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.

Because, feminism. And because I’m not going to eat you no matter what happens. Public domain photo from Pikrepo I have something in common with black men, which might impel some to yell, “I have NOTHING in common with YOU!” But here it is: We’re both members of privileged and non-privileged groups. A black man has male privilege; I’ve got white privilege. I won’t debate which is more powerful; it differs under the circumstances. White privilege protects me from cops but did nothing for 70% of Bill Cosby’s rape victims. Oh yeah, speaking of rape, let’s talk about the Mutually Assured Destruction black men and I hold over each other: They have the power to rape and kill me, by virtue of being male, and with my superpower I can have them arrested for existing, maybe even killed with a single 911 call. It puts me in a unique position to say to another disadvantaged group of nevertheless privilege-blinded humans, “Sometimes you see ‘microaggressions’ where there aren’t any.” OMG I live in such a patriarchy-drenched world! Reason #1 why I don’t always believe stories of racial microaggressions: Imaginary feminist microaggressions. Women over-interpret sometimes too. The North American world I live in, as a woman, is one still emerging from the shackles of true patriarchal structure, one set up by men, for men, to serve men. White ones. The last fifty years have been a whirlwind of feminist change. In the America I was born into, whatever problems women face now were way worse back then. You could legally rape your wife. Hell, it was still sort-of okay to rape a stranger. A woman needed a husband to get a credit card or a father to co-sign a lease for an apartment, assuming he allowed her to get one, assuming she could find a landlord who’d rent to a single woman who might have SEX EVERYWHERE!!! Yet some feminists today live in a way more patriarchal world than I do. Wealth/education privilege offers them the opportunity to learn just how oppressed they never knew they were. ‘Patriarchy’ in road signs. Mansplaining. Manspreading. Minor advances made upon them (NOT full-out sexual aggression). Some women come from real patriarchal lives, be it an ethnic, religious or social culture. Others got ‘woke’, or something. Maybe I’m still asleep. Or maybe others hallucinate more than I. Just search Medium on ‘patriarchy’ to find some of the most ridiculous complaints ever. I won’t mention any article or author. I don’t like the idea of picking fights or ‘calling people out’ unless they say something egregiously stupid. And recent. These are the ones for whom I roll my eyes when they go on about ‘sexist microaggressions’. There are genuine ones, and then there are the manufactured ‘microaggressions’ that live between impressionable ears. Many of these ‘microaggressions’ are hardly gender-specific, since everyone has to deal with them. There’s patriarchy, and then there’s the Patriarchy Monster. Writing while white If you believe the current news channel/social media discourse, everything white people do is a microaggression, connected to ‘White Supremacy’, The Patriarchy’s roommate. Don’t share memes, white people. Don’t speak out against George Floyd. March in the streets until you drop from heat exhaustion or you’re not a real ally. Don’t ask black people how they’re doing. Don’t support us, that’s Photo by Allyce Kranabetter on Flickr virtual signalling. Don’t not support us, that’s racism. The George Floyd straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the explosion of anger in the bone-dry tinderbox of American patience living resentfully in lockdown behind face masks has made everyone a lot more sensitive to racial injustice, fueled by in-your-face-on-the-news violence against black people. But also, hypersensitivity to slight rather than real injury is through the roof too. “Wrong perceptions” Buddhist psychology teaches us about ‘wrong perceptions’, based on the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works filtered through our own unique, biased perspectives. It leads us to misjudge others and ‘mindread’, thinking we know what they think, what they value, who they are as people. Most of all, what they might think about me, the most important person in the universe for everyone. Here’s an example of what a black guy might have suspected was a racial ‘microaggression’ when I was, in fact, in a hurry. A few months ago I was in a pre-pandemic grocery store where I don’t often shop. As usual, I was preoccupied, not paying attention. I grew annoyed when I couldn’t find something. I looked around to ask the nearest shelf stocker, turning to find someone in the black-shirt-and-pants uniform of this store’s employees. “Excuse me, can you tell me where I might find thus-and-such?” As he turned I realized his shirt didn’t have a name tag. He was black. “I don’t work here,” he said, stalking away. Oh shit, I thought, he thinks I assumed he worked there because he’s black. Fact was, I didn’t see skin, I saw clothes. I hadn’t taken the time to check for a name tag before I opened my mouth. I’ve made this oopsie before, mistaking red-shirted white people for Target salescritters. It wasn’t a microaggression, just not paying attention. I don’t know if he took it as such but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. I know racial microaggressions are real, just as sexist ones are, but we’re not always right about it. Sometimes we layer our interpretations on others without knowing (or being able to know, since we can’t mindread) the facts. ‘Microaggressions’ I’ve committed I don’t think are microaggressions: Asking someone where they’re from (I don’t do this anymore now that it’s a cardinal sin). I’m an American-now-dual-citizen living in immigrant-packed Toronto. It used to be a great conversation starter, bonding over our shared