy, Tate released an over-the-top video of himself dressed like a bargain-basement Ming the Merciless, smoking a big-penis cigar like a film noir gangster, staging a pizza delivery, calling after the faux deliveryman to ‘make sure those boxes don’t get recycled’, inexplicably flashing some nip, blathering on about ‘The Matrix’ that Greta Thunberg and the mainstream media are part of, and making himself look like the clueless, desperately insecure little man he is, furious that he got pwned by a teenager. Hours later, he and his brother Tristan were arrested by Romanian police for alleged human sex-trafficking violations, and alleged rape. Twitter went wild again, especially when the story spread that the pizza box in the video gave police an address where they could track Tate down. What kind of perfect Hollywood ending was that? Andrew Tate brought down by his own small dick energy, called out and ridiculed by Greta Thunberg and the global Internet. The pizza box takedown isn’t true, according to Romanian authorities, who had been tracking the Tate bros in Romania, but it’s the sort of J-Edgar-Hoover-in-pantyhose urban legend we should perpetuate, since it will drive Tate absolutely insane. Commented Greta after his arrest, I stand corrected. Maybe she is, in fact, the Queen of the Zingers! Who is Andrew Tate… If, like me, you thought, “Andrew who?” while checking Twitter mid-Christmas week, here’s a brief sketch of the puffed-up social injustice warrior. He’s an Internet influencer and founder of ‘Hustler’s University’, a collection of fairly pedestrian online classes for gullible young men who could just as easily get this information from YouTube. Tate purports to teach them how to getrichquick like he genuinely has, although he leaves out the parts about running fraudulent webcams, human trafficking, and how the most lucrative way to make money as a Hustlers U student is through Tate’s affiliate marketing programs getting others to sign up. He also coaches them on how to ‘reclaim’ their masculinity and be a self-described misogynist like him, with some of his more extreme proclamations including that women are owned by men, that they shouldn’t be allowed to leave the house when they’re in a relationship, and that they need to ‘take some responsibility' if they get raped. Tate is a former professional kickboxer who rose to fame on the TV show Big Brother mostly from being kicked off a week later after producers saw a video in which Tate physically abused some girlfriend with a belt. He claimed it was consensual kinky sex, as does she. He had millions of followers on social media before being banned from about a half-dozen of the majors for misogynist comments and ‘hate speech’, mostly against women. It did nothing to harm his bottom line, turning him into a free-speech martyr for the anti-woke set. He is, nevertheless, a self-made very rich man, having conned a lot of gullible young man into ‘leaving the Matrix’ and teaching them to blame feminism for their problems rather than the toxic masculinity he serves. His Hustlers U website contains several laughable photos of students in the process of leaving The Matrix, many with their faces or heads blocked off because they’re not, I assume, man enough to be identified. If you want to see what The Patriarchy looks like, check out Andrew Tate’s ‘War Room’ website (sorry, you’ll have to Google it, I’m not linking to it). It’s the Priscilla, Queen of the Desert of toxic masculinity - so over-the-top you can only laugh. This is where ‘overcompensation’ goes to be defined. …And what’s wrong with his penis? Tate’s hostility to climate change activist Greta Thunberg is part of what might be termed the Green Resistance. A fair chunk of climate change denial comes from men who see protection of the environment as a feminine activity and therefore something a ‘real man’ should eschew. Toxic masculinity is all about conquest, whether it’s the environment, ‘inferior’ races or women. Men often express their masculinity via their cars and when a man is as desperately insecure as Andrew Tate, it can take as many as 33 big-ass emissions-spewing high-performance sports cars to make him feel better about himself. The grand irony of Tate’s willful dedication to polluting the environment is that his alleged ‘33’ Bugattis (Romanian authorities have only seized eleven which suggests Tate may be exaggerating size) may be directly contributing to the diminishment of he-man masculinity more than the most ball-bustin’ man-hatin’ Jordan Peterson-triggerin’ feminist ever could. Chemical exposure is linked to declining sperm counts while a researcher finds that pollution is actually shrinking penis and testes size and volume, and it’s not doing much for female reproductive capability either, that in some parts of the world, the average woman in her twenties is less fertile than her grandmother was at 35. (Off-topic question: How many more Bugattis would it take to make Andrew Tate’s penis completely disappear?) Why does a rich guy like Tate hate women so much? Shouldn’t Andrew Tate be able to get as much consensual sex as he wants? Many of his followers are angry incels who can’t get laid to save their lives, but know that would change if they got rich. I understand why they’re angry. But not Tate; he now has his pick of the world’s most beautiful women, unless perhaps that’s changed if, nearly