CNN's Don Lemon's massive WTF moment is just--Did the aliens get him too? A woman is like an egg salad sandwich on a warm Texas day... Full of eggs, and only appealing for a short time. - Sheldon Cooper, quoting his father, The Big Bang Theory Did he drop the brown acid? Go off his nut from an RFID chip Bill Gates planted in his latest COVID booster? Suffer Havana Syndrome? Trance channel his inner Mel Gibson? What in hell possessed Don Lemon, an otherwise likeable, intelligent, and customarily level-headed CNN host to utter sheer madness on last Thursday’s CNN This Morning show with co-anchors Poppy Harlow and Caitlan Collins? The subject? Newly-announced 2024 Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, who has floated the idea of mandatory competency tests for presidential candidates of, shall we say, a certain age. Like 70. Quite possibly a double-dig at both 80-year-old President Joe Biden and 76-year-old wanna-again Donald Trump, who’s going to be mad as hell that Haley dares to challenge him. Quoth Lemon: “She says people, you know, politicians or something are not in their prime. Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime, sorry. A woman is considered to be in their prime in 20s and 30s and maybe 40s.” I’d be more outraged if it weren’t so jaw-droppingly bizarre. It’s the sort of thing you might expect Donald Trump or Josh Hawley or maybe Nick Cannon to say. His female co-stars looked at him with WTF? looks on their faces. “Wait a minute—prime for what?” asked Harlow with a tight smile. That was Don’s early warning that maybe he’d better ‘splain himself, and make it good. So he ‘splained. “That’s not according to me—” “Prime for what?” Harlow asked again. “—It depends it just like, prime, if you look it up, if you Google ‘When is a woman in her prime?’ it’ll say 20s, 30s and 40s. I’m not saying I agree with that—” Sounding rather a lot like a 1.4 grade point average 15-year-old who uncritically believes everything he sees on Google, Lemon tried to explain himself further when challenged by his co-anchors and only dug himself in deeper. It was like aliens were controlling his mouth or something. Maybe the conspiracy theorists are right about the recent upsurge of suspicious unidentified flying skeet over the United States and Canada. I guess we missed one! Alien interference might well be the only logical theory to explain what happened last Thursday morning, the WTF-ness level we haven’t reached since Donald Trump accused ex-President Obama of spying on him. “—So I think she has to be careful about saying politicians aren’t in their prime.” Harlow tried to help him out. “I think you need to put on qualifiers, like prime for like child-bearing or—” “Don’t shoot the messenger, I’m just saying Google what the facts are — Google it, everyone at home, when is a woman in her prime,” he said. “And I’m just saying Nikki Haley should be careful about saying that politicians are not in their prime and they need to be in their prime when they serve.” It was like he had no freakin’ clue those ages are commonly cited for what are widely considered women’s best ages for reproduction and sexual attractiveness, however realistic the first and offensively sexist the second. The woman’s campaigning for political office, not Miss America. Not even Ms. Menopausal America. Again I have to ask, WTF, Don??? What truly blew my mind was Don Lemon talking like an aging angry incel about a 51-year-old woman as though she should only be evaluated on her fertility and fuckability. I mean, for fuck’s sakes, Don Lemon is gay! Was he hoping to have a baby with her or something? Maybe he’s worried about her period Never mind the fact that when a woman is ‘in her prime’, according to Lemon, she’s not even eligible to run for President until after the first fifteen years. Which leaves her, what, maybe ten or fifteen good years to campaign for the White House until menopause sets in and God only knows what could happen, she could be one of those crazy mood-swingy menopausal chicks who might start a nuclear war before Putin because she’s having a bad day and Don Lemon just said something mean about her on CNN? Sooooo glad we didn’t have to deal with crazy weirdness and bother about the nuclear button during, say, the Trump years. No periods there to worry us! In 1970 presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey’s physician claimed women’s ‘raging hormonal imbalance’ made them unfit for certain jobs, like, you know, , public office. In 1984 when Geraldine Ferraro became the first female vice-presidential candidate, a female caller to a Boston radio show wondered whether she’d been through menopause yet. (At 48?) It didn’t help this was the same year doctors started talking about ‘pre-menstrual syndrome’, or PMS, when some women experienced heavy-duty mood swings and physical pain in the days leading up to their period, which lent credence to the historical male paranoia that the monthly shedding of the unused uterine lining made women more likely to blow up the world. Even worse, it quickly became many women’s lazy excuse for not taking responsibility for irritable behavior they were well able to control. And anyway, Don, I didn’t know one of the mandates for a woman becoming President is she has to be able to make a baby or something. Maybe that’s the real reason Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election. Competency checks for aging presidential wannabe primers What Lemon took issue with was Haley’s competency checks idea. I guess he’s not keen on it. While I don’t intend to vote Republican in 2024 - or ever - I’m with Haley on this. I’ve been saying we need it ever since Washington began whispering during Ronald Reagan’s second term. “The President might be going senile.” In the summer of 1987, while Colonel Oliver North testified about the unraveling Iran-contra scandal on national TV, rumors began swirling around the 76-year-old President’s mental focus. That he couldn’t. That he kept reminiscing about his Hollywood career. That he confused his World War II experiences with scenes from his old movies (his actual service never left the state of California). CBS News reporter Lesley Stahl reported a bizarre meeting with him in which he didn’t seem to know who she was, then snapped out of it and was fine. His aides said they’d witnessed episodes like this before. It’s never been proven Reagan was senile in office, although he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s five years later, and died ten years after. But we all still wondered. Reagan was the oldest elected President at the time, a few weeks shy of his 70th birthday on his first Inauguration Day. He’s now third oldest, with Donald Trump having broken his record (age 70 and three quarters) and now Joe Biden is the oldest, 78 when he became President. If our Presidents get any older Congress may have to pass a new entitlement for federally-funded Depends. Wait for it—Biden will be 82 if he runs again in 2024. Nikki Haley is practically a teenager by comparison, and at 51, she’s in the age range of what a USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll found in December many Americans preferred for a candidate, 51 to 65. The only one of the three who are ‘in their prime’, if Americans are evaluating presidential mental acuity vs fertility and fuckability, I’m quite sure only Nikki Haley can pass that test with flying colors. In fact, I’ll bet she can pass the other test. I bet Melania Trump would pick her, too. I don’t know if Haley meant her idea as a dig at her possible future opponents, especially the guy who will probably give her a mean, misogynist nickname if she gets in his way in the polls, but I’m down with her suggestion. Sure thing, a mental competency test for both Biden and Trump, and any other 70 y.o.+ candidates next year. Don Lemon thinks it’s ageist, but I don’t. While there is such a thing as early senility - it can hit people even in their thirties - that’s not nearly as common as in the elderly, and 70 definitely qualifies as elderly. Then again, maybe he’s afraid Nikki lied in her response to his record-breaking cluelessness. Responded Haley, “I wasn't sitting there saying sexist, middle-aged CNN anchors need to have mental competency tests, although [Lemon] may have just proven that point.” She might be right. I’m only half-kidding. The WTFness pandemic Don Lemon will be 57 on March 1st. His comments were so deeply weird, so beyond what I would expect from a CNN commentator - Okay Grandpa! - I’m beginning to wonder about his own mental competency. I won’t call for his suspension, or resignation, I think he’s an otherwise fine commentator, but the supreme WTFness of his superlatively ignorant WTF moment makes me wonder if aliens are really behind America’s national backslide toward imbecility. I mean, WTFness has been in vogue in America for a long time, but got a rocket-powered boost with Donald Trump, a man who demonstrated much sharper mental and verbal acuity twenty years ago. Last week I read Twitter with my Tucker Carlson WTF face (Twitter is Ground Zero for worldwide loopy mentally deranged thinking) and I think I said out loud, “What the fuck? Are you really that fucking stupid? How can you still be preaching pointless mental health solutions to out-of-control gun violence for people who will never want it, use it, or acknowledge they need help, rather than keeping guns out of the hands of violent idiots?” I mean WTF, we can keep abortions out of the hands of women who need them, right? And we can’t do anything about idiots with guns? How hard can this be to comprehend? Whether it’s the left or the right, the U.S., Canada, or elsewhere, my WTF meter just broke from overuse. Some of my WTFs are ongoing, like WTF?? when people claim men are women on their say-so (Can they not see the openly deranged, abusive male-entitled misogyny that characterizes transactivism?) or that whales are being killed by windmills (Marjorie Taylor-Greene, natch, one of Congress’s leading WTF’ers). After all, we also have: People who think COVID vaccines kill more people than COVID An entire ‘news’ organization we now have incontrovertible evidence bald-faced lied to America about a stolen election because telling the truth sent their audience screaming to an even more idiotic news source and dropped their stock price We have to explain to feminists men are not women no matter what they tell you (I’ll bet they’re the easiest women to lay) Hillary Clinton ran a pedophile ring President Obama was born in Kenya, even with the 1961 Honolulu newspaper birth announcement 9/11 was an ‘inside job’ by George Bush (Or the Jews. A few have suggested Osama bin Laden, but that’s just crazy talk!) Sometimes, you wonder if someone slipped supersized stupidity pills into the nation’s water system. Remember when we used to laugh at the Middle East because they were convinced the Jews were behind 9/11 and that Mossad-controlled sharks were attacking swimmers in the Red Sea? Which brings me back to the aliens who, for all I know, were the real brains behind the Muslim-munching marine monsters. Anyway, I don’t know where Don Lemon got his last glass of water before that morning show but I hope it wasn’t from Lake Huron. They still haven’t found the debris from that last UFO the government shot down and God only knows what the aliens packed it with. Given the way Lemon spoke last week, my money’s on alien RFID chips that turn gay men into Amy Coney Barrett. If you’re interested in learning more about what the aliens may or may not have planned for us I suggest an earlier article, The Aliens Might Be Here And They Probably Don’t Want Kinky Buttsex. (Hope that's not going to ruin your weekend plans ;) ) 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!