experiences of leaving the mother country and starting a new life elsewhere. We still do that, but you have to dance around it more so no one is a ‘racist’. Pointing out we all share 99% of our DNA with each other. The fuss we make about racial differences is skin-deep. Identity politics are as stupid and superficial as racism, the left’s way of dividing the world into groups to increase the number of ‘thems’ while decreasing the number of those one considers ‘us’. Pretty soon, it won’t be Us vs Them, it’ll be You vs Everyone. Then I expect society will break down and we’ll all start eating each other because, as every one of us will know, everyone besides me is a total animal, therefore my inferior. So yes, at some point we have to acknowledge All Lives Matter. Many of the abuses and issues Black Lives Matter confronts affect far more than just black people, and pretending only Black Lives Matter rejects a huge amount of potential allies, including those on the right who haven’t yet ‘woke’ to the reality they’re voting for those abuses not just for ‘others’ but for themselves. But that’s a subject of a future article. For now, rock on with the BLM protests, a great start to ending police brutality for all of us. We can talk about economic inequality and how multicolored the 99% is another day. Calling out black racism. I can point out to deniers it exists even as I acknowledge white racism is the far bigger crisis. I’ve called white racism a festering cancerous tumor, noting you have to kill all the post-surgery residual cancer cells or it comes roaring back. Just because POC racism isn’t anywhere close as bad as white racism doesn’t mean it’s any less toxic. The cancer patient feels a lot better after surgery, too, but she’s not out of the woods until all the cancer is destroyed. ‘S/he said hi to the white guy but not me.’ ‘She tucked her purse under her arm because she thinks I’m going to steal it.’ ‘She walked ahead of me getting on the bus even though I was there first.’ See: Not paying attention because we’re all wrapped up in our own self-obsessed lives. It’s not always about you, you, you. Racial, feminist, and other ‘microaggressions’ look an awful lot like ‘not paying attention’ and ‘common rudeness.’ Calling it a ‘microaggression’ without real justification is just layering your interpretation on it. I understand there are real aggressions and microaggressions black people are subjected to, but maybe not relentlessly. I’m not sure every day contains a subtle-or-not slur against one’s personhood or citizenship. I receive male aggressions and microaggressions too, but not daily. Maybe it’s because of where I live. Or because I’m older, except I didn’t get it much when I was a young belly dancer, either. Maybe I’m not paying attention because I’m as wrapped up in my life as you are. Maybe I notice age discrimination now more than gender discrimination. We all get it wrong sometimes. None of us are ‘psychicpaths’. When you’re followed in a store, when you’re pulled over for no good reason, when people make assumptions about you based on your skin color (like, assuming you’re racist because you’re white, ar ar), when people deny racism even exists, or white privilege, or male privilege, asking why you have to be so loud and opinionated (women can relate!), not being able to hail a cab…yes, those are microaggressions, maybe even macroaggressions. Then there are the ones you make up when you’re having a bad day, or realize you live in a country hell-bent on losing. A country almost suicidal in its collective approach to a pandemic. I analyze the false narratives we tell ourselves as we interact with others, as I challenge my own Miss Cleo psychic interpretations of what others think about me. The truth? They mostly don’t think about me at all, since I’m not me. I don’t deny the heightened danger for blacks and other POC in the Ignited States of AmeriKKKa. I keep in mind that I left fifteen years ago. I’m horrified at the way the country has degenerated, thanks to the right and the about-as-divisive left. It’s why I’m closer to the Murky Middle. Who’s really holding this country back? A demented old racist in the Whites-Only House or a disunited collective effort? Photo by Barbara Rosner on Flickr Sometimes we hold ourselves back As a woman in a sexist society, I know first-hand the obstacles of systemic sexism. But still. I also see women, especially educated ones, hold themselves back. They don’t stand up for themselves enough. They’re afraid to challenge themselves. They blame others rather than push back. They make excuses. As I encourage them to stop viewing themselves through the victimhood lens, which encourages weakness, I have to challenge my own exaggerated sense of victimhood as I forge a new way to support myself in an upside-down high unemployment new world. I see privileged POC doing the exact same things overprivileged white women are doing. It serves real white supremacists and patriarchs quite well, thankyoverymuch. The white female experience isn’t the same as blacks’, or even the black female experience, but we do share historical disadvantage in a century now with far more opportunities for all, regardless of what the naysayers and doomsayers claim. It doesn’t mean we’ll all succeed, and North America isn’t meritocratic. But it’s a helluva lot better than it was. If you can describe your Black Experience or struggles with The Patriarchy in academic race and gender theory jargonbabble, you’re in a much better position to help yourself than your grandparents were. We hold ourselves back by refusing to challenge the narratives in our heads, or asking, ‘Is what I believe really true?’ So you might see an eye-roll when it sounds like you’re bitching about another invented ‘microaggression’. Hey, victim feminists find me annoying too. This originally appeared on Medium in July 2020.

