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.

When women write misogynist kink for women. Because, like, pirate rape empowerment or something. Photo by Sophie Dituri on Flickr What if someone, under a pseudonym, wrote a kink lit trilogy about a beautiful teenage virgin from a warm and loving home who is raped while unconscious and taken away by the rapist, with the reluctant permission of her parents, to a place far away where she is forced to be naked at all times, is strung up for a man’s pleasure over his bed, is spanked until she technically should have no ass left, is trained to be a slave and sexual plaything for, like, everybody, is beaten and tortured, and pretty much horribly mistreated 24×7 until her spirit is broken and she learns to like it? Then engages in increasingly weirder and abusive sexual adventures consensually — because looking to be brutalized more is apparently the only form of consent Our Heroine possesses in this quartetverse — because she was ‘awakened’ to how ‘boring’ her life had been before she was ‘rescued’ by a Prince who relieved her from the terrible, burdensome bonds of loving parents and personal safety? What if you learned that the mystery kink lit author was a man — especially an unpopular man — say, sex crime-probed U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz, or Alex Jones, or maybe schoolgirl killer Paul Bernardo? Betcha people would be screaming blue murder over the positive depiction of ‘hate-fucking’ and misogyny and violent imagery of sexual assaults on a woman and how just this sort of thing contributes to rape culture. Now what if you learned that it wasn’t Roosh who’d written it, or Bernardo, not even a screaming incel, but instead good ol’ vampire queen Anne Rice? (a/k/a A.N. Roquelare in 1982). And that it was written not for men but for women? Beauty and the Stockholm Syndrome I happened across a New York Times story from 2012 about how Rice’s hardcore kink lit BDSM Sleeping Beauty trilogy was re-issued to capitalize on the 50 Shades of Grey popularity (which made ‘mommy porn’ a household word. Who knew housewives could be so kinky?) One of the comments in the sidebar, though, written by a man, made me stop and think: So– I need to get this straight — men are pigs because they read and watch porn where women are dominated and sexually degraded (everybody knows this). But we now know that it is admirable for women to express themselves by reading “erotica… about being overwhelmed by a pirate, [because] that’s her right.” Huh…? Um….good point. Uh, conflicting messages about rape culture, ladies? I’ve read the first Beauty book, borrowed from a kinky friend, out of curiosity. By page 57 I was quite certain even the most dedicated spanking fetishists must surely be tired of all the damn spanking. I didn’t even think I’d likely finish the book, not because it was alternately offensive, horrifying and boring (boy oh boy did everyone have a thing for spanking) but because I’d vowed never to read another Anne Rice book until she’d learned about the Mysteries of the Plot Line, which were, IMO, missing in action in her first two vampire novels. I stuck with this one because even though its plot line was thinner than a Condé Nast fashion model’s breakfast, it nevertheless existed. Needless to say, I didn’t read the next two books, which I understand involve a move from spanking to sticking everything you can think of up southern regional orifices. Still, the whole time, I was keenly aware that I was reading porn for chicks. And that if it had been written by a man it would be held up as a classic example of What’s Wrong With Men And Misogyny. But…wow. I can see where men — a decent man, by the tone of the commenter — can be confused by the conflicting messages here. Violent porn is bad when men write and read it, but empowering when women do it? The thing is, even if I don’t understand what’s erotic about stringing a naked woman up by her ankles and wrists in the garden and smearing her ladyparts with honey to attract insects, I get that there are people who do. In the olden days I’d have guessed the prime suspects were, ‘men who virulently hate women,’ but now I know there are, apparently, empowered women who find this erotic. At least in fantasy, which is what the Beauty trilogy is. And I do understand the attraction of fantasies, even violent fantasies — because you, the star and producer, have complete control over what’s happening, even if your fantasy is that you have no control. No sane person wants to be in a real situation like that without full control — that’s why BDSM culture has safe words and rules and clearly delineated discussions about consent and permission. Beat me, hurt me, but hold on a minute, Wankel rotary engine, I need a breather. And no, you may not insert an egg beater up my hoo-ha, but yes, the spatula is just fine. Aunt Jemima me, baby!!! Maybe Anne Rice can ‘splain… We should ask the question the NY Times commenter asked — why are men pigs if they seek violent kink lit, but women are empowered when they do? I’m not condemning BDSM/kink lit or culture — whatever floats your boat in a free society, baby, and as long as you go about your somewhat risky business in as safe a manner as possible, which BDSM culture does, have at it. But consider what Anne Rice wrote on her blog about her re-release: It has to be remembered that within the frame of a sadomasochistic fantasy like the Beauty trilogy, the readers are invited to identify with and enjoy the predicament of the slaves. The books aren’t about literal cruelty; they’re about surrender, the fun of imagining you have no choice but to enjoy sex. Beauty’s slavery is delicious, sensuous, abandoned, and ultimately liberating. This is all part of the framework. Now imagine Matt Gaetz saying that. Or saying he identified with the Prince or other Master, and that ‘Beauty’s slavery is delicious, sensuous, abandoned, and ultimately liberating.’ Oh yeah. Or Donald Trump, Roy Moore, Jeffrey Epstein, any other misogynist man you love to hate, or even Ghislaine Maxwell. So how come Anne Rice gets a free pass? Standing outside kink culture, I don’t see any difference between the Beauty book I read, and the violent, humiliating, degrading and dehumanizing porn lit and imagery certain men are flagellated for consuming. Is Rice’s “erotica” more socially acceptable because it’s equal-opportunity abusive? Not just man on woman violence, but woman on man, woman on woman and man on man? 50 Shades of WTF Since I’m a woman who tolerates zero male control in a partner, I seriously don’t get the appeal of 50 Shades of Grey, but hey, I guess for women who like masochism and bondage and submission and especially nailing a filthy rich guy it’s awesome. (Mommy, where do stereotypes come from?) Beat me, hurt me, make me read badly-written erotica. Photo by Mike Mozart on Flickr There’s certainly a double standard going on, and I’m just as confused as the NY Times commenter. Let’s just say it out loud: ‘Erotica’ like Rice’s Beauty series (Ugh, she wrote a fourth one) is contributing to rape culture, an idea that will not sit well at all with the kink community and many feminists (some of which, I suspect, are privately as disturbed by the 50 Shades and Beauty popularity as I am). Let me make something perfectly clear: The kink/BDSM community doesn’t offend me. Violent, degrading, humiliating porn does. Regardless of who writes it and consumes it. Remember the olden days, when women helped pioneer rape culture with bodice-ripping romance novels? I’ve read only a few, they’re not my cuppa, but I always wondered about the rapes women enjoyed complete with orgasms. Is porn desensitizing men to violence against women? Shortly after Toronto’s Jian “I want to hate fuck you” Ghomeshi scandal broke, the Toronto Star asked Is porn desensitizing men to violence against women? Can she truly give consent in this situation? Read it and then consider the following questions. Go ahead, I’ll wait. If violent porn as described in the article contributes to rape culture by making violence against women seem more acceptable, then doesn’t Rice’s Beautyverse also contribute by making it seem like that’s what women really want, and does it ‘train’ some to be willing to accept that treatment? If the Beauty books are just ‘harmless fantasy’, then isn’t violent porn by men and for men as well? After all, as the writer notes, we can watch an action film without wanting to shoot up a mall, right? What about the 50 Shades of Grey series? I haven’t read any of the books myself, or seen the movies, but others argue they glorify rape. If you ask, “Why the hell would a normal, sane man want to watch a woman being choked nearly to death?” why then would you not ask, “What normal, sane woman would want to read about a teenage virgin getting raped in her sleep?” We condemn that up one side and down the other when high school football jocks do it to a drunk, passed-out teenage girl. Maybe the question now is, is violent, misogynist kink chick lit desensitizing women to violence against women? Serious question. Okay, but just remember the safe word is “Mr. Rogers”.