And she put the kibosh on his future raping activities, at least for now "The more fight you put the more they want to give up. If I keep going, I keep pushing, he's going to stop. He's going to let go and he finally did." It’s every woman’s nightmare. A 24-year-old Tampa woman unlocked the gym door for a man she recognized from seeing him around before and went back to her workout, only to find herself in a titanic struggle when it turned out he wasn’t there for the Stairmaster. He grabbed Nashali Alma, chased her around the gym and they struggled on the floor together. She fought back with every ounce she had and eventually tired him out, upon which she ran away and called 911. It’s horrifying. "The more fight you put the more they want to give up,” she said. "If I keep going, I keep pushing, he's going to stop. He's going to let go and he finally did." She went public with her story to let other women know they can fight back. To be fair, she’s a body builder, although he was still the more powerful of the two. But she didn’t give up. She remembered what her parents had always taught her about life: Never give up, always fight. She urges women to call 911 immediately, rather than waiting. The sooner one reports, the better chance police have of catching him. Twenty-five-year-old Xavier Thomas-Brown, her would-be attacker, went elsewhere looking for easier prey. He rang the bell of someone’s house and told the woman who answered she was pretty and asked if she’d like to hang out. Her fiance appeared and chased him off, and shortly after, the police caught up with him. Who knows what might have happened if the fiance hadn’t been there, but this much is for sure: Nashali Alma put the kibosh on Thomas-Brown’s future rape plans, at least for the time being. There perhaps is a woman or two strolling around Tampa today, blissfully unaware that if Alma hadn’t bravely reported him, she might now be curled up in a ball on her bed, unable to function. Alma refused to be a victim. At least, she wasn’t going down without a fight. When the self-defense mechanism fails The MeToo movement has brought much-needed attention to the ongoing historic problems of sexual assault against women. Victims have taken to social media to tell their stories, some anonymously, some bravely stepping from the shadows to refute the shame with their name. When I blogged on Medium there was a veritable firehose of stories about women who had been sexually assaulted or narrowly escaped it. One early story was a young woman who’d been raped—twice, on two separate occasions—even though she was a kickboxer. She’d studied since a young teen. Papered her bedroom with posters of the legends—Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jackie Chan. Worked out all the time and had the trophies to prove it. Then one night at a bar a guy dragged her under a pool table and raped her. All that training, all that worship of martial arts champions and heroes, and when she was physically attacked, she did what so many of us would do, or have done in that situation. She froze. She did her best to move beyond it. Then one night, different guy, different place, what went through her mind was, “Here we go again.” She froze again. I wondered what went wrong. How is it, after all that training, she froze when shit got real without a referee? I reached out to a veteran I know of both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, someone who’d been trained in handling violent situations. Why did this happen? Could women learn self-defense and actually use it when the chips were down? Lessons from a combat vet Colton told me it was possible to mentally prep yourself against bad situations, run mental scenarios in your head of what you might do and how you might react. “The best way to survive is to listen to your gut. And that is something that absolutely can be trained. It prevents “freezing” in the moment by never having the moment to begin with. But if the moment does happen, recognizing ‘important information’ in the flood of data your senses are collecting for you can mean life or death. The more you train, the better you get at recognizing important and discarding the unimportant.” He spoke of the ‘tells’, the super-subtle signs that allow one to assess a situation, using the example of coming out of a gas station and seeing someone standing to the side who looks like bad news. Most people, he notes, will turn their back on the person, scurry to their car, and drive away as fast as possible. Colton looks at the hands and feet and body distribution. Is the person’s hands inside their pockets? “Is it cold outside? How are they dressed? Do they have a foot on the wall? Are they leaning back? If I look over my shoulder toward them as I walk away, do they hold focus on me or look away? In 1-2 seconds I know if they’re a possible problem. And if they are where is my closest advantage? Maybe my keys in my pocket? A gun in the truck? A bystander?” I practice heightened vigilance on the Toronto transit system. I have no car and no intention of ever owning one again. Eighteen years I’ve ridden the TTC safely, with few incidents, none involving me. Now violent attacks have gone up 60%, many of the perpetrators clearly mentally ill people. Last summer a woman was fatally set on fire at a station one stop from my own; people have been attacked with bottles, knives, and fists. The perp demographics are across the board all over the city: Young men, roaming teenage girl gangs, people of all colors, older people and women. The homeless are no longer harmless. One verbally assaulted and threatened a friend and I last fall. My friends and I trade tips on how to sit on the train, what to do, how to watch for trouble, how to not look like a victim. What to carry in our pockets to defend ourselves. (I recently realized my keys are actually a fairly formidable weapon). I run scenarios mentally about what I’ll do with my first line of attack, a bottle of hair spray (pepper spray is illegal here, and I also don’t want to punish a bus full of riders). I don’t know what will happen if I’m ever confronted, but hair spray will hopefully burn their eyes enough for me to escape and won’t cause lasting damage. I might get in trouble legally, but it’s better than being slashed or burned to death, n’est-ce pas? I’m not likely to get raped at my advanced age, and especially not in late February, but it’s not outside the ken, and hair spray may set someone back long enough for me to escape. If things get more critical, there’s my Mighty Keychain O’ Pain. Colton told me, “If someone freezes in that moment and can not commit violence it’s due to lack of mental preparation. And that comes through training.” He describes his first firefight as ‘traumatic’ because he wasn’t mentally prepared, but he was better prepped for future ones. His mentality now is of surviving through the steps. “The ‘formula’ so to speak. Trust the training, you might cry during or after, you will want to kill, anger is normal etc. etc. I now train my men in the same manner. So they can know what to expect for mental survivability, even if they don’t win the fight.” It matched what I found when I researched how to overcome the ‘freeze’ mode. It’s something you have to work on constantly; it’s not something you never forget like bike riding. Taking a self-defense class isn’t enough; you have to practice, or mentally prepare yourself. Always. It doesn’t apply to just mano-a-mano combat. Freezing, or fumbling in a panic, is why there are so few ‘good guys with a gun’ who stop mass shooters. You can buy a gun, take lessons on how to use it, but unless you practice constantly - and under the pressure of having to react at a moment’s notice - chances are you’re going to get shot before you ever fire a single bullet. The importance of mental preparation In 2009, ABC journalist Diane Sawyer rigged an experiment at Muhlenberg College to see how people who had just been trained to use a gun would react to an active shooter, played by an actor with a paint gun. The participants didn’t know it wasn’t a real active shooter. They put out a call for people who’d like free gun training, then were herded into a classroom ostensibly for a talk on protective gear. They were armed with real Glocks filled with, which they didn’t know, simulated bullets that fired paint. Shooter guy shows up, the guy in front struggles to get the gun out of his pants, and gets shot with a paint gun. Several others in the class failed to stop the shooter as well, and it ended in fake slaughter by a fake shooter. And that was after immediate training, not days, months or years later. Where does that leave us civilians, since daily training simply isn’t practical for those of us who aren’t soldiers or cops? Nashali Alma didn’t mention having undergone self-defense training nor did she mention military service. She simply reacted. Perhaps she was mentally prepared. Freezing can happen to anyone, not just women in rape situations. But she didn’t. And sometimes, women fight back. There’s some middle road there where we don’t necessarily need to train every day, like a soldier, but we can mentally prep ourselves. It’s no guarantee we won’t freeze in battle, like with a man with evil on his mind, but then again, we might not. Colton synopsized ‘The Formula’: Avoid the fight If you’re in the fight trust the training. You’ve been here 1000 times in your mind. So just do, don’t think. There will be a fallout after. Good results or bad, life is different now. I found Nashali Alma on LinkedIn where she’d announced her GoFundMe page for her Never Give Up! Women’s Empowerment Campaign. She admitted to ‘some PTSD’ from her traumatic experience but she’s also expressed she’s not going to stop doing what she loves. She still goes to the gym. She hasn’t let this asshole ruin her life. Colton’s last point seems to be key to dealing with a traumatic event. Your life will never be the same, but it doesn’t have to be 100% negative. Sometimes you emerge stronger, or more confident. “Hey, I got beyond that, and it’s ancient history now.” I’ve spoken and heard the stories of numerous friends and strangers over the decades of sexual assault, from minor groping to full-on rape. No one’s life was ever the same, but some handled it more effectively than others. It’s important to note Alma’s attacker had no weapons. And undoubtedly for many of us, we might comply just to avoid getting hurt any further - what if he had begun beating her? We don’t know how an attacker will react, and many women have gotten seriously hurt or killed fighting back. I don’t know what you should do, but Colton’s advice on assessing the situation sounds worthy of consideration: Your brain will already be taking stock of the situation. How much are you willing to risk to fight back? Another important question: How much is he willing to risk if you do? There are easier victims elsewhere. Thomas-Brown realized this one was too much trouble and preferred to look for easier prey. Every woman is different, and we can’t know what we’ll do in the firefight (as my soldier friend experienced the first time), but we can reduce the chances we’ll come out the worse for it if we think about how we can fight back. I may even practice whacking invisible attackers in the face in my apartment. Will it help me if I ever get cornered? Well, it won’t hurt. What if Thomas-Brown goes to trial? We have to remember at least some of the power is in our own hands. Will we press charges? Or will we listen to naysayers who tell us not to ‘waste our time’, as we’ll never get a conviction, or if we do he’ll get a light sentence? Real possibilities, but there’s still very good reasons for making men go through the justice system. Rapists Who Get Off Easy Don’t Get Off Scot-Free What’s critically important: The sooner police catch this guy, the more women’s lives may be saved. When he’s off the streets he can’t harm others. We’re not powerless. We can fight back, with our strength or with the justice system, however imperfectly. At the very least, make him soil his Fruit-of-the-Looms wondering what will happen to him if he gets convicted, especially if he winds up on the other side of a rape. Maybe he prevails, maybe he doesn’t, but either way we get him off the streets, at least for a little while. And, hopefully, we go back to the gym. Related: What If Human Women Challenged Male Aggression Like Bonobos? Stop Male Abuse When It’s Happening…Maybe? 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 Big Dick Is Back, courtesy of black men (of course!) and you can have one too merely for the price of a quickie gang rape! You can have a dick as big as any African’s, white boy, but will the rod match the curtains? No one knows! Photo by Keith Syvinski on Free Images Penis enlargement spam is back! Thicker, harder, larger than life, and now, racist as f — um, hell! I’ve written about how a quest for a really huge monster mandingo was the only welcome spam I received during its Golden Age. Today my digitized shitty lunch pseudo-meat induces sleep. Somewhere, someone got the idea I’m a golfer and I’m flooded with sales pitches for all things Old Retired White Boomer Man. I can’t imagine how I got on their lists since the world’s most boring sport is one I never Google. The New Improved Penis Enlargement Spam offers industrial-strength racism with super-sized misogyny I don’t remember from the Golden Age. Emails promise to make my wife scream with my eight-inch-long Hummer From Hell thanks to African men and their Amazing Big Dick Tribal Secrets. All I have to do is buy a plane ticket to visit the Somba tribesmen in Western Africa and turn my white wife out to them. The gargantuan gherkin is all mine! (Maybe I won’t need those golf clubs after all!) Eddie Murphy on the history of the Big Black Dick. WARNING: 1980s Eddie Murphy is not ‘woke’ for 2021. Don’t watch this if you’re easily offended. Or worry about your white dick size. Or if you’re Chinese. Especially if you’re a Chinese male. This guy offered his white wife to the African tribesmen as a gift in exchange for their secret manhood elongation ritual. And it WORKED! I know it’s fiction but damn, that’s offensive. So I wonder: Who are these guys marketing to? Who’s feeling so emasculated and hateful they’d consider turning their wife out to an African tribe so they could get a big thick rod and nail four chicks in one evening? Not sure what’s up with the guy with the eye patch. Maybe he’s a Republican because of a white ancestor who screwed up his dick size? Photo by outtacontext on Flickr (CC0 2.0) The big tell the target audience is sexually insecure white men is the overall racist assumptions, and the context in which it takes place. It emphasizes the ‘white wife’, so you’re quite clear on who needs some hammer help, since white men are more likely to have white wives than non-whites. Some spam indicates she’s into the idea herself (Husbandly big dick? Doing several Africans? BOTH!) Of further racist note: Sexual success seekers journeying to Africa for The Secret never seem directed into an air-conditioned office in downtown Nairobi talking to tailored-suited businessmen. Their stories always center on painted tribesmen with spears in mud huts sitting around waiting for the next Trumpanzee to show up with his hot-to-trot wife (You Know How Those White Women Are!) perhaps ‘curious’ about trying some boudin noir. It’s no surprise ‘Africans’ possess the alleged secret to ‘elongation’ techniques, since the myth of the Big Black Dick’s roots originate in the American African slavery era. It plays into the old white male slave owner fear that if he’s availing himself of sexual pleasure with his female ‘property’, maybe his wife is doing the same with those big strong field you-know-whats. Now why would Miz Prudence choose an ‘inferior’ black slave when she could have her husband’s pure white superior manly studliness? Well, because Mede is, in one way at least, two or three times the man Massa McCracka is. Oh…. And if you wonder if the African tribe fellows scored on the white chick, the answer is YES! (I never doubted it. Gang rapes are pretty much always a huge success, except from the viewpoint of the victim.) Apparently, some ladies were perfectly okay with being offered to a bunch of strangers because they got to bang a bunch of guys with big penises while her husband worked on making his own Tom of Finland-worthy Louisville Slugger. This dude is crazy but what a secret he discovered… He took his wife to a remote African island to negotiate with the tribe elders, including 3 African priests, the sacred secret to gain 6 inches on his member. But they needed something in exchange. This guys WIFE… Don’t worry, it was just for a short period of time, but what followed after it’s wilder than anything you’d see on the craziest rated movies. What was the concern addressed re the ‘short period of time’? To assure the recipient the wife’s distress was minimized? Or is it more about the pain of seeing your wife getting nailed by guys she might not want to have sex with, or even worse, want to? When she might even decide to stay with them rather than you, since God only knows what other Mandingo Magic these African guys know? What if they also possess the closely-guarded Secret of the Magic Triple-Axle-Twist Propeller Tongue? Little-known fact: Some African tribesmen have up to eight tongues and they know what to do with them. It’s not actually BBD those white wives are running off to Africa for! Public domain image from Pixabay Apparently his wife dug the gangbang so much they might go back ‘just for the fun’. Ironically, while these stories feature a white woman getting ganged by a bunch of black men (or eagerly agreeing, because BBD) they don’t mention the (presumably white) husband nailing a bunch of African chicks while he was there. Maybe African men aren’t as keen to turn their wives out to others as under-endowed white men. After all, what’s in it for them? The Secret To The Lowest Ever Golf Rounds? According to spam about SavageGrowPlus, the current spam king of dicktacular spam (with a website and everything, but you’ll have to Google it yourself — caveat emptor!), white women are allegedly often on the prowl themselves looking for Big African Dicks. The spam promises a 2,000-year-old African ‘twist’ hack that makes one’s penis 48% longer with the subject line White Wife Caught Riding 3 African Priests. One wonders what an African man 2,000 years ago needed with a bigger dick. It certainly wasn’t to make his wives scream with pleasure. Know what African women were doing 2,000 years ago? Mutilating their baby daughters’ genitals to prevent sexual pleasure. That shit is still going on today. Yes, men believe still in the myth of the BBD, including gay men. Including non-white gay men. Think of how much pressure black guys are to meet some deformed ideal birthed in the era of total black subjugation. I’m reminded of the Dove Soap video several years ago showing how a model is ‘created’ for a billboard ad. By the time the makeup and retouching gods are done with her, even she can’t meet the beauty standard gracing motorists on the highway. I always wondered how insecure she must feel if friends wanted to introduce her to someone they knew who loved the billboard. What was he going to think, no matter how dolled up she was? Her neck was too short, her eyes not manga enough, her skin less blemished than advertised? Apparently, the palpable disappointment by men and women alike at unzipping a black man’s pants is similar when they discover a similar awful reality smackdown: Six inches, more or less. What a terrible legacy of hypersexualized expectation to have to live with. I don’t know how much men still believe in penis enlargement phallus-ies (ar ar, I’m on a roll!) but I should point out it IS possible to alter your penis to make it bigger, longer, thicker, more massive. It’s an evidence-based scientifically proven technique known to medical doctors since the 1980s: Phalloplasty, or surgical penis enlargement. In other words, gents, you’re stuck with the same dilemma as women with breast dysmorphia: Those silly-ass creams, exercises, devices and herbal supplements won’t grace you with a longer schlonger any more than they will give your wife Dolly Parton boobs. Did not get these from an ad in Women’s Wear Daily. Photo by Luke Westall on Flickr (CC0 2.0 Generic) You really want to make your body parts bigger? It’s gonna take a few sharpies to make it so, Number One! A second option may be less painful but there will be needles: Dermal filler injections, similar to what women get to boost lips and cheeks. Here’s the real irony: Women don’t care about gigundous johnsons nearly as much as men. Research has shown many men seek penile enlargement to impress other men, although some do it for self-esteem, and some for better bedroom performance (in their own minds, anyway). In fact, dick size isn’t even on the list of reasons why women divorce their husbands. Even African women aren’t impressed with macroscale manmeat. A study of cheating wives in the Lake Victoria region of Kenya found a longer-than-average penis was one of the reasons given for cheating (as was domestic violence. Take note, beaters! Maybe you don’t have to pay someone to cut up your dick after all. An anger management program sounds less painful, doesn’t it, guys? Guys? Guys? Where’d you go’?) Men want to impress each other. Think about it. Your open-mouthed-with-awe Big Dick moment isn’t in her bedroom, but in the locker room at the gym. (Don’t stare!) Do the Somba tribesmen actually seek bigger dicks? Maybe. I can’t find a lot about them so far but I did find a brief historical reference from the turn of the twentieth century talking about what they allegedly did for lengthy lingams, and while it involved herbs rubbed on the penis (not taken orally), one needed to cut a hole ‘of a certain size’ in a tree branch into which the prospective Priapus inserted his dick for several months until he got the desired length. The reference included a photo of a Somba man with what looks like an 8"-9" fully erect penis belted to his belly. I’m guessing white men won’t want to wander around with a giant tree branch strapped to one leg until they get their humongous hot rod. “Hey big boy, is that a Balsam Fir in your pants or are you just happy to see me?” I’ve never ceased to boggle at the capacity of the human mind to believe what it wants to despite the evidence of its lying eyes: There’s no quicky tricky for enlarging body parts. You either work with what you’ve got or you book an appointment with a plastic surgeon. As a teenager I found ridiculous ads for bust creams in magazines. I asked my mother, “Do those really work?” I was only twelve and embarking on my first bra but I couldn’t know whether I’d ‘measure up’ when I was sixteen. “Don’t believe those things. They’re all garbage,” she told me. Uh, duh. After all, if it was that easy to get big boobs, wouldn’t every woman have them? During the Golden Age of Spam, in the ’90s and ’00s, I used to wonder similarly about men. Did they not wonder why they didn’t see more monster masts in the gym or public restrooms? Or does everyone else look like they’ve got 48 pounds of swingin’ schwing when you look at your own perfectly normal six-inch love cannon while your brain screams “MICROPENIS!!!”? Mostly I laughed in the olden days, wondering who the hell was desperate enough for a colossal kielbasa that they’d buy a product calling their dick a ‘custard launcher’. Today it’s not as amusing, even though I know no one is turning their wife out to a mob for some fake tribal secret. Still, it goes to show you: Some guys never learn. Six inches is six inches, guys. And they say women can’t do math. Photo by Deon Black on Unsplash This post originally appeared on Medium in May 2021.