twenty-five years into the new century, beautiful women can afford to be pickier and not tolerate an abusive, suspiciously psychopathic cartoon Rambo. Losing his mind over a tweet from Greta Thunberg demonstrates what Margaret Atwood has observed, that what men fear most is being laughed at by women. Except it’s doubtful Thunberg was laughing at him. She merely responded with a lame tweet and moved on. Thunberg, a global activist celebrity who engenders mixed feelings in many, has got to be a stinging slap in the face to a man who claims he only dates 18-19-year olds because they’re not too sexually experienced (leading me to wonder what he’s trying to cover up there, hmmm). Thunberg is famous for her perma-scold demeanor and pinched, unpleasant scowl. She’s supremely annoying despite her sound, valid and human-desperate fight to slow or reverse climate change. She gets a very simple fact that Tate doesn’t: It’s not a good idea to shit where you sleep, and he has to live on this planet too. Still, a message from Greta Thunberg is like being gifted a candy bar wrapped in a shit tamale. You want what’s inside, but have to get past the unpleasant exterior. She lobbed a low-grade insult bomb at Tate and he took the bait. Furious that she accused him of being a swaggering empty masculinity suit, or perhaps he believed she’d insulted his dick, he lost his mind, unleashed his verbal flamethrower and she ignored him while Da Internetz went wild. It was 395 million Twitter users against one, not including any lame-ass supporters who tried to defend him, which opened them up to their own torrent of abuse and derision from others. Twitter: It ain’t for children. Except for Thunberg, still very young, with childhood still in her rearview mirror, and at a highly vulnerable age to criticism and abuse. And she ignored him. He might have driven most other 19-year-olds off social media entirely, except he picked a young woman who’s been a teenage activist for five years, and has been surrounded by older and wiser heads who have guided her through her difficult teenage years, made more challenging with autism, and armored her against the slings and arrows that come the way of any woman who dares to speak up and challenge male authority. Especially men like Andrew Tate who are directly responsible for contributing to climate change with his alleged 33 cars. No, Macho Man picked the woman least likely to shrink off Twitter and delete her account. Someone who has taken vicious abuse from better than the likes of he responded to his boast about his penis enhancers like she figured she should just toss off one dismissive retort. It didn’t sound like she put much thought into it, far less than he put into his laughable and now infamous ‘pizza box’ response. She dissed him, and she fucked off and ignored him, while Twitter picked up the gauntlet and universally laughed at Tate, then renewed and magnified it ten times over when he got arrested and the 'pizza box’ narrative grew. Whenever he gets out of jail he will be haunted and taunted by that silly-ass forever video. The jig is up: We have seen him for what he is, a teenage boy locked in a man’s body who’s easily triggered by the school wallflower. Greta Thunberg shows us chickie-boos how it’s done. As the latest global backlash against women’s rights unfolds (once again) as women continue to make strides around the world (as always), tiny little men like Andrew Tate spew hatred boosted by antediluvian Biblical texts he picks ‘n’ chooses from like salad bar religious fundamentalists. It’s not just I-don’t-give-a-fuck Greta Thunberg who triggers emotional boyos like Tate: It’s all of us who don’t pay attention to their petty gender tyranny, don’t respond to their misogynist manboy comments, who barely give them a glance as we pass them by. It’s something to think about the next time we’re in the presence of a poisonous peacock who’s trying to trigger us with dominating discourse. They want to fight with feminists so they can, in their own minds at least, take our power. But what if we met such abuse with a smug smile and non-triggered responses? “I only date very young women because they’ve been through less dick!” “So, they’re too inexperienced to recognize how sexually inadequate you are? After all, if she’s had some really good men you’re so over at the first push-pull-repeat.” “Women need to share their responsibility when they get raped!” “Is rape the only way you can have sex? Is propositioning women a constant stream of ‘no-no-no’s for you?” “Men own women.” “Interesting. You know, you’re only here because you’re mother allowed you to be born. You’re here because a woman chose to let you.” (Emphasis on the disempowering rhetoric). The point is not to refute what he said (anyone within earshot who isn’t a raging misogynist knows it’s BS) but to always keep the focus of attention not on what he says, but what he is. To make sure he understands you see right through him, and that includes his terrifying vulnerability. Challenging toxic masculinists like Andrew Tate by dismissing them without showing anger diminishes them faster than PCBs in their tap water. These guys live to take feminists’ power by triggering them and making them feel threatened by men like him. We can even take it back by meeting them with humor. Outright laughter may not be the best course of action in the presence of such a man; women have been murdered for laughing at men. Also, it’s not at all helpful, and inducing shame makes people more violent, not less. But you won’t get murdered for smiling and moving on - dismissing him. Greta Thunberg exposed more than Andrew Tate when he flashed a nip: Not only does he have small dick energy, he may well have a smaller penis than he had when he was a kid. Think about that the next time you meet a he-man who drives a vehicle that gets three miles to the gallon. If he didn’t have an undersized dick when he bought it, he may now. If you know where I can get Andrew Tate’s version of I Want to Drive a Pink Cadillac, Wear Diamond Rings, and Kick Women In the Butt, drop me a line! Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