Men, I offer my own experience and encourage you: Please, go forth and write! Photo by Andres Ayrton from Pexels Everyone’s tribe is under siege, especially in the Ignited States of America. Victimhood culture’s self-destructive ideology has infected the bodies politic and social like a metastasized cancer. America falls apart before our eyes, slouching toward potential failed state status. We hate each other. Still, we’re all victims, legitimately. To some degree. Yeah, even men. Yeah, even white men. This article, though, is for everyone with male privilege. ’Coz y’all need to know you have the right to tell your stories and challenge certain narratives. Feminism isn’t a dirty little f-word, although for some it’s become an excuse to hate men the way some ‘antiracists’ hate on the easily-sunburned. Both deny their bigotry. I offer my experience debating my female tribe, particularly the perma-victims — along with my membership in the White Skin Tribe, where my privilege is occasionally overestimated by the Heavy Melanin set. I recently wrote a well-received article on how we need men to join us and tell their stories. It quite resonated with the dudes, along with women clearly as tired as I of infantilized pseudo-feminist victim thinking. Men, We Need You To Tell Your Truths Too Don’t like how you’re treated? Don’t like the racism and misandry? Feel abused? Tell us why. Yes, I’m serious. It sounds cliche to say We’re all in this together but it’s the dirty little truth for right- and left-wing bigots. Here’s another tired little platitude we need to take seriously: Be the change we want to see. Toxic -isms beget counter toxic -isms. Misogyny juices misandry and misandry juices misogyny. White racism feeds black racism and black racism returns the disfavor. The transgender community’s biggest challenge for greater acceptance is toxic masculine entitled ex-men who’ve been women for like fifteen minutes who think they know more about being a woman than those of us who’ve been at it our entire lives. Sad to say, but, typical. It juices dislike and distrust of transfolk. Women and feminists (they’re not necessarily the same) can’t go on about the difficulty for women telling their stories without a lot of shaming, harassment, and online abuse, yet turn around and do exactly that to men who have experienced trauma, also at the hands, more or less, of patriarchal culture. It’s hard to suffer the slings and shitbombs of trolls and haters, even when you’re a member of an advantaged group. I know, because as a white woman, I share a common experience with non-white men: I’m a member of both a privileged and a disadvantaged group. Fear me! I am white! Fuck, man, almost any man could rape and/or kill me if he wanted. Two words: Bill Cosby. Therefore, I can be sympathetic to how beaten up by toxic feminism men feel, because I feel beaten up by toxic antiracism. Still, we can support an essentially good cause without allowing haters’ poison into our lives. Just say no to extremists! I perpetually tell women they don’t have to allow abusive men into their lives. (A surprisingly controversial opinion for some so-called ‘feminists’.) Gentlemen, you have the right to refuse toxic, abusive women. Photo by Monstera from Pexels The ‘antiracists’ I refuse are those less interested in racial equality than taking out their hostilities on white people — which also includes frustration with themselves, deep down, for not having the balls or labia to speak up more, speak out, and not tolerate white bullshit. I see what men find annoying in chronically aggrieved women. Victim feminists rail about how they’re ‘not allowed’ to do this or that and I think, Really? Who’s stopping you? Is it the Patriarchy or is it you? And, seriously, do you really think men don’t have a lot of social dictates about what they’re ‘allowed’ to do? Is there no such thing as a ‘man box’ in your constipated world? Ironically, they exemplify the toxic masculinity model: Buying uncritically into the narrative. Women who buy uncritically into the victim feminist narrative are no different. It’s easier to blame men (or feminists) than it is to challenge yourself. We’ve got a lot in common, huh? Who’da thunk it? When we tell our truths, as a member of a privileged group, we have to take more care with our words. We have to acknowledge, at least to ourselves, how privilege-blind we are, and don’t see how it negatively affects the lives of disadvantaged groups. The advantaged have valid points of view, but not all POVs are valid. Let’s talk about men’s rights. Not the whiny, self-victimizing MRA kind. The kind of men who want to be, in the immortal words of a U.S. Army recruiting poster, all they can be. Speaking as a woman who challenges the ‘wrong’ people in my work (i.e., victim feminists), I’ve spent the last few years learning how to ‘speak my truth’ and deal with critics who can’t stand it when someone who’s supposed to be a ‘sister’ challenges other women to be all they can be, too. I understand men’s confusion a little better now, especially when communicating and articulating feelings and positions. Thanks to Anthony Signorelli for his sympathetic article on why men find this so challenging. Hold Men Accountable: Move Beyond “Toxic Masculinity” In our cultural discussion on gender and #MeToo, there is a constant call by therapists, activists, women partners, and…medium.com Don’t be put off by the headline; he doesn’t bash men. This is why I decided to write this article right now, although I’d been thinking about it since publishing the one about men’s stories. There’s a lot I don’t know about the challenges men face, especially those surrounding exploring their inner lives and learning to articulate emotional discussions better. Gentlemen, take what I’m saying as my view based on my experience. I’m not trying to tell you what to do. I know how aggravating you find all those arrogant, pretentious, lofty, woker-than-thou advice articles by self-appointed femsplainers on howtuhbearealman. Castigated men may relate to my experience, since, thanks to left-wing victimhood ideologists, I suffer the same blanket condemnation and unpaid membership into a monolithic White Supremacy some of you do. (It’s like the Patriarchy, except it includes women, even on the golf courses.) Anthony’s right. You don’t have the right tools, and as you can see from some of his comments, some women would rather kvetch about their own victimhood as they scoff at men’s pain or inability to express themselves well. Or at all. Ask those chickie-boos