Smokers, the obese and drug addicts aren’t the same. Here’s why. If these are your loved ones, might want to put off Christmas shopping for them until, oh, maybe a few days before Christmas. Photo by Michael_Swann on Flickr CC0 2.0 When sexual headcase Robert Aaron Long killed eight people, including six Asian women at Atlanta spas in March and got arrested because he didn’t kill himself the way many mass shooters do, an outraged public demanded justice. That same month, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa was taken into custody after killing ten people including one police officer in a Boulder, Colorado supermarket. Outrage, calls for change, blah blah blah. As did here in Toronto a few years ago when an underlaid nerd ran down women in a van after calling for an Incel Rebellion on Facebook. When now-daily mass shooters are arrested rather than carted out in body bags we practically call for their heads on pikes for the innocent lives they’ve destroyed. When infantile crybabies pitch public tantrums about having to wear masks, socially distance, and not take part in large indoor gatherings, and exercise their ‘freedoms’ by not vaccinating and putting themselves, the lives of their so-called ‘loved’ children, and masses of strangers in danger, we feel understandably helpless. We can’t arrest the suspected killers; they’re doing nothing illegal and no one can prove they killed anyone. Even if their family contracts COVID, oh-so-coincidentally right after an outbreak linked to the Trump rally s/he attended, no one can be sure the family didn’t get infected elsewhere. If they’re all unvaccinated, who knows? As Omnicron warp-speeds around the globe and promises to Make Christmas Suck Again, COVIDiots have become our new mass shooters. They’re the ones breathing potentially toxic germs on others, taking up valuable bed space in hospitals, choking out their last, painful breaths. On Reddit, the Herman Cain Award documents the content COVIDiots tweeted and posted before they drowned in their own lungs, or repented of their former anti-vaxx ways if they survived, or it applauds people who say they decided to get vaxxed after visiting the forum. Those of us who wish we could Make America Great Again are getting very, very tired of COVIDiots doing everything in their power to hold America back. Americans are tired of not being able to live at least semi-normal lives because a bunch of spoiled, overprivileged brats — and I’m including all the black and brown brats too — won’t get vaccinated for a lot of really stupid reasons. None can read properly-sourced advice by subject matter experts documenting overwhelming evidence the vaccines work, that nothing Donald Trump suggests does, and the underwhelming global number of vaccinated people dying from COVID or the vaccine is minuscule compared to the unvaxxed, who are breaking healthcare systems everywhere and creating stress, burnout, mental breakdowns and PTSD in our healthcare workers. We should have been past the worst of the pandemic by now, but healthcare workers watch a perpetual conveyor belt of tantrum-ing brats move into hospital wards or adjacent buildings, putting their own lives at risk and stressing their spirits even more. It didn’t have to happen. COVIDiots did this. It’s not so funny today, is it? Especially the guy on his hands and knees in the mud coughing out his last. Their excuse was they didn’t have access to a Black Plague vaccine, because they lived 700 years ago. All because of overblown narcissistic American individualism and exceptionalism. People who love their politics more than they love their fellow humans or even Jesus. America needs a break. Our healthcare providers need a break. Enough is enough It’s argued that people who made bad lifestyle choices don’t just include the intentionally unvaxxed, yet are treated according to need rather than judged less worthy of immediate healthcare. This includes, among others, smokers, the obese, alcoholics and drug addicts. You could include drunk drivers and people who engage in risky, high-adrenaline activities like bungee jumping or auto racing. But fat people don’t run around stuffing Big Macs down others’ throats, nor do smokers force people to blaze up. They’re no longer allowed to pollute the indoors as they once argued was their precious, God-given ‘right’. Addicts might mug you for drug money but they won’t corner you in an alley and stick a heroin needle in your arm. No one wants to be addicted to substances, including food, and the reasons why people engage in and perpetuate what they know to be unhealthy living decisions are legion. They often pay their own price including increased health problems, decreased standard of living, reduced romantic and job opportunities, higher insurance rates, and increased mental illness. In the U.S., with its broken healthcare system and only a few shreds of a safety net left, there are few worse places to make stupid lifestyle choices. The unvaxxed ‘fortunate’ enough to have survived are often faced with insurmountable hospital bills (Oopsie! Un/derinsured!) in a country where stupidity pays handsomely if you’re a healthcare C-suiter. No, I will not contribute to your crowdfunding account. The number of people for whom the COVID vaccines might be contraindicated are tiny. The best way to know for sure is to consult your doctor to see if you’re on the shortlist. Not Gab and Parler, not QAnon, not numerous dumbass websites and media sources failing accuracy evaluations at Media Bias Fact Check, and certainly not a woman who looks like and contains more plastic than a Barbie doll. Your doctor knows you and your health problems and history best. S/he’s the best source for determining whether to get vaccinated against COVID. Hey, you survived MMR as a kid without becoming autistic, right? Annual childhood DPT shots didn’t Nicki Minaj CC0 2.0 image by Rory on Wikimedia Commons kill you? You haven’t grown a second head out of your shoulder from the smallpox vaccine, amirite? Many COVIDiots probably got an annual ever-changing flu shot until they were harder to source than toilet paper last year. COVIDiots perpetuate each wave, drive small businesses out of business, burn out our healthcare workers and dangle the ever-looming threat of lockdown and restricted access to local goods over our heads. They’re part of the reason Jeff Bezos can shoot into space while underpaying his employees because COVIDiots are forcing us to depend on Amazon for anything we can’t get at a non-‘essential’ business. Intelligent, rational, mature, and responsible people are losing patience with adult babies, especially ones who blithely walk around not caring who they murder because they won’t cover their piehole. The ones who ‘identify’ as Christians believe they have plausible deniability when they meet Jesus: “Whaddaya mean I was responsible for killing over a dozen people at a Stop The Steal rally? How was I to know I was infected? When I got sick I thought it was just a silly old cold! C’mon, you’re messin’ with me, ain’t you, Big J? It was all a big Deep State plandemic! Come on, Jeez, can you prove I did it?” Meanwhile, good people who need immediate healthcare still wait, some of them living with internal time bombs if they don’t get the treatment and surgeries that keep getting postponed to handle so-called ‘more immediate’ COVIDiots. People who refused, in all their overprivileged First World glory, free vaccines to keep them and their so-called ‘loved ones’ alive that billions of other humans would give their meager life savings for. Our little brainiacs prefer conspiracy theories promoted by Tucker Carlson or Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaxx documentary targeting particularly vulnerable black and Hispanic communities. Never mind the appalling optics of a white man encouraging POC to, essentially, kill themselves. Maybe we ignore it because it’s Bobby Kennedy’s kid, rather than, say, Steve Bannon’s. Make no mistake: Willfully unvaccinated POC are as blameworthy as MAGA cap COVIDiots. The Tuskegee experiments ended fifty years ago. Open your damn eyes and visit the CDC in 2021. You’re alive today, because of vaccines. You didn’t die of smallpox. You don’t live in an iron lung. You’re welcome. COVID kills black and brown people far more effectively than white scientists ever have. Black Lives Matter, or is that only when white cops take them? The global evidence since vaccines became available this year is plain. It refutes hysterics of all colors. This doesn’t include anyone who can’t easily access the vaccine because of work requirements, child care issues or because they’re unfortunate enough to live in less-served rural areas. Or are genuinely at risk. For them, I reserve all my sympathy. Now some are debating the previously undebatable: Whether the unvaxxed should be moved down the triage line. One problem is some want to vaxx but can’t; at the moment, it’s impossible to determine who really couldn’t get a vaccine they wanted and who’s lying to get medical help. Triaging on the basis of lifestyle choices violates medical ethics and correctly scares other unfortunate lifestyle choosers who wonder whether the obese or smokers will one day be subjected to similar scrutiny. To which I say: All of them put together have NEVER overstressed the system the way COVIDiots have. Pandemics may be with us for some time. How do you feel about a near-future pandemic without healthcare givers? Can you blame them for throwing in the towel and saying, Fuck these people? I think the triage conversation is one we need to have. What’s truly ‘unprecedented’ about the pandemic is how so pigheaded and politically divided we are that getting a proven vaccine is controversial for those who love their political beliefs more than their families, their fellow humans and even Jesus. WWJD in a pandemic? Maybe it’s time to let the unvaxxed exercise their right to wait for care like all the pre-pandemic people who have to wait for surgery today. Because of COVIDiots.. Tick-tock. 1832 cholera pit in Howard Park, Kilmarnock, Ireland. Funeral homes are stacking bodies to the ceiling in some states, so maybe we’ll be digging COVID pits shortly. Photo by summondbyfells on Flickr CC0 2.0 The aspiring Buddhist in me is uncomfortably aware of the value judgment on human life. In this, I understand why black and brown people are mistrustful of largely white healthcare. Or fellow unpopular obese, smokers, or addicts. On the other hand, my inner crappy Buddha doesn’t lose sleep over punishments for mass shooters, and at least they’re not protesting in front of hospitals, because they’re in graves or jail. None of those other lifestyle choosers willfully hurt others. When’s the last time anyone demanded a smoker, obese person or skinny-as-a-rail meth addict customer put their baby’s life in danger to satisfy some MAGAt’s toxic political stance? A Texas couple wore face masks at a restaurant to protect their immunocompromised infant. The owner didn't like that. I bet that restaurant owner is ‘pro-life’, too. I wonder: Why are we urged to show more compassion for the uncovered unvaccinated than we do for mass shooters? Both made decisions to harm others. A UK study reported a link between susceptibility to COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, and willingness to promote misinformation about the pandemic to Machiavellianism, psychopathy and collective narcissism. Not unlike similar findings with mass shooters. Fuck psychopaths. #NotAllCOVIDiots, of course, there are those whose reticence is driven by scientific ignorance and risk overestimation rather than toxic politics, but will wear masks and be reasonably responsible. The in-your-face crybabies are selfish, irresponsible, and are now willfully potentially spreading death and sorrow every time they exhale. Call me a terrible person if you like, but I think it’s time to move the unvaxxed down the triage line so that ambulances can pick up accident victims promptly. Yeah, maybe the victims were driving drunk or simply driving while stupid but until idiot drivers necessitate setting up ad-hoc ‘waiting rooms’ in parking garages, let’s keep them higher on the list too. Ditto, everyone else on the ‘unfortunate lifestyle choices’ list. I had a friend who got diagnosed with breast cancer at the beginning of the pandemic last year but was still able to get proper treatment. They caught it in time and her prognosis is now very good. I’m grateful to all the phenomenal healthcare professionals who saved her life. I’d be ripshit furious if she was still waiting while some COVIDiot stole her hospital bed like these pseudo-scientists: Yes, they look pathetic and in need of compassion. But I wonder how many people they took out along with themselves. I bet mass shooters look pathetic sitting in jail, too. Twitter I don’t like mass shooters, and I don’t like mass breathers. Time to turn these suicidals into social pariahs and restrict their ability to take as many innocents as they can with them. They made their choice. They can always unmake it with a better one. Let them produce their vaccine passport, or a damn good reason why they can’t be vaccinated, or be refused service in all public places, including essential services. Let them pay for food and medicine delivery. Let them lean on friends, family and neighbors if they can’t afford it. Let them feel the consequences of choosing to be social pariahs because of their pigheadedness and unChristian concern for their fellow ‘God’s children’. I wonder how that bright light tunnel greeting with Jesus went. Twitter They don’t have the right to take the rest of us with them to the Pearly or Iron Gates. The rest of us want to LIVE. And move on. MAGA! This was originally published on Medium in September 2021, so I updated it for the Omnicron world here.