What did they know, guess, or suspect, and what did they say about it? If I had one question each I could ask Bill and Hillary Clinton it would be: Mr. Clinton, how could you be friends with someone like Jeffrey Epstein? And Mrs. Clinton, what did you have to say to your husband about it, if anything? My interest is, as always, the female collaborators for male bad behavior, because we forget the perpetrators’ enablers. Not just the Ghislaine Maxwells. These guys couldn’t get away with what they do without a lot of female support. It’s collaboration when we say nothing, do nothing, know nothing. I’ve written about a woman who collaborated with a likely illegal pornophile by not reporting him. She was brave enough to tell her story on Quora, under her real name, and she allegedly used his real name and warned women in the San Francisco area to beware of him. She told horrific stories of the kind of porn he consumed and how suspiciously illegal it looked. But she never reported him to the authorities. Ghislaine Maxwell’s role in Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita empire is well known, and now she cools her aristocratic heels in a jail cell. She’s the most obvious female collaborator, but what about others? The wives of the rich and powerful men whose husbands rode Epstein’s planes, and may have ridden them themselves, when this high-flying financier could give their hubbies access to underage girls? What did they know, and did they tolerate it? Da Gatesez Melinda Gates was not happy with hubby Bill’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, and she made her opinion well-understood. She divorced Gates in 2021, citing among other reasons his friendship with Epstein, something Bill Gates says he ‘now regrets’. She said she met Epstein once, out of sheer curiosity, and regretted it immediately, finding him ‘pure evil’. Bill Gates has no excuse for ignorance. He met Epstein in 2011, five years after his first prostitution solicitation conviction. He and Epstein formed a partnership based on Epstein’s claims he could bring trillions of dollars to Gates’s humanitarian projects. His foundation board members were disturbed to discover they were working with a registered sex offender and pushed back on Gates’s personal alliance. Gates never flew the Lolita Express as numerous Internet memes have alleged, nor did he visit the island. But he was good friends with Epstein knowledgeably post-conviction, meeting with him many times, sometimes closed-door, and once spent an overnight with him. Melinda Gates, an advocate for women and young girls, was not amused. She began talking to divorce lawyers in 2019, shortly before Epstein’s suicide and around the time the media began exposing her husband’s friendship and business dealings with him. She’d expressed strong reservations about Epstein to Bill since 2013, but he listened neither to her nor his board members. Melinda Gates was not a ‘good little wifey’. Those horndog Democrats! It’s curious how many politicians associated with the Democratic Party were friends with Epstein and Maxwell, and I include Donald Trump because back in the ‘90s and early 2000s, before he and Epstein had a falling out, the future Republican president identified as a Democrat. Epstein donated money to several Democratic politicians including Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, John Glenn, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Chuck Schumer. And oh yeah, Hillary Clinton! He’s also donated to some Republicans, including George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole and Robert Packwood. But I can’t find any Republicans personally or closely linked to him, the Lolita Express or his multiple molest-a-thon residences. To be fair, not all Epstein’s donation recipients - perhaps most - likely knew Epstein was a sex trafficker and pervert. Some, like Senator John Kerry, had never met him and perhaps wouldn’t have even known Epstein’s name, who wasn’t a household name yet. Several gave his donations to charity once the truth about him came out, as many did after Harvey Weinstein’s fall. While politicians might be excused for not knowing the names and repuations of every donor they have - and they must have some real doozies whose sins are never known because they’re not celebrities - more prominent politicians, like Trump and the Clintons, might have known or at least suspected that Epstein wasn’t squeaky-clean years before the feds came down on him. Even before Epstein became a registered sex offender, having done time for soliciting sex with a minor back in the