to help you move a piano. Then get mad at them when they complain they ‘can’t’. Kidding, ladies! Well, kind of. Get it? Yes, you can help a man move a piano if you work out enough at the gym. Just as he can learn to express himself better. Get thee to a fitness center, girly! Here are what I believe are the core guidelines for telling one’s truth. Men’s Rights of Engagement You have the right to define your own masculinity and sense of manhood. Toxic messages target us from all directions, and toxic people never shut up about what they think others should be. I don’t let men define what I ‘should’’ be. Nor do I allow toxic feminists to tell me what I ‘should’ think. I don’t allow toxic antiracists to layer me with their racial generalizations or lump me in with real white supremacists. You didn’t see my lily-white ass on Capitol Hill on January 6th! As a man, not only do you have to guard against toxic feminist thinking but also toxic masculinity thinking. Welcome to our double-edged world! Your right to define your actions and behavior ends where others’ rights begin. You have the right to stand up for yourself, but not be abusive to others. You have the right to challenge women, but are obligated to do it in a healthy, fair-minded manner. Women don’t get to solely define alleged male abuses and aggressions. As a white person striving to be as non-racist as I can, it can be exhausting keeping up on all the things black people tell me I should and shouldn’t do. I occasionally scan those Things White People Shouldn’t Do lists to see if someone’s come up with something new rather than parroting everyone else’s lists. Ergo, I understand how tired you are hearing about how much you irritate women. Constant gripes, especially with ‘microaggressions’, start to grate, especially when harm is exaggerated, as the left is wont to do. I find it with black complaints. Bitching about microaggressions is a sign of privilege. If some guy said, “I’d hit that!” as I walked by in the park, I still had a way better day than every woman in Afghanistan. You have the right to challenge claims of abuse and aggressions. Note, I said challenge, not deny. Bill Maher put it well in a New Rule video: #TakeAllegationsSeriously, an opinion piece that brought together four words you never expected to hear: Joe Biden, Sex Monster. Victim feminism perpetually broadens the definitions of formerly very serious words like rape, abuse, harassment, consent, narcissism, gaslighting, and psychopath to cast a wider net over alleged perpetrators, as antiRACISTS try to drag all us white folks into the same category as Steve Bannon and Robert E. Lee. When women tell their stories, treat them the way you want your own stories treated, and remember your own scoffers. Just because someone says you’re a misogynist doesn’t make it so, but conduct some honest self-questioning and make sure they’re wrong. Keep skimming those Things Men Do To Annoy Women articles to make sure you’re not missing anything. Recognize your membership in your privileged group It’s harder for white men, who don’t have the experience of being in a disadvantaged group. But recognize your penis and/or paleness grants automatic privilege. Look at your male privilege the way I have to consider my white privilege. I thought about it a few years ago when the Canada-U.S. border was damnably slow due to a computer system malfunction. I asked the guard as he rebooted his computer again, “Is it okay if I text my brother to tell him I might be late for dinner?” He granted my wish, and eventually let me go even though he couldn’t check me in the computer. Yeah, I wondered, how would that have gone down if I was brown and wearing a hijab? Or was black? I seek out black antiracists who don’t hate white people, who don’t read victimist black literature or, Goddess help us all, Robin DiAngelo, the Great White ‘Antiracism’ Goddess. When I see what’s really wrong with our racist society, rather than someone having the worst day of their life because someone mistook them for a Dollar Store employee, it makes it easier to challenge black bigotry. As a woman, it’s easier to push back against victim feminism because I’ve grown up in a sexist, misogynist world, but lived my life identifying with personal power rather than chronic grievance with ‘The Patriarchy’. Know where women (and POC) are wrong, oversensitive, disingenuous, or just exaggerating (we all do it, we’re human) so you can push back the right people at the right time in the right way. Embrace being wrong or not knowing something Men take a lot of crap for being know-it-all, mansplaining, and never admitting they’re wrong. They might well win the prize, but women who do this — particularly the ‘woke’ — are close silver medal winners. It’s human nature not to admit you’re wrong, or not know what you didn’t know. This is especially important when you don’t have the life experiences of others. There are more times I STFU around racism debates than gender equality ones. I don’t know what it was like to grow up black, and I don’t want to belittle someone else’s genuine experience if it sounds like there’s bona fide grievance rather than privileged nitpicking. I push back on transwomen activists who think they know more about being a woman, because they don’t. I’ve been a woman my entire life. I don’t care if they call me TERF or transphobe, because the left transitions every label into shallow boogerhead insults all meaning the same thing: “I don’t like what you said and I’m not logical enough to refute it.” TERF-flingers are often just misogynists in dresses. Still, you can learn valuable insights from your critics, and if you engage with them, they can change your life. Last year someone recommended the book Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft. It offered incredible insight on why abusive men are the way they are, how near-impossible the likelihood they’ll ever change, how they’re way better than I would have expected at faking reformed behavior even with highly-trained professionals until the partner loss danger is past, and why it’s so challenging for their partners to ‘just leave’. Stay strong, don’t give up, and fuck trolls. If you’ve got a story to tell, and it challenges conventional thinking, the people who don’t like intellectual challenge are your target. If you’re writing as honestly and authentically as you can, those you trigger are those most resistant to your message, ergo those who need to hear it the most. It’s good for them. This first appeared on Medium in 2021.