Pelosi 'doesn't do fear' and embodies toxic masculinity's worst nightmares about female power U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: She's not afraid of you! Image by Gage Skidmore on Flickr “Power is not anything that anybody gives away. You have to fight for it.” - U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi I don't know how she did it. I don't know how she faced the nation and addressed the horrific January 6th attack on the Capitol with such a cool mien, but U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, targeted by the right-wing mob a day earlier violently assaulting the halls of power in our democracy, faced the nation and addressed what happened. Then she got right back to work, business as usual, one day later to certify what everyone who wasn't a MAGA knew was a done deal: That Democratic candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 federal election. How specific the information she had on January 7th concerning intent and threats made against her is unclear, but I marveled to watch this 81-year-old woman comport herself like a boss. Nancy Pelosi elbow bumps a slightly hesitant Mike Pence after the Jan. 7 certification A day before, the Speaker hid underneath a conference table with her terrorized staff while rioters tried to break into the room. They made it through the first door. They gave up with the second. She wasn't factually certain of their intention, but no one questioned their lives were in danger and she knew at least some of the mob had murder on their minds as they howled her name. Months later, in an article in USA Today, Pelosi recounted what happened but acknowledged little personal fear. "Well, I'm pretty tough. I'm a street fighter," she said. "They would have had a battle on their hands." She lifted a four-inch stiletto heel for the reporter and added, "I would have had these," to use as weapons. If you've ever watched the movie Single White Female, you know that's no idle fashion-feminist threat. She was, she explained, more afraid for her staff than herself since the second-in-line for presidential succession has plenty of security. She said she will 'never forgive' the rioters and their supporters who caused such trauma. As for herself? Nancy Pelosi doesn't 'do fear', according to her biographer Molly Ball in Pelosi. Pelosi pretty certainly feels fear, but she'll never admit it. I can't imagine what a punch in the nose it must have been to her haters and would-be murderers to watch her address the press a day later and show no fear. If their intention was to shut that #@$%& up, mission unaccomplished. No one trapped on Capitol Hill, not even the woman who rivals Margaret Thatcher for sheer will and ramrod-stiff spine, can escape the trauma of January 6th. However it affects her, Pelosi hasn't let it show publicly. Never let 'em see you sweat When women one-quarter her age fold up like frightened kittens when a man on the street pays them a compliment, Nancy Pelosi faced down the most virulent, violent display of MAGA toxic masculinity in anyone's memory. There's no question she wondered what would happen not only to herself but to her much younger staff members had the howling mob broken through. Pelosi's lifelong iron will and near-fearlessness stem from intimate connection with power since forever, beginning with her father, Democratic Congressman Thomas D'Alesandro Jr. The only woman in history to be Speaker of the House, not once but twice, learned about power while working on his campaign and being present at John F. Kennedy's inauguration. Her mother, also active in politics, taught her daughter the value of social networking as she organized Democratic women. But her mother also indirectly taught her daughter the value of independence and the need to control one's own future, which Pelosi's mother didn't have. Former President Barack Obama said of Pelosi, “She was as tough, or tougher, than anybody in the world.” She's everything take-no-prisoners hypermasculine he-men value--in other men. It's no wonder GOP pit bulls relentlessly attack her, blaming her for the insurrection plot and deceptively editing the viral video of the Speaker ripping up Trump's last State of the Union speech. This is the real one. The fake one has been largely taken down, but it went viral. GOP critics call Pelosi 'nasty', 'bitch', and accuse her of 'tantrums'. She doesn't exactly have it easy with clueless men in her own party, either. They didn't understand why she ran for house leadership. She told interviewer Dana Bash, "When people said a lot of the women are supporting Nancy to run, they said, ‘Why, do the women have a list of things they want us to do? Why don’t they just make a list and give us the list?’ This is the Democratic Party in the year 2000!” Just tell us what you want, girls! We'll handle it for you. It seemed audacious to her colleagues when she stated the next time around she was the most qualified candidate for the House Speakership in 2018. Only men do that. On why moms make good politicians “Women--you know how to get it done, know your power.” When most women her age are living in retirement wiling away their days until they pass on, this big-brown-eyed grandmother proves even Silent Generation women, uniformly raised to be Good Girls who served their husbands and children, had the capacity to seek and seize power and be unafraid to use it for the greater good. Women are still afraid of their own power, afraid to assert themselves, afraid of what others will think and even worse, what they might get called. The plaintive whine, When men are assertive they're called effective, when women do it we're called bitches! doesn't fly with Nancy Pelosi. She doesn't care what your hoary old grandpa said about her over Thanksgiving dinner. She was the youngest child in a family of six and all her siblings were brothers. She says it helped her a lot because she was 'unimpressed'. In the Bash interview, she notes how women are no longer raising their families first and entering politics later. They're doing it, exactly as men have always done it, at the same time. Funny how no one thought to question whether a father shouldn't do as mothers were expected to do and put their political aspirations on hold until the children were grown. Pelosi detailed exactly what qualifies mothers to be effective politicians: Mothers are diplomats, into interpersonal relationships, chefs, chauffeurs, problem-solvers, time managers. She says she has tremendous respect for the mothers who are raising families and walking the halls of Congress at the same time. In 1987, when she was first sworn in, there were 24 women there. Today, after the 2018 Blue Wave, there are 102. That's a 400% increase since the Last Years of Reagan. What we can learn about women and power from Nancy Pelosi She's one those rare women who understands her power and fully embraces it. However privately she may fear other things--like the very real danger she's in as the most assertive badass woman in power who dominated Donald Trump's term--Pelosi clearly doesn't fear her own power. "I pwn you, motha----!" CC0 2.0 image by the Washington DC Office of Public Affairs on Wikimedia Commons Here are some of Nancy Pelosi's Greatest Power Hits: STAND FIRM She gave Donald Trump The Clap in a viral video as she thwarted his attempts to fulfill his wall obsession. She wouldn't stand for his crap. Trump shut down the government and she made it clear he wasn't going to blackmail the Democrats, or the country, to get what he wanted. He held his breath until he turned blue. He caved only after Mitch McConnell warned Republicans were losing the public relations war, which any real politician of any political stripe knew was the only conceivable outcome. DON'T TALK THE TALK, DO THE WORK 'The Squad's' young idealistic Congressional newbies learned the hard way that Pelosi isn't impressed with their passions or their feelings. They tried to hold up border wall funding because they didn't think it went far enough and Pelosi shut them down hard. She believes if you're passionate enough about something you'll do the work of getting support because nothing gets done without it. You're just four opinions, she essentially told them. You have no support in our party. Go get it, or public support. That's what she calls being 'operational'. It means working with what you have in a given situation given the challenges and obstacles. She doesn't give a damn about your beliefs, your ideology or your dissatisfaction with why things are the way they are. What can you do to change it, right now, in the real world? SHE DOESN'T GIVE A CRAP WHAT YOU THINK OF HER Pelosi has stated she knows she's effective because she's a target. She doesn't care what the right thinks of her only insofar as it gets in the way of the job she needs to do. She's claimed she doesn't care about her image, but she had to pay attention when it began to obstruct her work within her own party. Not all the criticism and sniping comes from Republicans. The highly diverse Democratic left lends itself easily to its famously internal disputes, which serve the publicly united Republican Party. Our takeaway? We need to take ourselves seriously, but not sweat the Neanderthals who can't handle aggressive, assertive, take-charge and male dominance-challenging women. People take you a lot less seriously, Pelosi learned, especially if you're a woman, until you have authority. And no one gives you that, either. Like power, you have to take it. Like a man does. DON'T BE AFRAID TO PROMOTE YOURSELF If there's one thing women are far less effective at than men it's self-promotion, especially for a better job. Men aren't afraid to state they think they're the best person for the job, and unlike many women, neither is Nancy Pelosi. She was right to be bold about a second run at the House leadership. How differently might the 2016 election have gone had Hillary Clinton boldly stated she was far more qualified than Donald Trump who clearly demonstrated during the debates he didn't have even a rudimentary grasp of critical issues facing the United States and the world? Pelosi told Dana Bash she wants women to see they shouldn't let themselves get pushed around or run away from a fight. It's especially important when men consider an idea great after a man parrots the woman who said it a moment ago. They do it, Pelosi points out, not to be dismissive but because they missed it when she said it. They weren't listening. We need to challenge men who aren't listening to women or they're never gonna learn! Be pushy. Be aggressive. Be a 'bitch'. Who cares what they say as long as you're getting shit done. Be operational. Listen to your colleagues. Men don't listen enough and that's what they can take away from this. And don't let them smell your fear. That, if nothing else, is my biggest takeaway.

FKA Twigs’s story demonstrates the uselessness of #MeToo if we refuse to learn from it, and act more intelligently By Bobo Boom on Wikimedia Commons — FKA Twigs, CC BY 2.0 Singer, songwriter, dancer, and this week’s #MeToo cover girl FKA Twigs, the woman whose initials don’t stand for anything, who ‘just wanted a selection of letters that sounded quite kind of masculine and strong,’ filed a lawsuit against career violent bad boy Shia LaBoeuf for sexual assault, battery, and emotional distress. She met him in 2018 on a movie set, years after he became more famous for his execrable behavior than for his acting, and got involved in a relationship with him. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG??? Cue the tired Greek chorus of female voices asking the same damn question over and over: Image by Patricio Hurtado from Pixabay We all know the words! Come on everybody, let’s sing along! “Because men keep doing this! Because they think it’s okay to treat women this way! Because entitlement and privilege and patriarchy and stuff!” The wall separating feminist brains from self-awareness and emotional intelligence slams down like a rushed scenic drop in a stage play. No one acknowledges the other reason this keeps happening. What will it take to force women to acknowledge the female agency, the female decisions, the choices our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers fought for us to make, and to finally ask ourselves and each other, “Why do we allow this to happen?” I mean, it’s not like Black Lives Matter was birthed by a bunch of white people who decided it’s time to end police brutality against blacks. Are we going to learn anything from Twigs’s story, a woman lacking many of the typical excuses women have to get into and stay in abusive relationships, or will we wipe her tears and say, ‘Great #MeToo story. Smash The Patriarchy. Who’s next?’ Maybe we’ll simply add it to the archive and move along. That’s what a lot of patriarchy-smooshers are best at. The female chorus of ‘silencing’ The age of #MeToo raised a veritable cacophony of women shouting about how they’re silenced, or were silenced, or will no longer be silenced, with endless public tales of abuse and misogyny. I welcome the female thunder. But clearly, if anyone’s ‘silencing’ women anymore it’s themselves. I’m losing patience with the relentless willful cluelessness of women like FKA Twigs. She’s 32 years old, for Goddess’s sake, she’s not a rank ingenue. She’s in show business, she lives in the #MeToo age, she lives in London. How the hell do even young women claim ignorance anymore about dealing with abusive men? She’s filed a lawsuit against LaBoeuf. Good for her, I’m glad she did and I hope she holds him accountable for what he did to her. Even though she let him, it doesn’t excuse him in the slightest. Someone needs to call him to account. Please, please, Twigs, just don’t marry the sonofabitch! Don’t reward misogyny like that moron Rihanna did. “I’d like to be able to raise awareness on the tactics that abusers use to control you and take away your agency,” Twigs says in the gentle language of the personally disempowered. Her story is standard fare: How these abusive relationships start, why they stayed (minus, for her, the economic reasons), why she let him treat her this way. Don’t waste your breath, girlfriend. We’ve heard it all before. We girlies just don’t learn, do we? You know what I’d like to raise awareness of? Feminists who insist on enabling women like Twigs and countless others to never examine their own role in allowing abuse. He was Shia LaBoeuf, for pete’s sake; what made her think, Yeah, I want me a piece of this? Feminist excuses of ignorance and victim socialization have worn so thin you can read your mobile through it. How are we all failing women? What are we missing? What are we not teaching them? I’m speaking to all women, but especially those of us who are much older than Twigs, who have even less claim to blithe ignorance in the #MeToo era than she’s got. We’ve been around a lot longer. What’s our excuse? “Why does this keep happening?” we ask, reciting to ourselves the holy mantra of blaming everything on men. Never, ever, should we ask why women allow this to happen. Why they refuse to acknowledge their own role in complicit victimhood the same way abusive men deny their role in abuse, or even deny they’re abusers. We make endless excuses for women to avoid having to ask them — and to acknowledge to ourselves — that physical abuse happens today because women allow it while swimming in an ocean of stories and information and sisterhood. Our excuses ring more and more pathetic with each #MeToo cycle. It’s not only ‘The Patriarchy’ that infantilizes women. We’re guilty, too, of refusing to challenge women to be the adults we righteously claim women are when men try to deny us the power of choice. You simply can’t get involved with a guy like Shia LaBoeuf and not know it’s going to end badly. If Twigs really did believe that, then we older women are failing the younger generations. Twigs says “It can happen to anybody.” No it can’t. Not to women who don’t allow it and learn from their own and other’s mistakes. Not when some of us actually pay attention to #MeToo stories, take an active role in identifying the dynamics of abusive relationships, and the mistakes women make dancing down that wilted primrose path. When you see the tiger from a safe distance, you stay away. Even