mid-2000s and gotten off easy by cutting a ‘sweetheart deal’, it’s hard to believe any of them believed Epstein’s private life, of which they were all a part, was on the up and up. Authorities ignored the evidence Epstein had abused dozens of women by that time, and so too, I suspect, did many of Epstein’s associates. What Clinton and Trump, and their wives, knew about Epstein is much foggier. All ended their connections with him before his first arrest. Da Clintonz Bill’s plane trips occurred before Epstein’s 2006 arrest. While it’s indisputable Clinton rode Epstein’s plane, what’s less certain is whether he ever visited Lolita Island. Some say he did, but the location is missing on the plane’s manifests for 26 documented Clinton trips (Clinton initially claimed only four). Not everyone who rode it ever visited the island or Epstein’s other underage brothels. And Clinton could have gotten there on his own. If Clinton never visited any of Epstein’s personal brothels, and if nothing happened on the plane (the pilot testified he never saw anything sexual on the plane, ever), it’s possible Bill Clinton is clean. But those rumors he was on Lolita Island persist. And with disinformation, conspiracy theories, and ‘deep fakes’ so common, and Bill’s own penchant for lying, who really knows? The unexplained part is how ignorant anyone could be if they lived in the same neighborhood or region as Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein’s proclivities weren’t a secret to his neighbors. Bestselling author James Patterson, who lived near Epstein in Palm Beach, wrote a book about him and noted that the neighbors knew something wasn’t right. Patterson had heard ‘hair-raising’ stories about him for years, and many had seen young women coming and going from Epstein’s property. And this was all before Epstein’s first arrest. The locals on St. James Island called his island seraglio ‘Pedophile Island’. And if Donald Trump knew about Epstein’s fondness for very young women, it’s a sure bet many others did too. The wives had to have heard about all of this, and who knows what they may have seen or experienced they haven’t spoken about. New York is the biggest small town in America where everyone knows everything about everyone else, if they care to know. The Clintons moved there in 2000, so Hillary could campaign for the Senate. Bill Clinton says he briefly visited Epstein’s Manhattan apartment once, but in the company of staff and Secret Service agents. Maybe it’s on the videos Epstein made. He installed pinhole cameras all over his properties for video surveillance and recording of sexual imbroglios for later potential blackmail. But we don’t know if he had the goods on Clinton. So did Bill or didn’t Bill? And how did even pre-arrest Epstein escape Hillary Clinton’s notice, a highly intelligent, experienced political activist and budding politician who, like Melinda Gates, had been an advocate for women and children, who would have had a finer-tuned sexual predation detector? Especially Hillary Clinton, the target of so much misogyny? When powerful men victimize others, it’s often an open secret, like with Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein. Didn’t they hear the rumors? Wonder about stories of young women coming and going from Epstein’s Manhattan address? Word gets around with rich and powerful men who avail themselves of the pleasures denied the less monied and well-connected. The Clintons and Trumps were friends before Hillary decided to run for the presidency (Trump had donated to her Senate runs). Did Hillary Clinton detect nothing about Epstein? And if she did notice anything weird or ‘off’ about him, did she investigate further? Or was she blinded by the Benjamins? Or did she just not want to think about what else her husband might have gotten up to? Hillary Clinton, as we all know, has a loooooong history of ignoring her husband’s sexual peccadilloes, and there’s at least one credible-sounding rape allegation against him as governor of Arkansas, although Clinton was never reported or charged. There’s also the very ugly fact of her successfully defending a rapist early in her legal career out of obligation, and it’s clear she believed he was guilty. She can compartmentalize her brain when necessary. If Hillary Clinton has any strong opinions about Jeffrey Epstein, and her husband’s friendship with him, I can’t find them from the famously private former senator and presidential candidate. There are allegations from an IT director that both Clintons were guests at Epstein’s New Mexico address (where he wasn’t required to register as a sex offender) but no other witnesses or documentable evidence. Da Trumpsez I can’t find indication any of Donald Trump’s wives had a problem with Epstein, and they all hobnobbed with their Palm Beach neighbor and his buddygirl. Ivana used to go shopping with Ghislaine Maxwell. Marla Maples and her daughter Tiffany rode the plane in 1994, and Epstein was a guest at Trump’s and Maples’s wedding in 1993. (Maxwell attended Chelsea Clinton’s wedding.) I’m not sure if any of Trump’s wives visited any of Epstein’s home brothels, and I wouldn’t be surprised if wives overall weren’t welcome. Donald Trump pretty certainly knew or at least suspected what Epstein was about. He commented favorably on how Epstein ‘leaned toward younger women’. Trump and Epstein have been