It's time to confront victim feminism's self-imposed disempowerment. Who's truly holding us back? Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash The persistent image of 'man-hating' has dogged feminism since, like, forever. It perpetually irritates some not because it's inaccurate, but because it isn't. More than ever. Power vs. victim feminism Naomi Wolf described two types of feminism she encountered in her 1994 book Fire with Fire: New Female Power and How It Will Change the Twenty-First Century. At the same time, feminist gadfly Christina Hoff Sommers detailed the same in her book Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. They assigned different labels to the same descriptions: Feminists identifying with powerlessness and a fairly traditional image of women as weak, helpless, and in constant need of protection by, ironically, a largely male, 'patriarchal' state. Wolf called this group victim feminists; Sommers called them gender feminists. Feminists identifying with personal power and agency, who seek genuine equal rights for men and women, and who advocate women use their financial, economic and political power to achieve change for the greater good. Wolf calls them power feminists; Sommers calls them equity feminists. The misandrists populate mostly the victim feminist camp, although it's inaccurate to paint all victim feminists as man-haters. Having come of age myself in the early 1980s, when Second Wave feminism was in full flower, I became disenchanted years later after a growing internal reactionary mindset infantilized women, and with blinding lack of self-awareness, blamed only men for women's inequity. The problem, as I saw it, was that genuinely patriarchal institutions had clearly weakened since our great-grandmothers had fought for voting rights (the First Wave). Victim feminists seemed unwilling to acknowledge progress accomplished, which Wolf described at length in her book. Today, cognitive scientist and popular author Steven Pinker describes what he calls 'progressophobia' on the left--the fear of acknowledging the clear historical evidence for progress. I didn't appreciate feminism's growing misandrist mindset treating women as chronic perma-victims. It didn't jive with my own and other women's experiences that we held ourselves back as much as any systemic -ism did. I sure as hell couldn't 'identify'. As we march into the 21st century it's obvious we ARE making rather a lot of progress, and it's time to acknowledge what power feminists have recognized all along. Victims are weak, not empowered It's hard even for us power feminists not to fear our own power, let alone embrace it. Women have only begun to flex their muscles for a little over a century, after thousands of years of genuine patriarchy. Evolution takes time. I wrote recently about my admiration for U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi who has never shirked from power and embodies the best qualities of strategic power--all aligned toward getting things done. What especially impressed me about Pelosi is how she boldly stated during her second run at the House leadership, "I'm the best qualified for the job." Men do that, not women. Why don't we? "That glass ceiling doesn't look so thick...." Public domain photo by scottwebb on Pixabay Nancy Pelosi does not fear men. One can offer the usual justifications for holding ourselves back--"When women are assertive we get called bitches!" "Who am I to say I'm the best-qualified?"--but maybe it explains why we don't get promoted as much. Leaders, well--lead. What men do right is they don't wait for anyone to hand them the power. They pursue it, and they don't care what you call them. Sometimes they take it too far, like trying to overthrow a government over an election they lost fair 'n' square, but you have to hand it to their leader for this: He won the first election fair 'n' square because he oozed confidence, however ill-fitting, and declared he was the best candidate. His opponent may arguably have never had a genuine chance at real power, but she was the first shot over the bow signaling women's time to lead the government is here. Now a woman is one heart attack away from the U.S. presidency, and in fact she was President for about an hour in November when the elected one underwent a minor surgical procedure. After the 2018 elections, over 100 women now warm Congressional seats and terrorize their toxic opposition on Twitter. It fetishizes weakness to blame 'The Patriarchy' as though it's some monolithic Illuminati. The world, and even North America, still retains many elements of patriarchy, but here at least, it's more like your wheezing elderly relation than, say, frat boy Tucker Carlson. It gives too much power to men and denies our own personal agency. With power comes responsibility, and too many feminists pay lip service to agency while remaining deeply conflicted about it. They, and sometimes the rest of us, don't even realize we think like victims. We face many genuine challenges in forcing men to share power, but no one ever gives it up willingly. Hence the MAGA backlash, as white people and male people realize people of color and women people want a seat at the table too. Like it or not, we need men to work with us on creating a more equitable society for all. Not all are on board with the MAGA set. Misandry pushes away our male allies Men are tired of being blamed for everything wrong with the world. As a member of an advantaged group myself--white people--I know many of us, too, are tired of being blamed for the same. I don't hold men today responsible for the grievances of the ancient past any more than I hold myself for any. I especially