if your mother didn’t teach you how to be a grownup, even if your father was a poor excuse of a man, an Internet connection and a few social media accounts will show you a world outside your family. The mass media, Internet, and social media revolutions raised awareness of oppression and how to fight and stop it in so many different ways. No one has the right of ‘ignorance’ anymore. We have to challenge each other to do more, be more, stand up more, stand together more. We have to Just Say No to abuse. Have you got the labia for that, girlfriends? The feminist infantilization of women Young women still seem incapable of learning from others. What’s the point of #MeToo if we don’t learn anything from the deluge of horror stories? If we’re going to infantilize women, then, fine — no more treating them like grown-ass women. Maybe we need to chaperone young people again. As I understand the fragile feminist mystique, men are overpowering predatory beasts and women are helpless, fragile little victims-in-waiting. Maybe we shouldn’t allow young people to date without a grownup in the backseat making sure hands don’t touch anything except other hands, monitoring every interaction that happens. It would simply be the next step logical forward for a relentlessly infantilizing consent culture which requires verbal permission for every move you make. Maybe we should legally enforce remaining a virgin until marriage, since it’s not at all clear women can ever truly consent to sex anyway. Maybe we should reinstate curfews for women, for their own safety. Maybe she should have to get her parents’ permission to marry, regardless of her age, and the fiance must get her father’s specific, face to face permission to marry his daughter. In fact, maybe we should just let Mom and Dad decide who she’ll marry. When a woman can’t identify an abuser despite his well-publicized past, can you really trust her with any personal life decision? Please don’t feed The Patriarchy #MeToo is useless without responsive action. It’s been essential for bringing to light the excesses and horrors of misogyny and its historical treatment of women. No one can claim they’re ‘silenced’ anymore, and it’s a good thing. Keep bringing those stories on, but it will take more than testimony to end the sort of abuse FKA Twigs and so many others suffer. It’s all for nought if women continue to feed The Patriarchy. To witlessly encourage women to keep tolerating abuse, and most of all, to enable the rapists and abusers. If men must be forced to confront the privilege and sense of entitlement to women’s bodies that allows them to violate them, then women must now confront their complicity in their own, and other’s, victimization. Men can’t claim ignorance anymore, and no longer can we. You can’t return feeling all empowered from your Take Back The Night protest to find your just-raped roommate curled up on her bunk bed sobbing and disheveled and tell her, “Don’t report it; you won’t be believed.” The rapist thanks you for your support. We have to do more We, as women, are failing our sisters. As privileged and financially independent as FKA Twigs is, as powerful as she thought she was and it’s clear now she’s not, I don’t fault her for not having the wisdom to know how to handle a violent man. She’s right; a guy like him can happen to anyone, but more understandably to a woman who doesn’t know a man’s history. I don’t expect Twigs to have the wisdom of women much older than herself. I do expect her, now, to Just Say No far, far sooner than she did before. If she doesn’t personally learn anything from this, her lawsuit is a waste of time and resources. So is #MeToo if we refuse to grow stronger rather than sink further into privileged perma-victimhood. We are failing the younger generations when we don’t tell them the truth about relationships. It takes two parties (at least) to be in one. Each plays a role and, in the modern world, in the #MeToo era, everyone must take responsibility. In a world where women claim equality, where they’re no longer legal children, they have to accept the responsibility of being adults. We fail women when we refuse to acknowledge she stayed for a lot of dysfunctional reasons, and not ask what’s going on in female heads as abusive relationships unfold, what hidden psychological weaknesses we need to exorcise, and exercise to build emotional strength and resilience, the way you build stronger muscles at the gym. It’s not ‘blaming the victim’; it’s taking responsibility, claiming our power, exercising it, and becoming the grown-ass women we claim we are. We enable abuse and ‘The Patriarchy’ when we make endless excuses for why women make really bad relationship decisions. We refuse to hold women the tiniest bit accountable for their own much-vaunted choices, yet we don’t let men/abusers get away with the tiniest damn thing. Try arguing abusers can’t be held responsible for how they are. Express endless sympathy for the cruelties of growing up male in a misogynist culture, brainwashed by toxic masculinity, perhaps abusive parents of their own. Try suggesting it’s not their fault they’re abusers, they don’t know any better, they grow up with male privilege they can’t see, you can’t fault them for the way they are, and then share endless tales of abusive men who grew up in bad situations, were socialized in abusive religions and cultures, and how they can’t be held responsible, ever, for abusing women. The poor dears! Not their fault! Don’t blame the victims! This line of thinking grants men inclined to abuse to keep up business as usual. It gives them permission. Ergo, we give women permission to continue being abused when we don’t challenge what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what she, and we, can do better the next time around. We’ve spent enough time dissecting and analyzing all things male — patriarchy, privilege, entitlement, narcissism, supremacy, and how it perpetuates abuse and oppression of women. It’s now time for women to engage in collective self-analysis, dissecting our own brains and asking ourselves why so many of us follow the well-trodden path into abusive relationships. We’ve already expended plenty of energy on dissecting the why of feminine behavior, or reactive behavior, now it’s time to ask, And what are we going to do about it? Men don’t possess our brains. They belong to us. They’re our responsibility. And if our psychology fails us in some ways, it’s our responsibility to fix the problems. If there’s no shame in strengthening your body by going to the gym, there should be even less shame in strengthening your mind and your will against tolerating bad relationship behavior. Let’s stop it with the blame game — for men, most of all for ourselves — and let’s be the grown-ass women we always claim to be. We must agree to end our complicity in our own oppression. Support FKA Twigs, but what becomes known can’t be un-known. Hold her, others, and yourself accountable. This first appeared on Medium in January 2021.

Never doubt the power of determined women Free photo from PxFuel The Buddha was silent for a long moment before he said, “It is not possible.” — Thich Nhat Hanh, Old Path, White Clouds Oh yes, it was possible. It was time for The Buddha, the Awakened One, to accept female disciples, or bhikkunis. He just didn’t know it yet. To be fair, he knew it would create a spitstorm with non-monastic society. It was, after all, 2,500 years ago, and Indian women lived in a highly patriarchal society. There were other details to consider: How would they live with the thousands of existing bhikkus, male disciples? Buddhism pledged sexual chastity for monks, and the Buddha knew human beings were all-too-subject to temptation. When Queen Gotami, the Buddha’s stepmother, visited and asked to become his first nun, it wasn’t the first time he’d been thus petitioned, but the Buddha had always responded, “This isn’t the right time.” Sort of sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Equality, or at least rights closer to equality, are never ‘the right time’ for those in power. The Buddha had much respect for women and understood they shared capable intellects for understanding and following The Dharma as men had. He had already made exceptions for those otherwise rejected from other contemporary spiritual traditions. The Buddha had begun allowing underage novices — starting with his son Rahula — but scandalously, he also accepted those from the Untouchable caste where, in the sangha, or community of disciples, they were regarded as the equals of all other bhikkus, including former princes and kings. Queen Gotami acknowledged that the notion of female and male disciples would create drama with the rest of the world. But she also noted The Buddha had been unafraid of the public opinion’s before. He never ignored it, but he always responded in accordance with The Dharma. He acknowledged in return there were other women who had requested to be ordained. He still didn’t think the time was right. His stepmother, the woman who’d raised him as though he was her own son pleaded, but he was resolute. She went away. But the disagreement wasn’t over for the Buddha. Never underestimate the power of a determined woman. Or a small army of them! Queen Gotami returned to the palace and gathered fifty women who wanted to become ordained. She observed that in Buddhism, all were equal, and that if The Buddha could accept Untouchables into discipleship, he could certainly accept women, fully capable of achieving enlightenment and liberation. It was time to show him they were as serious as any aspiring monk. So they shaved their heads in accordance with the practice, discarded their lovely clothes and jewels for simple robes, and took begging bowls to the streets to feed themselves en route to their return to the Buddha’s sangha. This was how monks supported themselves; through begging for food, often in exchange for imparting Buddhist wisdom. The walk was hundreds of miles for the determined ladies. They proved they were ready to give up their lives as every monk including the Buddha had done and demonstrate that women were as rugged as men — that they could handle and love the life of simplicity and hardship, measured by their previous standards, that was the Buddhist seeker’s way of life. What a surprise it was for Ananda, the Buddha’s assistant and closest friend, to meet up with fifty bedraggled women whom he originally mistook for aspiring monks, so dirty and shaven and with bloody, swollen feet. Even more surprising was to recognize Queen Gotami. The Buddha had rejected previous requests when Ananda came and brought him the female monk question, but now, with fifty determined women having made a very long trek to speak with him, he was in no position to refuse to see them. Ananda added a little spin of his own. He asked The Buddha if it was possible for women as well as men to achieve arhatship, or Enlightenment. The Buddha acknowledged it was so. “Then why won’t you accept women into the sangha?” Ananda asked. The Queen had taken care of infant Siddhartha after his mother died shortly after his birth. Gotami had made one helluva gesture to prove she and fifty others were dead serious about becoming nuns, seeking teaching and enlightenment. They had proven they were up to the challenges and hardships of being bhikkunis. “Please have compassion and allow her to be ordained.” The Buddha never stopped talking about the need for compassion. He also didn’t believe in discrimination, but there were practical matters to consider. This time he responded, “Let me think about it.” He called his advisors together and they worked out all the problems they’d foreseen before but just hadn’t taken the time to address. How to deal with the conflict both inside and outside the temple? How can men and women learn together in harmony and without each other’s distraction? While the women waited and the men debated, the Buddha and his advisors devised Eight Rules which they felt would enable them to begin ordaining women into the Sangha. These rules, they felt, would address the concerns both inside and out and assure the people that nothing untoward would happen. The nuns must always defer to the monks. During the retreat season, the nuns would not stay at the center with the monks, but at one close by from which they would receive instruction. Twice a month the bhikkunis would invite a bhikku for a special day of observance called uposatha, when he would teach and instruct them. After the retreat season was over, they would present to the monks and the other nuns what they had learned on retreat. If a nun broke a rule, or a precept, she had to confess in front of both the nuns and the monks (rather than just their own, as the monks did). They would take vows in front of all. A nun would never criticize or censure a monk. A nun would never teach a community of monks. Not full equality. But. The Buddha had finally responded to the numerous requests to ordain women. Other female seekers would surely follow in droves, as had so many men when they’d heard the words of the Awakened One. One of the Buddha’s closest disciples, Moggallana, laughed at the clear inequality of the Eight Rules. Sariputta, another disciple, observed it was a first step in opening the door to women. Photo by Edgar Alan Zeta-Yap on Flickr Gotami accepted them. After Ananda had departed, the other women all turned to her. Um, seriously? Gotami noted the important point that they had achieved the right to be ordained, which was their purpose in making the sacrifices and enduring the hardships they had on this journey. It had, as Sariputta pointed out, opened the door. How true is this story? And when did Gotami decide ‘the time is right’ to challenge the unequal Eight Rules? Historians and scholars now believe the Eight Rules may have been added later, and that this story is more mythology. Old Path, White Clouds is clearly a book like the Bible: History and mythology intermixed. The truth about feminism and Buddhism is that it was a sexist religion at the start and continues to be to this day. While an Untouchable man, the lowest of the low, he who was believed to pollute anyone in a higher caste he touched, was considered the equal of former kings and princes in Buddhism, women, once reluctantly accepted, still had to be carefully corralled. Old habits die hard. Change has only really begun in the last twenty-five years. The current Dalai Lama has proven to be one of the most open-minded spiritual leaders ever, inside and outside of his own tradition. He is, as far as I can tell, the only spiritual leader who is well-versed in science, keeps up on the latest scientific findings, and has stated that if science contradicts a venerable Buddhist teaching, proving it wrong, the teaching must be abandoned, not the scientific finding. Just try finding a major religious leader anywhere else who will state that. The Dalai Lama has also speculated it’s possible his successor may be a female, which would be a first for a tradition within Buddhism that began at the end of the fourteenth century (and the title wasn’t created until the late sixteenth century). He has been moved to grant more understanding to gay Buddhists, although he won’t refute Buddhist teachings. Still, like the Eight Steps, it’s a start for disadvantaged sexual minorities. Buddhism still has some work to do on human sexuality. It still clings to many teachings that are based more on suspicion to healthy sexual activity, even for married couples, than to modern understandings. The story of feminism in Buddhism is, like so many other religious histories, a mixture of history and mythology. The story of Queen Gotami’s march for women’s rights illustrates the early role women played in the Buddhist tradition, not erased or buried the way the story of Jesus’s female disciples were. Old habits die hard, and misogyny is one of the oldest. It doesn’t depart anywhere without a fight. It is, however, vulnerable when even the Buddha himself acknowledged women are every bit as capable at attaining Enlightenment as men. What’s good enough for Untouchables is good enough for the double-X chromosome set. Change will happen. The time is always right. Photo by Suc on Pixabay This originally appeared on Medium in August 2020.