There’s another option for angry, entitled incels besides sex workers and sexbots— and yes, I’m serious about this Public domain image from PxFuel If you’ve ever explored the incel movement — hopefully out of intellectual curiosity rather than a state of chronic sexual grievance — you know how entitled these guys feel to sex, and not just any woman, but with the crème de la crème — the drop-dead gorgeous wank fantasies of every California beach movie. Not you and I, my fellow mortals. Yes, I hear you, thank God/dess we don’t stand up to the exquisitely discriminating tastes of the ultimate arbiters of the female form. The involuntarily celibate famously don’t think women should be allowed to make their own sexual decisions. And because women customarily don’t spread their legs (or lips) for desperately misogynist spoiled brats (unless they’re rich — incels are right about that), said women, the brats opine, should be raped if necessary (‘blackpilling’ in their parlance). Elliott Rodger, the Killer Virgin, and now patron saint of people with dicks shaped like a bicycle handlebar grip, expressed in his lengthy, tedious, turgid pre-murder/suicide manifesto that essentially, No means Yes. Women should not have the right to choose who to mate with. That choice should be made for them by civilised men of intelligence.— Elliott Rodger It’s the crux of what you’ll find in incel forums, man-boys throwing tantrums because their ‘10s’ won’t mate with them. It wouldn’t be surprising if even ‘2s’ and ‘3s’ wouldn’t touch their dicks on a triple-dog dare with a million dollars behind it, either. New York Times op-ed Neanderthal Ross Douthat argued incel murders were due to these guys not getting the opportunity to jack off into women’s orifices rather than that they were entitled, objectifying assholes. (Or “mentally ill”, as right-wing white people call it when white people engage in terrorist acts.) Douthat borrowed and then maimed ideas from an article by Oxford philosopher Amia Srinavasan who pondered whether sexual gratification from others was a human right, and concluded of course it wasn’t. (Which is what you’d expect from a woman.) Douthat twisted her words to make it sound like she was floating a debatable idea (which is what you’d expect from someone who looks like a former incel). Anyone who read her piece in the London Review of Books couldn’t fail to understand she did not think sex with others was a ‘human right’. We need a ‘redistribution of sex’, Douthat argues. He suggests sex robots or escorts could handle these guys (don’t escorts service men sexually already? Oh wait, they expect to get paid for it, the greedy bitches), or maybe we should return to monogamy and chastity — for whom, one might ask, since men as a whole have never considered either as a mandate for themselves. Especially chastity, except in a few cases, and no, Catholic priests definitely don’t count. He also mentions returning to that ‘special respect owed to the celibate,’ by which I expect he means female pre-marital chastity, since men have never been as interested in policing male virginity, not even in religions that mandate both parties should come to the marriage bed crystal-pure. There are no ‘Purity Balls’ for evangelical teenage boys. His argument for monogamy obliquely suggests bringing back the viability of marriage, but if these guys can’t even get laid, who’s going to marry them? Perhaps we need to bring back arranged marriages, not as uncommon or as ancient-historical as we think. We can find a shade of it as recently as the early twentieth century when families had the power to veto a woman’s marital choice, and force her toward the ‘right’ one. This happened to my ancestor who was pushed to married her alcoholic cousin, a ‘good catch’ instead of the man she wanted to marry. Big surprise: Her husband was abusive, and the marriage ended with a then-scandalous divorce. Won’t someone think of the embarrassed family? However, I’m down with Douthat’s sex robots idea. Incels can already buy a RealDoll if they can scrape together $6,000; maybe Walt Disney Corporation can trick them out with robotics to make each ‘10’ as realistically human as any dead President. Maybe the Incel Liberation Front can argue the government should give them a grant, not a loan, since Real Men don’t pay for sex, so they can afford RealDolls. The giveback, of course, is they don’t go on murderous rampages. But there’s another option beyond rape, sexual slavery and sexbots, for men who aren’t Jeffrey Epstein ( and by the way not all incels are white, not by a long cumshot). There’s a way for incels to get all the sex and blowjobs they want. Photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels The suggestion isn’t as snarky as it sounds. I’m serious. Men have sex with other men for numerous reasons besides being homosexual or bi. Men have long made do with other men when necessary, and even when not necessary. Just ask all the Republicans and conservative evangelical Christian dudes who got caught schtupping other men. It’s not that difficult a step for incels. The first penis is always the hardest! I mean, consider this, boys: Y’all are obsessed with anal sex. Everyone looks the same from behind! According to a new book by a University of British Columbia sociologist, strongly-identified straight men engage in hookups and clandestine same-sex affairs on the side, and it’s often because they’re not getting enough sex at home. They don’t regard having sex with another man as cheating, and don’t engage in an extramarital affair with another woman because they’re afraid she’ll get ‘clingy’ and pose problems for their marriage. Still Straight: Sexual Flexibility among White Men in Rural America by Dr. Tony Silva notes they’re often politically conservative, including a small otherwise homophobic percentage and some felt sex with men lacked the pressure they felt when having sex with their wives. Most importantly, some did it because they were lonely and craved human touch and didn’t know a masculine way to get it platonically. So it’s not as much of a leap as one might think for incels. Sure, they’ll have to get used to the idea. But you know… Incels