don't consider a birth penis (or a white skin) 'original sin'. Treating men as The Enemy pushes away our potential allies--some of whom lick their wounds with 'men's rights activists' or sexually entitled incels. Plenty of real men would like to see women succeed and are genuinely invested in creating a more equitable world. But they're neither blind nor stupid. They can see how women hold themselves back. How we need to speak up more. How rapists get away with it because we don't hold them accountable. How we're more risk-averse. How we fear too much what others will say about us. How we worry more about what we look like than what we've done, and what we can do. How we're afraid to seek power. When I make these points I get a certain amount of pushback, but men reach out to me publicly and privately to say, "Thank you. Thank you for saying what I don't dare say." I get them. I feel the same about 'victim antiracists'. They closely resemble victim feminists, except their fight is racial rights. Worthy cause, but, like victim feminism, self-infantilizing and bigoted (white people). Victim antiracists teach people of color they're perpetually oppressed and in need of constant state (white) protection. Sound similar? Still waiting to 'not be heard' In my thirties, I read an article by a newspaper reporter (she later became a friend) who wrote about how her voice became less important after she hit forty. Her bosses didn't listen to her opinion as much as when she was young and cute. Men were less inclined to turn to her in a conversation than they once had. I was perturbed. I was a few years away. It never happened. It seems when you're as loud and opinionated as I am, people hear me whether they want to or not. I'm hard to tune out without leaving the room. I don't always speak up. I don't always make myself heard. Like other women--like other people--I sometimes silence myself. Now I push myself more when I feel reticent about speaking out. Less clueful men will never learn to listen to women, hear our stories, unless we make them. Image by Tumisu on Flickr Be too strong for them to ignore you I wonder if we make it easier to victimize women when we don't take responsibility for ourselves and our lives. When we complain about harassment overmuch and exaggerate harm done, how serious do we sound? How overprivileged? How much does a victim feminist mindset train girls to think like victims rather than go-getters? My Life, As Interpreted By Victim Feminism It's one thing to be rightfully irritated if some jerk feels you up on the bus, it's quite another to turn it into an Epic Battle With The Patriarchy. Xena I ain't, and neither is anyone else. I reserve my outrage for the truly outrageous, like that American women's precious abortion rights are hanging by a thread over a malign Supreme Court stacked with newer members who couldn't hold an intellectual candle to a guinea pig. Or that Harvey Weinstein was allowed to operate in plain view for decades. Or that judges still worry more about what effect jail will have on a rapist than the convicted perp's rape had on his victim. Or that his dad called it 'twenty minutes of action'. There's nothing less weak-looking than women mistaking slights and 'microaggressions' for world-class oppression. #MeToo jumped the shark when Matt Damon was all but forced off Twitter for differentiating between a butt grab and a rape. As we move into the halls of power, how can we challenge ourselves more? How can we be stronger? How can we confront our personal power and use it for the greater good? How do we change the often-unconscious patriarchal paradigm and embrace our male allies rather than drive them away? What can we learn from good men in power? What do they do right that we don't? What don't they do that we do? What are we learning from good women in power? What are we learning from the ones who screw it up? (I'm looking at you, Elizabeth Holmes!) Are we acting like victims, thinking like victims, playing at empowerment while hiding in our little 'safe spaces', slapping at 'The Patriarchy' when it walks by, but failing to call the police if we hear our (female) neighbor in danger? Who's really holding us back, the Patriarchy or ourselves? Or each other? What are we doing to challenge the genuine man-haters? If misogyny is wrong, so is misandry. Men make up roughly half the world's population. We have to learn to live and work with them. I'd rather work with them than against them.

And you don't have to, either. Mother teaching daughter how to sit in yoga butterfly pose — depositphotos.com "Did you ever notice it’s the short guys who hit?” Michelle’s question came out of left field. My first thought was, What on earth makes you think I’d know? “No, I’ve never been hit by a man,” I replied in a steady voice, otherwise hornswoggled. “I’ve dated plenty of short men, but none of them had Short Guy Disease.” You know That Guy. The little man who struts around overcompensating for his perceived lack of manhood because he’s not towering over you like a cactus in the Arizona desert. Who’s more hypermasculine than Stallone and hits women because he thinks they’re secretly laughing at him. And because they’re weaker than he, and if he can’t get respect for his height, dammit, people and especially those bitches will respect his superior strength. Not the kind of man I ever went out with. Michelle believed this was normal, and part of every woman’s existence. She didn’t know I’d made conscious choices my entire life, thanks to the greatest gift from my mother. “Never put up with a man who hits you,” my mother instructed as soon as my hormones bubbled like shaken ginger ale. “If he hits you once, that’s it, he’s over. Don’t let him apologize and swear it’ll never happen again. He’ll give you gifts or take you out to dinner and tell you how much he loves you. He’ll shower you with crap and treat you great for a while, until you’re over it, and then it happens again. It ALWAYS happens again. ALWAYS.” Mom was never abused. Not by my grandfather, her first husband, or my father. Nor by any boyfriends. She never mentioned anyone she knew who was battered. Probably she didn’t know. Good wives knew how to whip up a great cake for a neighborly kaffeeklatsch. The best ones knew precisely how much vodka to mix into the pitcher of screwdrivers. Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay Mom taught me how boys and men manipulated women to get sex. “He’ll say whatever he thinks will get you into bed,” she said. “He guilt-trips you. He’ll say if you really loved him you’d do this for him. If he really loves you he won’t push you to do anything you’re not ready for. “Or he’ll claim he’s got ‘blue balls’ from sexual arousal. It’s a made-up condition. He’ll claim it hurts. He’ll say it’s your fault so you need to relieve it. I don’t know if it hurts if they get worked up but they can masturbate if it’s that bad. They don’t require you. “He’ll tell you all the other girls are doing it. Don’t believe them! He’ll threaten to find a girl who will if you won’t. Let him go if he does. If all he cares about is himself he’s not good enough for you!” Mom made it crystal-clear I had the power to say no to abuse, never to tolerate it. In the 1970s ‘those damn women’s libbers’ as my feminist-in-denial mother always called them, had begun to focus attention on the problems of rape, sexual assault, and battering. Mom was furious one night at dinner over a woman she’d seen on an afternoon talk show. “This dimbulb was married to this man who constantly beat her, and she put up with this for years, and you know what she did? She burnt him alive in his bed! She poured gasoline on him while he was sleeping and she set fire to him! How the hell can you do that to another human being, even if he was a monster? WHY THE HELL DIDN’T SHE LEAVE HIM? “And you know what the audience did after she told this story? They APPLAUDED HER!” Mom finished, livid with rage. The Burning Bed was published in 1980, the infancy of understanding the complex dynamics of abusive relationships. Fortunately, a seminal and better book was released the same year, The Battered Woman. Mom’s frustration with women who stayed with abusers was rooted in a common ignorance of how different life was for women who often came from violent, dysfunctional homes as The Burning Bed’s Francine Hughes had. But her underlying belief in women’s personal power, at least early on, is a vision we need to embrace today. Mom may have lacked compassion in an era with little common example or discussion about male abuse, but she recognized the personal power women possessed but didn’t use. She challenged the prevailing wisdom and imparted it to her daughter, who never allowed a man to treat her badly either. I got lucky in the birth lottery. Born middle-class with parents who cared deeply for my brother and I, we had our dysfunctions like every family, but we grew up without physical, sexual, or psychological abuse. Our parents made mistakes, some of which eat at me a bit even today, but I also keep it in perspective. My cobwebbed complaints are definitely small potatoes compared to the stories I heard from other girls in high school and came to believe I was the only girl in town who wasn’t being visited at night by her father or some male relative. I’ve spent a lifetime not being abused by men. I’ve been harassed, and subjected to misogyny and double standards and all the other female crap, but I’ve never been whacked around by a partner, never been seriously sexually assaulted, never dealt with any remarkable psychological or emotional abuse. I’ve been manipulated, sure. I’ve given up my power many times and I’ve been pretty damn lucky when I’ve pulled some seriously dumb shit which could have ended badly and for which I’d have been partly responsible, for putting myself in danger. I excuse no man for what he does to others, but I own my responsibility to myself. Mom taught me never to tolerate misogyny. I identified on my own some of the toxic male subcultures where one must tread with great caution and to recognize key elements — degrading comments about women, severe homophobia, hypermasculinity — as red flags. Photo by Vera Arsic from Pexels Mom, and the take-charge protect-yourself feminism of the times taught me how not to act like an easy target. I believe abusive men can detect a woman with a victim mentality, or who is compliant enough to put up with misogyny. I know women who are sexually assaulted have an increased likelihood of it happening again. I’m not sure why; no one else does either. It’s like predators can smell it on them. I’m doing something right. And I’m not doing other things right. I’ve never been attracted to abusive men, nor do I fancy Danger Boys. I act like I don’t take any shit. It’s like they can smell it on me. I want to help other women see they don’t have to tolerate abuse. And men too; I have an ex-partner whose ex-wife used to hit him, and he didn’t hit back because ‘You don’t hit girls.’ It’s controversial to say women have a certain level of choice but I recognize many are blind to it, and it’s not their fault. I want to open their eyes to their power, and break the toxic traumatic bonds with abuse. I want every baby girl to grow up with my mother. I want everyone to just say no to control, manipulation and abuse. This first appeared on Medium in September 2020.