How much stems from historical knowledge? And does it make you hate the wrong people? Public domain photo from Pixabay via Nappy Trigger warning: A few descriptions of historical tortures. The dreams of medieval tortures began when I was around seven or eight. I can’t remember the brutal details, but generally — men coming after me, wanting to torture me for some damn thing. They petered out, then flared up many years later, as an adult. I remember those a little better. Burning stakes, cages and sharp blades. One memorable device I wasn’t even familiar with. The huge heavy weight looked sort of like a child’s top, with a broad base and a point. My persecutors wanted to center its point over my belly and crush me. When I awoke I thought, “What the hell? I’ve never even heard of anything like that.” Past-life memories? Intergenerational trauma memories? Psychically tuning in to another time? Maybe. Although the earliest dreams started around the time I read my first book on the European witch craze. Written for children, its descriptions of interrogations, confession tortures and executions were nevertheless graphic. I recall it was too upsetting to finish. The later re-visitations coincided with my exploration of Wicca. My reading material contained far more graphic descriptions of human suffering and now I had a very rough idea of what a medieval torture chamber looked like thanks to old Vincent Price movies and a Gilligan’s Island episode in which the castaways are held prisoners, but not harmed, in a mad scientist’s torture chamber. Mad Vincent Price’s faithless wife is about to learn Iron Maiden doesn’t rock the house. Public domain still from the 1961 movie The Pit and the Pendulum. Now I wonder about the belly-crusher: Was it a past life memory, or had I learned about it years prior and forgotten it? One’s unconscious doesn’t forget as easily as the conscious mind shocked into welcome forgetfulness. I can’t swear I hadn’t learned about it when I was younger. Memory is odd; we forget things. When reminded we may not even recall a sense of familiarity of once having known it. I read a story years ago about a woman who ‘remembered’ a past life involving a minor historical incident in which she recounted details confirmed by books. Turns out earlier records had gotten some details wrong. They’d been corrected in modern versions. She’d ‘remembered’ not the incident that happened, but the faulty narrative in a childhood book. Now as we debate the trauma associated with America’s slavery era, I wonder a few things: How much of the trauma is actually caused by historical knowledge, and does mishandling that knowledge cause us to excoriate the wrong people? You can’t see the first comment I received from my recent article 6 Racist Things Black People Gotta Stop Doing. The author deleted her well-expressed disagreement with my take on the slavery focus; I’m not sure why. She brought up an interesting point regarding my view that there’s a modern over-emphasis on American slavery banned a century and a half ago. I believe it keeps black spirits perpetually outraged about a past no one can change. On a subconscious level, I’d guess it’s less scary than contemplating how to change a present and future when there may be serious repercussions for challenging the white status quo. My frustration with endless repetitions of this hoary-if-horrific chapter in American history stems from my impatience with Pagans and witches preoccupied with inquisitions of yore. I’ve witnessed how toxic it is for women to, as I described similarly in Six Things, keep the wound raw and bathe it in lemon juice. The mixed-race commenter spoke of the damage she feels she’s been caused by the American slave legacy and I don’t doubt her, nor do I fault the ‘deep resentment’ she says American blacks feel for an ugly chapter in history. They’re living several generations closer to historical trauma than European-descended modern witches are. She also spoke of what she believes are ‘ancestral dreams’ embodying many of the very worst abuses of an American slave’s life. Also known as ‘genetic memory’, or epigenetics, it’s a controversial idea. Can trauma become encoded into our genes and passed along to our descendants? The science leans that way with experiments on rodents and nematode worms (you have more in common, genetically, with both than you’d like to know). Genetic memories go back as far as 14 generations for our wormy cousins, and if it ultimately proves similar for humans, that’s 350–500 years back depending on how you count the length of generations. So yes, my commenter and I could hypothetically have genetic memories of trauma. Lab mice taught to fear and avoid a scent similar to cherry blossoms passed on that fear to the next generation. Creative Commons 2.0 photo from Wikimedia Commons But I wonder: If she had no knowledge of the slave trade, would she have these dreams? Because I’m not at all sure I’d have dreamed about torture chambers if I’d never learned of them. American blacks speak of the damage caused them by the American slave system, but never of the ones they descended from in pre-colonial Africa. Nor does any black woman, to my knowledge, claim ‘ancestral’ damage stemming from a 2,000-year-old legacy of one of the worst human rights abuses ever, believed to have originated in Africa: Female genital mutilation. Epigenetic scientists have focused on Holocaust survivors and Native North Americans. I’ve wondered about the epigenetic legacy of American slavery, and also FGM. American slavery ended in the 1860s; FGM never ended in some places. Anthropologists aren’t certain how old the practice is because its first mention was in the writings of Strabo in Egypt, where its prevalence is still estimated at 87.2%. Should be easy enough to investigate. How many women descended from FGM-practicing cultures, I wonder, suffer unacknowledged epigenetic trauma even if their own genitals have never been mutilated? As for horrible slave ‘memories’, I wonder whether more than just American blacks are also impacted by slave trauma since we are all likely descended from slaves. It’s a universal institution, spanning thousands of years and just about every single human community. It was more prevalent in some places than others and the American slavery system introduced a deeper level of dehumanization than previous systems, which generally granted slaves at least a few rights of their own. But we can count slaves and probably more than a few slave owners and traders in our family trees as well. Black descendants can be guaranteed they weren’t all white, because pre-colonial black Africans happily traded in slaves before their new customers arrived from Europe and America. Black Americans’ genealogies, sundered by the slave trade, disappear only a few generations back, to the days when no one kept records on what happened to black slaves, including any children they may have born or sired. So they need never confront their own ugly past on the other side of the auction block: When their ancestors bought, sold and traded other human beings. I won’t say my commenter isn’t suffering from genuine genetic memories. I won’t deny her pain, nor the oppressive wake of an ugly legacy ended only 150 years in the past. Just as I won’t deny European-descended women the pain or the legacy caused by vicious, misogynist witch hunts and persecutions from hundreds of years ago. Maybe they, too, and perhaps I, suffer past-life or genetic memories. I may well have ‘witches’ in my own family line. My genealogy stems primarily from France, a hotbed of witchmania, as well as England and Germany. England was a better place to be accused, Germany was the worst. England eschewed the cruelest tortures and preferred hanging for execution; Germany refined maximizing human suffering to a hellish art form and death by stake-burning took much longer. And they managed to make it even worse while you waited to die. Don’t ask. Just don’t. Yeah, no wonder I had horrible nightmares back in the day! My commenter described how brutalizing, dehumanizing and debilitating American slavery has been to the descendants of Africans dragged across the Atlantic into servitude. If I don’t feel her pain personally, not being black, I understand her anger. I, and other white Pagans feel the same when we revisit the Middle Ages’ tortures of the damned. I believe we must never forget history; we can never know too much, we must drill down forever deeper for new insights into the human condition and behavior; where we’ve come from, where we are, where we’re going. As ugly and traumatic as it is to revisit the trauma of slavery, or witch hunts, the danger lies in allowing ourselves to feel too victimized and even worse, to confuse the descendants with the villains of those dark times. The new conflation of ‘white supremacy’ with modern systematized oppression of blacks and other non-whites today, I believe is fed by the preoccupation with the slavery era. American society may be rooted in genuine white supremacy, but our ancestors would be appalled at how much freedom blacks have now. This conflation between history and the present drives misplaced black aggression, confusing white people today with the slave owners of the past. As bad as modern, true white supremacists are, they’re a much tinier representation of white Americans. They’d probably become Massas again if not restrained by what’s left of the democratic state, but maybe it’s a testament to American resilience that we haven’t yet descended into all-out civil war. There’s plenty of reason for black Americans to be angry and aggressive; but it’s counterproductive to add needless anger at whites for something almost no one supports anymore (I say ‘almost’ because I’m quite sure some Trumpers would happily support black slavery again if allowed; but I also think some black extremists would start popping off white people indiscriminately if not held back by that same state). I’ve witnessed and felt that same toxic confusion between the nightmarish abuses of centuries past, with the aggressive feelings and sometimes downright loathing for people today — modern men and the Catholic Church (the primary villains of the Witches’ Narrative). You see it when some female writers recount the tortures of the damned for moderns, in case we weren’t aware of how they ripped flesh from bones with red hot pincers or how the strappado worked. Let’s describe in gruesome detail burning rods driven up vaginas, iron cages over hot coals, the rack tearing female joints apart like a hungry warrior with a leg of mutton. (Ohyeahtheydidthatstufftomalehereticsjewsandmuslimstoobutwhocaresalotofthemweremen) By the time you were done reading that shit, you were ready to firebomb your local St. Peter’s. Our angry feelings bled over to modern men, most of whom, as far as we knew, thought the Spanish boot was something worn by hipster metrosexuals. The Catholic Church’s modern crimes faded into the background as we confused the abuses of patriarchal dead guys with our own otherwise more civilized ones. We need to know and understand history, but also make the distinction between what was yesterday and what is today and stop misplacing blame. Human history is brutal. I’ve begun re-reading Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It’s one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read, and one of the most difficult. It is, believe it or not, also a heartwarming and hopeful book laying out in 700 pages why humanity is getting better, not worse, and how violence is decreasing everywhere (yes, everywhere) around the world, and has been for many centuries. He describes how brutal non-state societies were, like pre-colonial Indigenes and those still in existence, if you consider homicide as a percentage of a population. Fifty deaths in a war on one side doesn’t sound like much when our own battles number many more; but it’s a helluva difference when your army began with a hundred warriors. That’s a 50% casualty rate, compared to way under 1% for American wars, even though far more people die. It wasn’t even war that made/makes pre-state life so nasty, brutish and short; it’s the raiding parties that often wiped out entire villages, that made pre-European contact Indigenous life far dicier. As for pre-contact Indigenous violence? Don’t ask. Just don’t ask. As scientists add the treatment of North American Indigenes by whites to the epigenetic debate, I wonder: How much epigenetic trauma have they encoded from pre-colonial days? If it goes back that far for humans? In addition to slavery practices and female genital mutilation overall, how much epigenetic trauma is there for descendants of tribes and kingdoms conquered by those famous brutally bloody bastards, the Mongol Horde? Genghis Khan was literally one of the most prolific men in human history, raping his genes into millions of descendants currently alive. So there may be a lot of epigenetic memories. What about pre-contact Native Americans scalping one’s ancestors alive, or, as Steven Pinker describes, being forced to watch while others carved a piece off you and ate you in front of you? Sometimes victims were forced to join in the feast. Cannibalism: The dirty little secret of many pre-contact Indigenes. We may never know if our memories and dreams are from a particular slice of history, or one that we’re already knowledgeable about. Books or legacy? I think both. Maybe nightmares and the trauma of learning what really was done to others is the price we pay for morally evolving. There’s a positive note, though, in the epigenetic trauma story: It seems positive experiences can reverse the damage, at least with more recent trauma. Something to think about as we descend further into polarization, Othering, and tribalism: Stop the madness and develop positive qualities like equanimity, kindness and compassion! Do it for your future kids.

Even white people. Especially white people! Okay, I took the easy route and chose a picture of the Dionne Quintuplets (1952). But really, this could be any group of young women today, regardless of race, fashion, or hairstyle. CC0 1.0 Public domain photo by unknown author on Wikimedia Commons It’s considered racist to say about other groups of people, “You all look alike to me.” But…what if they really do? Including your own tribe? My roommate came home one afternoon — I worked, she was still in school — and said, “Oh my God, you wouldn’t believe these three girls I saw today. I literally couldn’t tell them apart!” Seems three blonde, pretty little Barbie dolls sat together, with the same manufactured look — hair, makeup, clothes. “Literally, Nicole, I couldn’t tell them apart. They were like little clones. I wanted to ask if they needed name tags to recognize each other.” Gotta love college girls. A few years prior, in my student days, every cool girl sported a poufy bad Toni home perm and the then-fashionable Flashdance shirt-falling-off-one-shoulder look. Fashionable black people emulated Michael Jackson’s dipped-my-head- Photo by C-Monster on Flickr in-axle-grease look until his hair caught fire while filming a Pepsi commercial, and folks realized how flammable their heads were. January 27, 1984: The day the Geri curls died. Black guys whacked it all off and carved artistic designs into their 2mm scalp fuzz. Black girls went back to cornrows, braids, or generic fluffy short ‘dos. White guys? The hot ones glued their feathered locks in place after pinching their sister’s hair spray; rockers adopted the Stray Cats Wannabe ‘do (“The higher the hair, the closer to MTV”), the metalheads’ hair poufed longer and bigger than the Toni perm girls’, and the stoners all looked like Kansas (the band, not the state) as did the farm kids (the state, not the band). Adolescent sheep tend to trend because they haven’t developed the maturity and self-assurance yet to follow their own siren call and create their own authentic look. Okay, fine. But what’s everyone’s excuse today on the subway? I don’t public-transport much anymore. When I do it’s noticeably less crowded than my pre-pandemic rush hours when the sides of the cars fairly bulged. Insert one thin mint at Bloor-Yonge and it would have exploded like a Monty Python sketch. Usually I read, but I’d also glance around at my fellow passengers, especially curious in the early months after I moved to multicultural Toronto. People self-homogenize not just by trending, but by not trending. Everyone looked bored and slightly pissed. The young people still looked clone-y. The middle-aged faded into each other, tired, old. Their wrinkles didn’t erase them; it was their barely-there air. On singles sites, slightly overweight non-descript men blended into each other with shaved heads, goatees, and T-shirts or light jackets, to the point where you couldn’t have picked out the perp in a criminal lineup of one each — white, black, Asian and brown. Looking at cloned tired white women on the bus is part of the reason why I kicked my ass into gear at forty-five when I realized a horrifying truth: I was fading, like them. Was I ready to be old and invisible? No, dammit! My life wasn’t over! I lost the post-moving-to-Canada weight, colored my hair more regularly, and stopped dressing as though I didn’t care, because now I did. I don’t ever want to look like everyone else. Especially not as I enter the senior silver years, like all the clone-y church ladies of my youth lined up in the front pews on Sunday morning, their once-a-week Big Day Out. Sometimes I consciously look at others, especially people from different racial groups, and pay attention to differences to gain a better understanding of what makes people look different so they don’t ‘all look alike to me.’ Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels When I dated a Japanese guy he asked, “Why do white people say we all look alike? We don’t have a problem telling each other apart.” “We see variations in eye shape and color,” I explained. “Hair too. Asians lack diversity to us with largely dark hair and eyes. I imagine you recognize each other differently. Maybe facial features or eye shape or hair type or something.” He had to think about it. You never consider how you tell your tribe members apart until someone calls your attention to it. Is the inability to distinguish as easily for other races racism? According to the New York Times article The Science Behind ‘They All Look Alike To Me’, scientists note after many years of research it’s not bigotry, it’s lack of early exposure to others as part of something they call the ‘cross race effect’. When people grow up in a homogenous culture (like the era of racial segregation), no matter their race, they can find it difficult to tell other races apart when they come in contact with them. It’s universal. The first research published on the cross-race effect, in 1914, found East Asians can have difficulty telling us apart. The cross-race effect is most pronounceable in whites, but it’s been observed cross-culturally. It starts in infancy. Newborns don’t demonstrate a preference for faces of their own race, but it changes between 3–9 months as they gain more experience within same-race families and communities. Whites learn to differentiate by hair and eye color differences; African-Americans pay more attention to skin color; Asians, as Atsushi explained to me, by face and eye shape and how one walks. Atsushi grew up in a culture even more homogenized than mine: Japan even today remains one of the least ethnically diverse countries. But he didn’t think about how he did it. He saw someone and said, “Hey, Daichi!” Still, people of all races can look undifferentiated if there’s nothing particularly unusual about their looks. And, sometimes we simply resemble someone else or remind someone of someone else. I only once ever got mistaken for a ‘celebrity’, right after I moved to Canada. At the summer Scottish Games in Fergus, Ontario, someone mistook me for an actress on Coronation Street. Me in 2005 and my alleged doppelganger, actress Sally Lindsey. Yah, hard to tell us apart, huh? Morgan Freeman, my heart bleeds for you. I’d never heard of her but I Googled later and thought, “What the hell?” I guess all us white women look alike to….even all us white people. Why do we make fun of the ‘Karen’ bowl cut? Because many middle-aged white women sport it. Maybe that’s why they pitch public tantrums; so people notice they’re there. The good news is, with a little effort and covert attention, one can learn to identify individuals of other races by paying attention to the differences one never noticed before. Toronto is the most ethnically diverse city I’ve ever lived in, not nearly as segregated, self or otherwise, as anywhere else. On a crowded subway when I have to stand with no room to read, I glance at my peeps. Body height and size. Hairstyle. Eye shape. Eye placement. Facial features. Different types of hair. Even when it’s all the same color, it’s different if I look. I’m not supposed to, but I’m also not supposed to stereotype or say, “They all look alike to me.” We’re emotionally split on ‘race’ (Is it a thing? Is it a human construct?) and differences (Celebrate them, be not ashamed, but don’t talk about or refer to them unless you’re writing your ‘woke’ bio listing the genetic recipe that makes you you). So I look. I try to be discreet since no one likes being stared at. The only way to move beyond ‘they all look alike to me’ is to notice how they don’t all look alike. ‘They’ don’t look as alike to me as they did when I first moved here. Muslim women in various states of coverage taught me to forget hair. How do I tell those faces apart? Skin tone for people with actual skin tone is far more helpful than it is for us largely uni-colored white folks. Some of us are pasty and some of us look like we vacationed in Miami, but I’ve never been able to use white skin as a cue for telling someone part. Now I see: African-Americans have many different types of (natural) hair. Asians have different facial characteristics and eye shapes. I don’t mean ethnic ones, although they may have that too; I’m interested in individual differences. Hopefully, I won’t ever mistake Lisa Liu for Lisa Ling, although to be honest, they really do just happen to look a lot like each other. Maybe one should get a haircut. Some people spend time to look different, standing out either by beauty or clothes or other types of expression. Others choose to fade into the background. Not everyone wants to be seen. And sometimes it just — happens. The cross-race effect may be more based in infant brain wiring than we realize, but it can be challenged. Scientists have found people who live in more ethnically diverse communities exhibit less of the effect. Paying more attention to people who don’t look like you enables you to see the differences you never saw before. Including white people. (But damn, we really do look alike sometimes!) No one likes being the first Brown Sheep in the neighborhood. CC0 2.0 image by Jesus Solana on Wikimedia Commons This first appeared on Medium in April 2021.