accused, not in a court of law, of allegedly raping a 13-year-old at Epstein’s Manhattan residence. The case was dismissed because it didn’t raise valid claims under federal law. The Jane Doe filed a federal lawsuit but never pursued it, and alleged she and her family had been subjected to death threats by Trump (none of which has ever been proven in court). After Epstein was arrested in 2019, Trump offered no opinions, and certainly no criticism, of the charges against Epstein sexually abusing young girls. He claimed he was ‘never a fan’ of Epstein (not true, their friendship has been clearly documented), but he wished well arrested madam Ghislaine Maxwell. Trump’s wives may not have witnessed anything sexual themselves, and may not have seen the young girls, but trophy wives pretty much understand their husbands won’t be faithful to them. All of them knew he was a tomcat. And all of them lived near Epstein and were part of the community and culture that saw a lot but spoke very little, at least publicly. Good little wifeys It’s important to remember that the Clintons and all the Trumps were friendly with Jeffrey Epstein before his arrest. But if the police ignored evidence Epstein was molesting young girls at that time, it wasn’t much of a secret. People see things, but they don’t say anything. They don’t talk about it with anyone who can investigate. They don’t want trouble with their neighbors, especially powerful ones. They might pretend they’re not seeing what they don’t want to see. Epstein’s butler handled making sure the girls got paid when they came came over, and claims he didn’t think anything of having to hand over money to them for massages, didn’t think anything was illegal and was ‘shocked’ when police showed up. When asked by an attorney whether he’d wondered if any of this constituted unusual behavior, the man replied, “It’s not my job.” Human denial is powerful, especially when the perpetrator is the hand that feeds you. It’s why HR is useless when the CEO is the accused horndog and he signs her paycheck. Even if you hear the rumors, even if you see attractive young women coming and going and hear stories about ‘massages’, and especially if your husband is a close friend or at least an associate of Epstein, maybe you tell yourself stories about what’s really going on so you can sleep at night. And with your husband. But it’s what makes many indirectly complicit, when they refuse to see what they see, after they’ve heard the ‘hair-raising’ stories. Melinda Gates wasn’t a good little wifey, but she had the evidence of Epstein’s sex offender registration to wave under her husband’s nose. Trump’s three wives were social with Epstein and Maxwell, and Melania was married to him when Epstein was first arrested. So if she didn’t know about his pedo associations before, she certainly did when he was splashed across the news. Neither Trump nor Clinton have been personally implicated in the worst of Epstein’s sordid affair. The stories swirl, including the rape allegations by Epstein and Trump from one alleged then-underage girl, but since she didn’t pursue it in court we may never know the truth. Maybe she’ll spill after Trump dies. Or not. Hillary Clinton has nothing, seemingly, to say about Jeffrey Epstein, and Melania Trump has never been much interested in anything, as far as I can tell, besides staying as far away from her husband as she can. In one photo at Mar-A-Lago when she was engaged to Trump, even then she looked like she didn’t want to be near him. As a global politician, Hillary Clinton is the most suspect for knowing or suspecting something wasn’t right with Epstein, and given her propensity for sticking with her tomcat husband no matter what, she’s the good little wifey I wonder the most about. (No word on whether she donated her Epstein money to charities). Trump’s good little wifeys, on the other hand, were less empowered to do anything or say anything. He wouldn’t have listened anyway, and might have retaliated against them for even daring to do so. Such is the life of a trophy wife, who gives up her power to live a life she can’t afford on her own, especially a failed runway model like Melania Knauss. It makes them every bit as complicit, because they chose the life they married. In the end, they’re unimportant. If Donald and Melania ever divorce, she’ll sink into obscurity like her predecessors. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, will always remain under suspicion. What did she know? What did she suspect? Did she say anything to her husband? And why does she say nothing about Epstein? Because it will draw attention once again to just how deeply involved with Epstein and Maxwell both of them were? Women will decide, not men, when sick crimes like sex trafficking, pedophilia, a viciously misogynist pornography industry, and sexual assault overall will end. The only powerful man in Epstein’s toxic orbit who suffered consequences was Bill Gates, although his own wayward dick with Microsoft staffers contributed as well. It’s unconscionable that the Clintons and the Trumps - all of them - knew fuck all about Epstein before his first arrest. Bill and Donald may be lying about never having visited the infamous island but we’ll never know, until people start swearing under oath or the mysterious videos are released. If ever. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!