The trial was a big win for sexual abuse victims CC0 image from Pixnio It shaped up to be a tough slog for witnesses testifying against Ghislaine Maxwell at her sexual abuse and trafficking trial, challenged to remember events as they happened twenty and thirty years ago. Wide speculation held it would all hinge on the credibility of the all-but-one pseudonymous victims. Would they be believed? The defense team did what they were paid to do, attempt to discredit them and render their testimony too questionable. It's every witness's worst nightmare, increased by the notoriety and sheer media circus surrounding Maxwell, the one that didn't get away. Nevertheless, the jury returned guilty verdicts on five of six counts involving sex trafficking and sexual abuse of young girls, some beginning as young as fourteen. Maxwell is facing up to sixty-five years in prison. They were believed. I marvel at the sheer courage of the four who testified how Epstein and sometimes Maxwell herself sexually abused them. I'm cowed by the horror they faced reliving the nightmare, describing in graphic detail the horrific abuse of their young bodies by these two sexual predators, ruthlessly cross-examined by a hostile defense team. Epstein can't be tried since he committed suicide in his jail cell a few years ago. But they got his raven-haired accomplice and partner-in-crime. She prospected, procured and groomed his victims for a man who allegedly wanted sex at least three times a day. It's hard for sexual abuse and other crime victims to remember what happened to them even just the night before, much less decades later. When the amygdala, the fear center of the brain takes over from the prefrontal cortex, the more rational part, they're no longer in control of what they pay attention to so they may not be able to answer questions like what was he wearing and do you remember the mole on his neck. It becomes easy to poke holes in memories of ancient crimes, when accusers give different details over several interviews, in this case spanning many years. The defense tried to portray the women as liars, shaming and blaming, but that tactic didn't work. Maybe we're finally coming to grips with #MeToo and the not-exactly-radical observation that rich, powerful men often think they're beyond the arms of common decency and the law. The defense argued the women did it for financial gain, except there was none to be had for testifying; they'd received money already from a victim compensation fund set up by the Jeffrey Epstein estate. All that was in it for them was reliving horrible experiences, being derided as liars and opportunists and--hopefully, making Ghislaine Maxwell pay for the way she colluded to ruin their lives for her eternally smug-faced friend. Yet they got five out of six guilty verdicts. Why were they believed? The defense brought to the witness stand a $600 an hour California psychologist and university professor, Elizabeth Loftus, who specializes in testifying for criminal trial defense teams to discredit witnesses. Loftus brought up many sound, established research findings into the malleability of memory, how false memories can be created, how memories change over time as we interpret them differently, how inaccurate details can be introduced and 'remembered' by witnesses, demonstrating just how suggestible and unreliable the human memory can be. It's unclear why this tactic didn't work as effectively here as it has in other trials. Perhaps we've become more knowledgeable about psychology overall; a jury didn't buy R. Kelly's defense that someone like him didn't need to 'force' young women to have sex with him and that point is pretty inarguable. It's only a credible defense if you believe men only ever 'force' women because they can't get them otherwise. Today, we know far more about male psychology, especially rape motivations, and the satisfaction some receive in controlling, dehumanizing and degrading others, particularly women, for their sexual needs. Perhaps #MeToo has done an effective job of highlighting just how much sexual abuse and harassment of women takes place, even among one's own friends and family. Women speak out more about the experience of having been controlled by an abusive partner or parent, and analyze why they stayed, why they put up with it, and how they were induced to submit. The believability of the Maxwell accusers is something feminists, rape activists and others would do well to study to determine why the highly accomplished Loftus's testimony wasn't accepted by jurors. How did the prosecution respond? What did they say that might have discredited Loftus in the jury's minds? We need to know why. Recognize this victory Here's a sexual abuse statistic that won't surprise anyone: One hundred percent of unreported rapes or sexual assaults result in zero convictions. One major obstacle to finding justice for abuse victims is that so many haven't historically been believed. Many victims may not even report because they're told by others, including other women, they won't be believed. Easier to just pick up your life and move on as best you can. Why go through all that trauma again just to watch the SOB walk free? Other times, the victim is believed and gets a conviction, but some judges are more concerned for the delicate sensibilities of a young rapist in the slammer than they are about the woman whose life he changed forever (perhaps not ruined, but sometimes). Rapists Who Get Off Easy Don't Get Off Scot-Free Still, we need to celebrate the small victories, the baby steps toward making real gains in seeking justice for rape and sexual abuse victims, and not fall prey to the 'progressophobia' of thinking nothing ever changes, or that conditions are worse than ever before for victims. We need to celebrate our victories. We must acknowledge progress. I wrote the above article on rapists to highlight that while convicted rapists may get lighter than hoped-for sentences, the accused still pay a price, even when they're acquitted. While Brock Turner got a light punishment for his conviction, his trial ended his dreams of Olympics glory and today works a low-paying job in obscurity while living with his parents in a small Ohio town. We forget that rape trials are traumatic also for the accused, who endure the massive anxiety of wondering what will happen to him. Of wondering whether the next time he's party to a rape he'll be on the receiving end, in prison. When you're sitting next to your lawyer in the courtroom, there are no do-overs. To quote Dr. Branom in Stanley Kubrick's movie A Clockwork Orange, "Here's the punishment element perhaps." The unpleasant fact is perpetrators must be reported and prosecuted more. A partial win is better than letting them get away with it. Of course, no one wants to be the one to pressure a crying, traumatized victim to report, although I don't see any other way around it. These crimes must be reported, the sooner the better. I hope the public experience of the Maxwell trial gives courage to others who suffered horrific abuses at the hands of entitled, above-the-law men, even those who aren't millionaires. These women were only four witnesses out of 150 victims who were paid out of the estate's victim compensation fund until the money ran out. I'm heartened Maxwell didn't get away with it. Her four accusers were believed and were rewarded with five guilty verdicts. This is a BIG win for sexual assault victims. Let's celebrate our victories, and build upon them for future trials.