’80s feminist power icon Pat Benatar fought real misogyny but never whined Neil Giraldo and Pat Benatar in 2009 by Terwilliger911 on Wikimedia Commons — CC BY 2.0 Neil Giraldo and Pat Benatar in 2009 by Terwilliger911 on Wikimedia Commons — CC BY 2.0“Railing against the constraints of male-dominated rock, Pat Benatar sings her lungs out with the kind of sentiments that the rock boize might address if only they had the balls.” — Tim Holmes, Rolling Stone magazine I have fallen back in love with Pat Benatar again, after a thirty-year hiatus. Recently I explored why some women are still afraid of their own power and included Benatar’s 1983 video Love Is A Battlefield. My favourite part is where she and the other taxi dancers stand up to the sleazy lecherous club owner and she throws a drink in his face, then shoulder-shimmies the other dancers out of the club and into the morning dawn. Abuse ends when *women* decide it ends. I Googled on Benatar and found she’d written a memoir. Between A Heart and a Rock Place. I downloaded it onto my Kobo. Pat Benatar wasn’t my idol, she was my role model as I entered college. Crimes of Passion, her second album, was at the top of the charts birthing one hit single after another. I loved her hard-rockin’ sound but even more, her hard-hitting message. The pixie-cutted spitfire with the defiant jaw took no shit from no man as she belted out Hit Me With Your Best Shot, You Better Run, and Treat Me Right. She got downright stalkerish on dudes with I’m Gonna Follow You and she defended abused children in her deeply moving Hell Is For Children (a song I can’t even listen to anymore). Ironically, many of the men we excoriate today for abusiveness were children in the time period during which Pat recorded the song (1980). Heartbreaker remains my favorite song. I’ve sung it more than once in karaoke bars. I Need A Lover spoke to the need for a partner without a lot of drama. No You Don’t was my friend Theresa’s favorite Benatar song. If it came up on my tape as we drove to a party or nightclub she’d insist I crank it to full volume, and maybe rewind it so we could belt it out again at the top of our lungs. Every young ’80s chick wanted to be Pat Benatar. Two friends were in bands, doing her songs. I wanted to become her, and I did. Not the rock goddess but strong, powerful, and take-no-shit. Benatar’s songs often featured unhappy love affairs or men who didn’t treat her right. For the most part, the themes were fictional because she doesn’t appear to have had wide romantic and sexual experience. She married her high school sweetheart at 19 and it ended in divorce seven years later, around the time she met lifelong love Neil Giraldo who became her creative partner, boyfriend, ex-boyfriend, husband, and, if anyone can ever truly be defined as such, her soulmate. I lost touch with Benatar in the late ’80s when I began belly dancing and listened obsessively to Middle Eastern music, then turned to Paganism and hunted for Pagan rock bands in the early days of the dial-up Internet, when the Web was called the WorldWide Wait. I rediscovered Benatar in the ’90s when I frequented music stores and discovered what she’d been up to while I was away. She’d put out several new albums and I snapped them up, but I found myself a little bored now. The whole man-done-me-wrong thing had begun to wear a little thin considering she’d been happily married to the same man for close to twenty years, an epoch in the entertainment world. Photo by Heidi Escobar on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 In retrospect, her garden-variety fake ‘man problems’ seem kind of cute today. They were the same perfectly normal human romantic troubles I had with men, flakiness and ego and a wandering eye or unequal levels of interest. Benatar never sang about abused women or narcissists or psycho exes. Her own life, as she described on an early Howard Stern show, was so personally drama-free that when he asked his next guest, Robin Leach, host of the then-popular TV show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous whether he should feature Benatar, Leach quipped, “She just spent twenty minutes telling you how boring she is. Why would I do that?” Apart from a split with Giraldo early in their relationship thanks to their insane work life, aggressively pushed by their record label, Benatar lived a life both ridiculously fantabulous while remaining herself remarkably grounded. For one thing, she stayed away from drugs, and it sounds like the band did too. She never had an alcohol problem. Because she’s been married for most of her adult life except for maybe a 45-minute break between husbands, she had to have made up all those unhappy love affairs, or drew from her friends bitching about theirs. She didn’t even try to steal Giraldo away from his then-girlfriend, actress Linda Blair, when he first met the pixie-cutted future rock goddess and encountered instant mutual chemistry. She didn’t want to be the kind of woman who would go after another woman’s man. That was also quite remarkable for an era in which women had less power than today and were far more conditioned to compete for men. Benatar grew up in a working class extended Long Island family. She learned to take care of herself and developed ‘emotional armor’ when her mother was driven into the workforce by necessity. She seems both to have been born with a sense of equality few other little girls had in the 1950s as well as a mother who taught her to be strong, like my mother did. Benatar loved and was attracted to boys even when she was very young and wanted to play with and be around them. They gave her ‘the business’ for being a giiiiiiirl including mashing earthworms against her legs, but she handled it with stoicism and in her memoir she doesn’t excoriate them for their early misogyny. She was, in fact, eventually accepted as one of them and it engendered in her a toughness which served her well when she one day dealt with hardcore lechery and misogyny in the music business. “I dressed the way I did because I liked it, not because I thought men liked it. That was the point. I was much more interested in showing how strong-minded I was. It was all about not taking crap from anyone for a reason.” There’s no shred of victimhood mentality anywhere in Benatar’s memoir. She certainly encountered plenty of misogyny. She describes an early songwriter who chased her around a piano and program directors who patted their laps and said she could sit right here, honey. The record exec who leaned forward as they discussed her next video and leered, “So what are ya gonna wear?” The radio deejays who tried to extract sex from her for the promise of more airplay. Payola lived into the ’80s, apparently, but was less evidential than bags of cocaine in the ‘50s. The worst misogyny was the heartless, soulless executives who insisted on a work schedule she described as ‘indentured servitude’ and who went bugspit crazy when she tried to have anything resembling a life outside of the recording studio or tour. They opposed her relationship with Giraldo from the beginning, fearing he’d become a Yoko Ono who’d split up the band. They fought recognizing Giraldo for any contribution and worked to split the couple apart. Which they did, and then went insane when Benatar and Giraldo eventually not just got back together, but married. Then, when Benatar got pregnant during the creation of the Tropico album, they went bugspit insane again, insisting she cover up her pregnancy and not be photographed with a belly as it would ruin her sex bomb appeal in their primitive 1950s-era brains. Then the Napster meteor struck the dinosaurs in the ’90s, a game-changing moment in music history. An illegal file-sharing application sent music labels into apoplexy as they watched their music download for free. Fans, already being gouged on artificially inflated CD prices years after the technology newness no longer justified it (a practice the Clinton administration ended), assumed their icons were already making plenty of money but artists disabused them of that, with a few brave souls like Courtney Love speaking out against how little they made and what record companies did to make stars look rich while they soaked them. Benatar and Giraldo jumped on digital music as readily as they’d once accepted the offer to do a trial video for a then-new MTV in 1982 (The You Better Run video was the second ever to air, making Benatar the first female artist to appear on it). Instead of seeing file sharing as a threat to their income, they envisioned the opportunity to jettison their dinosaurs and go indy. Every laugh line, every scar, is a badge I wear to show I’ve been present, the inner rings of my personal tree trunk that I display proudly for all to see. “I can’t imagine a guy ever abusing you,” my college-age brother said to me long ago. “I think you’d rip his balls off!” He was right. That’s what Pat Benatar would do, assuming anyone had been suicidal enough to take a whack at her. I don’t take shit from partners and I would never allow abuse. Not everyone understands it’s a choice, however unconscious, but Pat Benatar, along with my strong feminist-in-denial mother, taught me to take no shit, ever, from any man. “When you’re a doormat,” my mother used to say, “it’s because you agree to be.” The sooner we learn how to take care of ourselves, to stand up for ourselves, or to glare at the lecher who thought the music video was all about whatever we were going to wear (“Clothes,” I would have answered), the better we’ll take care of ourselves as well as each other. Cultivating a personal power mentality is a huge step toward true independence. We can only fight genuine misogyny when we recognize it, and a victim mentality leaves women tilting at windmills and unable to see the difference, for example, between a man like Joe Biden and the morally degenerate misogynist she just voted for. Pat Benatar got victimized sometimes, just like we all do. By record companies and lecherous associates, although not by her male bandmates who were all close friends. Her drummer and his wife became her daughters’ godparents. It’s easier to be victimized when you’re young and inexperienced and trying to balance standing up for yourself with going and getting along. It’s why predatory men prefer younger women. They’re easier to impress, manipulate, pressure and coerce. They’re more eager to please and blame themselves when something goes wrong. Some women never learn, others strengthen and grow. Pat Benatar was a proto-feminist who didn’t talk the gender theory academic jargonbabble talk, she walked the walk. She’s lived her life as authentically as she could with the man she’ll be with until death. That’s how I remember a lot of us in the ’80s, wild, outrageous, and take-no-shit. Feminism lost its labia along the way, with many giving away their personal power and authenticity. But as dark as the world seems in 2020, though, I see glimmers that Benatar’s old spirit is on the rise again, in personally powerful women like Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Kamala Harris is already causing tiny little testicles to retreat into man-boy abdomens every time she turns that District Attorney glare in one’s direction. The time has come to take back our power, stop being victims and like Pat Benatar, resolve to Take No Shit. “Luck has little to do with [Benatar’s] position as the apotheosis of Eighties American womanhood — she got here through experience.” — Tim Holmes, Rolling Stone magazine The girls who aren’t ready can stay behind. It’s their choice. This first appeared on Medium in 2021.

Who are you? Why should I believe your story? Photo by Cassidy Dickens on Unsplash I wrote an article awhile back — Men, We Need You To Tell Your Truths Too. My opinion, shared by others, is that the gender narrative is dominated heavily by victim feminists who see the world through the rust-colored glasses of powerlessness and a patriarchy looming larger in their heads than it does in ours. One must wonder how galling it is for men to read endless — and I mean endless! — articles by women telling them how to court women (often contradictory) and how to be a better man. It seems like a good time to discuss credibility levels with male, female and other truth-tellers. Hail Ansari, full of ‘Grace’ It was Aziz Ansari’s accuser who made me consider the limitations of anonymous testimony. ‘Grace’ did for feminism what Jeffrey Epstein did for yacht parties. She related a pseudonymous story of an evening with comedian and actor Aziz Ansari that came across as somewhat less rapey-sounding than portrayed. Aziz pushed her a bit for sex and stopped when she asked. She came nowhere close to getting raped, unless you count the inherent risk in going to someone’s home you’ve only just met. She felt the discomfort of a young woman who made a decision, was in over her head and came out of it less wise, it seemed, than she might have. She didn’t consider when she got Ansari’s invitation to come home with him that celebrities are famously entitled and think they can (and often do) get away with what mere mortals can’t, but she was young so I’ll spot her her inexperience. Still, she was old enough to know going home with a guy you barely know isn’t exactly a Best Practice. She’s lucky he wasn’t another Coz. Controversy erupted. For those of us who know equality means female responsibility and that men should accept no means no, Ansari did exactly that and she looked like a clueless teenager who shouldn’t be allowed to go to parties with beer and boys. Only he took the fallout with those who thought the night was rapey, even if no rape occurred. ‘Grace’ took some criticism and fallout too, but until someone revealed her real name she could go about her day without anyone knowing she was that Grace unlike Ansari who was that Aziz Ansari. ‘Grace’ backpedaled feminism for women fighting the millennia-old perception that it’s their fault when they get raped, while validating an infantilizing feminism portraying women as never responsible for their personal safety or for making their boundaries clear. The definitions of ‘rape’ and ‘sexual assault’ have bloated over the years to trawl a wide variety of male behaviors which didn’t fall under those categories before, and the victimhood set was plenty happy to rake another man over the coals even though he stopped when she asked while never wondering whether Grace should have an 11PM curfew. Male critics accuse women of not knowing what rape is anymore, and I fear they may be partially right. When Feminists Make It Harder To 'Believe Women': How can we be sure she was raped if she doesn't understand the difference between 'rape' and 'consent'? ‘Grace’ depended too heavily on subtle signals indicating lack of willingness to pursue a sexual liaison that Ansari failed to pick up. ‘Grace’ may have simply been unaware men often don’t pick up on nonverbal signals, so women need to be more verbal and up-front with what’s okay and what’s not. It wasn’t her youth; it’s uncommon knowledge. I won’t fault her, but we all need to understand men aren’t mind-readers. ‘Grace’ essentially held Ansari up for public ridicule, hiding comfortably behind anonymity (not unlike a troll) until someone dug up her name. Then she had to face the public consequences, too. I came to realize something which will make the #MeToo set cringe or turn red with rage, but I think it’s true, like it or not: Truth rings more loudly when you tell it under your real name. On some levels, anonymity is for cowards. The feminist troll I understand why women don’t want to tell violent tales of abuse, rape, sexual assault, stalking, genuine gaslighting and psychological manipulation under their real names. Men be crazy. Especially vengeful exes. Especially angry, incel trolls, themselves hiding in sexually frustrated cowardice behind their 4Chan monikers. I don’t condemn women for anonymous testimony. It’s necessary. But, it also opens her up to the legitimate suspicion she may be lying, or not being entirely truthful, or stretching it a bit. When #MeToo exploded, with tales of terror on Twitter and elsewhere, I wondered how many of the anonymous were lying? Yes, I think some women lie about rape, but not the way men think — where she falsely accuses a particular man. That happens, less than men believe, more than women believe. I myself have seen it twice. Feminist trolling is real, and it becomes easier to lie about rape and sexual assault — or anything, really — when there’s no chance anyone can identify you. A few years ago here on Medium, I read a perfectly reasonable article on gender relations by a popular male writer who received a lot of positive response. Then came The Feminist Troll. She descended like a Pacific Northwest heatwave, spewing poisonous misandry and tossing wild accusations about how men have ‘brought it all on themselves after thousands of years of patriarchy’. She had a ‘name’ — common, the same as countless women across the world — no photo, and nothing in her brief Image by Rachealmarie from Pixabay biography to identify her. Maybe it was her real name. But it didn’t matter. She was anonymous. She was a troll, even if she didn’t consider herself one. She spoke of having endured much abuse throughout her young life including multiple gang rapes that rang so — damned false. It was the first time I ever read such a thing and thought, “You’re lying.” She listed her ‘cred’ almost proudly, like she was rattling off her university accomplishments. Rapes, a gang rape or two, sexual assaults, sexual abuse when she was a kid — but without the dead-serious feeling most survivors of such traumas express. Maybe she was telling the truth but — sounding almost proud of her alleged abuse, being anonymous added to her lack of credibility. She made me wonder if some women lied behind anonymity to join the ‘sisterhood’ of sexual trauma survivors. The benefits of traumatic sisterhood When a woman claims to be sexually assaulted her word is considered sacred writ by many. She’s never, ever questioned, as that would be misogyny and blaming the victim. This sisterhood can damn men all they like, exhibit the worst kind of misandry, and be cheered on. Sure, they get hate comments and threats by misogynist trolls, but they don’t know who to stalk and dox. Thou shalt not question the word of a woman who claims to have been abused. It’s different when you #MeToo your way through social media or blogging platforms under your real name. There are ugly, real-world consequences to telling your truth the anonymous never have to face. This is why my faith in anonymous testimony has been shaken both by ‘Grace’ and the Suspicious Rape Victim. How to be anonymous AND credible Given how abused anonymous social media accounts are, I favor a fantasy I don’t know will ever occur — The Internetz and social media banning anonymous accounts. I don’t know if it’s technologically workable, or even legal. I realize it means many genuine stories will disappear, because women and men will be afraid to tell their truths when people can stalk and hurt them, but it also means anonymous trolls will shut the fuck up too, when there are consequences for their words. Like not being able to create a new profile moments after the last one is suspended. Or someone stalking and threatening them. Or worst of all, someone telling their parents. I believe identified truth-telling will always sound more credible than anonymous testimony. The reason is simple: It takes A LOT of courage to open yourself up to the kind of backlash, abuse, and public shaming dealt to those whose truth hurts others more even than it hurts themselves. I salute and honor these supremely brave souls, whoever they are and whatever their story. Identified authors will likely take a lot more care with their words when they have to answer for them, rather than NarcissismSurvivor1608. For those who simply can’t risk identification for insanely good reasons, you can add credibility to your anonymous story by being ever-mindful of your language and not allow your own personal narrative to obfuscate the truth. (Like every really minor ‘microaggression’ turning into the writer’s heroic Epic Battle With The Patriarchy or White Supremacy.) If it’s clear you have a toxic agenda — you hate women, men, white people, gay left-handed plumbers — you’ll come across a lot more troll-ish. You will open yourself to charges of ‘making it up’ or having an axe to grind. Your story will be, perhaps not unbelievable, but still less credible. I’ve read plenty of anonymous tales of terror that rang true. They simply sounded honest, with minimal exaggeration or personal self-serving spin. I don’t suspect them of lying. The response I got from my men and truth-telling article demonstrated that men, at least on Medium, are quite reticent about telling their truths to a platform often hostile to anything with a penis. I understand and respect that. I encourage them to tell their truths, from anonymous accounts if necessary, and to keep it as real as possible. The backlash from bitter women may sting and stab one’s soul, but you’ll start the ripple, the kind that can become a tsunami. We need to hear men’s truths as much as women’s truths. Not all feminists or abuse survivors are far-left misandrists, as not all male feminist critics are hateful right-wing incels. There’s an imbalance in The Force, gentlemen, and as I urge women to grow some labia, I urge you too to grow some balls and tell your stories. If you must do it anonymously, be as truthful as you can, and you’ll be amazed at how much positive response and support you’ll get from women. We get it, guys. We’ve been there for centuries. Photo by nappy from Pexels This first appeared on Medium in July 2021.

Generations of parents have a lot to answer for Photo by smpratt90 on Pixabay "Mommy, why do little boys hate girls so much?" I asked. "I don't know," she replied. "That's the way they are." "But why?" I persisted. "Larry doesn't like me 'because I'm a girl.' I can't help it. I was born this way. And what's so terrible about being a girl anyway?" I'd reached that logical conclusion based on the many conversations Mom and I had had regarding how wrong it was to judge someone by the color of their skin. She didn't want to raise racist children in 1960s Florida. "I don't know," she replied again, frustrating me. Why didn't she know? "But doesn't Mrs. X teach him it's wrong to hate girls? She is a girl!" "It's not my place to tell Mrs. X how to raise Larry," Mom explained. "But a lot of little boys are like this." Larry was my first-ever friend, and the only one my age in our small neighborhood. Sometimes he was nice, and sometimes he would hit me, run away, and laugh at my impotence. I'd complain to our mothers. Mrs. X grew tired of the tattling. "Hit him back," my mother advised. It never occurred to me to do it the next time he came within striking distance. I wonder if Larry grew up to be an abuser because his parents taught him it was okay to hit girls. Not all little boys were pint-sized jerks. Randall was a first-grade classmate with a sweet Southern drawl who I could always count on to be a decent human being around me, or other girls. Bill, a boy in my neighborhood with whom I frequently played, never gave me crap. I remember his hyper-masculine older brother teasing us once as we sat in a tree together. "Two little lovebirds sittin' in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G, First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Nicole with a baby carriage!" Years later, I suspect Bill might have been gay. He had all the earmarks of a future femme: Limp-wristed, talked in a higher somewhat feminine voice, and never ever had a problem with girls. My cousin, on the other hand, was a case study in how parents could do a better job raising their sons. He wouldn't let me into his treehouse because of his strict No Girls Allowed policy. I complained to my aunt, noting we'd been up there together the previous summer. She went outside and told him to let me in but he resisted, telling her absolutely no girls allowed. She relented. I appealed to my mother next, but she didn't want to intervene, because it wasn't her place once again. "Why doesn't Aunt Y tell him to come down, that he can't play there either until he changes his mind?" I asked. "That's what I would do," Mom said, "but I'm not Aunt Y." How different would the world be if parents, but especially mothers, who really should know better, crushed baby misogynists like little entitled bugs? Why does male entitlement persist? I never understood why Mrs. X and Aunt Y allowed their sons to get away with misogynist behavior and attitudes. They were girls, weren't they? Why would they allow their sons to be mean to girls when they were girls themselves? How did they not identify with my frustrations? Perhaps I judge the Silent Generation too harshly. Betty Friedan wasn't even a household name yet, and full-time mothers had little time to read, especially tomes as lengthy as then-popular The Feminine Mystique or Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. We spend a ridiculous amount of time debating male privilege and entitlement. I get it with the Boomers and us early Xers: We were raised in less enlightened times, when 'misogyny' wasn't a household word and we wrote off most of it with 'Boys will be boys'. Few questioned why boys were such boys, and whether they could do better. I have a harder time understanding why some young boys and men today - tail-end Xers, Millennials, and Gen Z - are still so entitled. We've seen progress, for sure. If you keep your eyes open, know or remember your history and don't subscribe to self-infantilizing victim mentality, you see fewer entitled-feeling men walking among us. When I speak of misogynist behavior I refer to indisputable, harassing, abusive behavior. I don't count compliments, pickup attempts, random comments, and minor events touted as 'misogyny' by the sort of women who will always find an oppression narrative in every interaction with a man. I don't see 'patriarchy' everywhere and I don't find it 'exhausting' to be a woman. I live in a sexist society, for sure. I'm well aware men are responsible for 90% of the violence in the world, and the people most at risk for violence by men are men. Much of the Trumpian backlash we experience today is thanks to entitled men's last stand at preserving their penis-granted privilege in a world where too many Others--women, people of color, people of differing sexual preferences or gender identities--are demanding more equality, more power and more of the pie. The older ones, I get it. But why the younger ones? We live in a highly gendered society despite more recent attempts to reshape mindsets toward 'gender fluidity'. The male/female differences are still there, and always will be. The problem isn't that our bodies are different, but the values and constructs we assign to them. Boys are boys, girls are girls, and anyone who doesn't fit either of those boxes is free to be whoever they want to be. The world sends many messages about how we're 'supposed' to think or feel, but gender expectations training starts at home with how parents treat each other, if there's a spouse or partner, and whether they allow toxic expressions in their children. Anti-misogyny begins at birth. Just as my mother successfully strove to raise two non-racist children at a time when the Civil War was a mere century ago, parents can correct boys when they express sexist ideas or engage in sexist behavior, like with Larry's hit-and-runs. The easy availability of violent porn may have plenty to answer for, but that's a discussion for another day. So, I suspect, does the 'self-esteem' movement, where children were taught they deserve anything they want, and when parents were taught to treat children like mini-adults rather than the baby humans they are who need firm (non-violent) hands and adult guidance and restrictions. They still restricted their daughters' freedom more than they did their sons. The unpleasant truth about the Ford-Kavanagh debacle is that Christine Blasey's parents didn't want her going to parties with boys and beer because they knew what might happen; young Christine snuck out behind her parents' back and learned they were right. She didn't tell, I believe, partly because she knew what her parents' reaction would be: To restrict her freedom further, not as punishment but to 'protect' her. I keep wondering why we as a society keep allowing young boys and men free reign while restricting women in a manner bearing a passing resemblance to the not-so-benevolent 'protection' offered by the Taliban. If women are in danger from men, restrict mens' freedom, not women's. Porno sex ed It's 2021, more than fifty years after shag-in-the-mud Woodstock, and parents still don't want to talk about sex with their children. It's embarrassing. Where are kids learning, then, about sex, apart from the fairly sterile stripped-of-all-values-discussions in health class? TED Talk: Peggy Orenstein: What Young Women Believe About Their Sexual Pleasure It bothers me greatly to learn many parents still outsource the job to teachers and leave kids to learn about their sexuality and sex roles from a deeply disordered porn industry. It's no wonder violent sex among young people is on the rise, as Nancy Jo Sales details in her exposé Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno. I don't damn working parents. Women have always worked, inside or outside the household, and had far less time to raise their children. Only since the post-World War II middle-class boom have mothers had the 'luxury' of staying home to raise children without copious help from relations and 'nurses' or 'governesses' (for those wealthy enough to afford them). The mantle of responsibility isn't solely on mothers' shoulders, but ultimately, they're the ones who relate to misogyny the most. It's no longer 'boys will be boys.' Fathers will never fully understand what it means to grow up female, or how much they themselves got away with. Privilege holders are blind. As the Angry White Man becomes the new face of hatred, we need to ask ourselves where they all came from. Why do they think they're entitled to women's jobs, women's lives, women's bodies? Why do they think it's okay to hit or even hate on girls? What if Mrs. X and Aunt Y had challenged her baby boy's misogyny more? My mother raised a boy after me, and he's in no way a misogynist. Then again, my cousin turned out okay too. It's time to stop leaving it to teachers and porn to raise the kids. (Especially porn!) Most of all, rule the baby and teenage Brett Kavanaghs with the iron fist with which we insist on ruling our daughters. There's nothing wrong with being born a girl. Time to stop punishing us for it. This article first appeared on Vocal.Media in November 2021.