can shave really closely, or use a depilatory on their faces, then get together somewhere (after the COVID crisis is completely over, of course!), gather in someone’s basement, turn off the lights and get funky together. Who can tell the difference with all those smooth faces in the dark? And who knows better than men what makes a blowjob so good? (Oh, wait…yeah…not these guys. Ask questions, boys! Ask what he likes!) Men who have ad hoc sex with other men aren’t gay. They’re just making do until they can be with a woman. Incels will simply have to make do with making do. Or grow the hell up, get some therapy, and stop looking at women as living blowup dolls and calling us ‘cum sleeves’ and ‘roasties’. Try it, you’ll like it! Photo by Elvert Barnes on Flickr Men in the Middle East have been engaging in non-gay homosexual relations for centuries. This brings up one possible ointment in the fly. A guy might get to like it. Rather a lot! This happened to someone I knew from the Middle East. He related how the boys and men in his country had sex with each other because access to women was heavily restricted. He’s been with a fair number of women and had girlfriends (after he moved away) but he’s got a real thing for sausage now. “It’s true,” he told me. “I’m still not sure if I’m bi, bi-curious, or just acquired a taste for penis by accident.” He means the last part literally. He’s got a REAL taste for sausage, and I don’t mean Jimmy Dean. And of course, incels can get all the sex they want— or don’t — in prisons. Something to think about before they take up some wack job’s call for rape or mass slaughter since women won’t give it up like Robert E. Lee at Appomattox. Consensual or non-consensual? Your choice! Speaking of soldiers, they’ve done it on the front, and on the sly, as well. The understanding is you never speak of this. What happens in your man-cave stays in your man-cave. Especially with someone else’s man-cave. With a little sexual experience under their belts, incels will no longer be incels. You don’t have to have sex with the opposite sex to lose your virginity. Bonus: Anal sex may even prevent prostate cancer! According to an article my Jimmy Dean friend sent me. It’s not ideal, but it’s a real suggestion. Incels need to remember: It’s not gay unless you come to prefer it to women. Look, the Middle East is famously homophobic but it doesn’t stop them from doing each other. This is only until I get married in September, Ajmal! Your turn. Fast or slow? Teeth or no? Maybe when they’re less sexually frustrated they’ll be less inclined to shoot up a sorority or run down women from a van on a sunny day. The fact is, sex has gone downhill in North America in the last twenty years and we could all stand for a really good lay. No woman, though, will want to shag men raised on porn and misogyny who think vagina is a God-given human right. Imagine incels’ reaction if informed that gay men have a right to their assholes. The problem, of course, isn’t feminism or hypergamy but, you know, standards. Women’s. The kind incels today don’t meet, for some pretty damn good reasons. They want to date light-years out of their league, with women who wouldn’t make them happy anyway. But many mortal women aren’t looking for losers like rich guys Shia LaBoeuf or Mel Gibson, who no sane woman would touch with a ten-foot Hungarian if she wanted to go through life without black eyes or uber-Catholic-laced Sugar Tits abuse, nor do they even require a man to make six figures, let alone seven or more. They won’t nail Sports Illustrated swimsuit models, but they might nail a genuinely wonderful woman who loves him for himself, as long as he gives her something to genuinely love. So go ahead guys, meet up, shag like Spanish fly-crazed little gerbils, and maybe some day you’ll actually do a real live woman. Or, like my Middle Eastern friend said, “Try something new! Put that penis in your mouth and see if you like it!” “I never thought it could be like this, selftoucher04981.” “Yeah, I’m so glad for my dick to finally get to meet someone else, OralBill1991.” This first appeared on Medium in July 2021.

Why do we still not understand this? Free for commercial use photo from PxFuel I haven’t wanted children since I first gave it serious consideration, as I prepared to catapult into adulthood upon high school graduation. Growing up, I’d always assumed, as most people do, that I’d have children one day. It never seemed real, and once I actually began to consider it (not soon!) around 17, I found that kids didn’t fit into my plans. Granted, my ‘plans’ at the time were pretty stupid: I wanted to go to Hollywood and be an actress. My father had other plans: I would go to college, which he had been saving up for since I was nine. I wouldn’t have cut it as an actress. I was like Penny on The Big Bang Theory — more enthralled with being a Movie Star than any real interest in the craft. I’m glad I stuck to my guns on children rather than my childish fantasy. I thought it through, like birth control and what I’d do if I got pregnant anyway. No question: Abortion. Not everyone should have children. Too many do it without thinking, or by default. Oopsie, I’m pregnant, well, I don’t want to make the ugly abortion decision so I guess I’ll have the baby. Worse, society takes a dim view of adoption and women who consider it are ‘mom-shamed’ with, “How can you possibly give up your own child?” If they’re not ready for parenthood, they shouldn’t assume the mantle. They deny that child the possibility of a better life. (I’m thinking of someone I know whose mother did the right thing by choosing the adoption route.) The decision is easier for the guy. He can choose to opt out if he wants. It’s not fair, but that’s biology. The onus is mostly on the woman. Still, both need to take the potential oopsie seriously. Men need to think about where they shoot their seed and women need to consider harder whom they allow to shoot their seed into them. Because raising children isn’t for the uncommitted, and ruining children for life is always a joint effort, regardless of who’s present, or not. Recently I wrote about the toxic vulnerability in female psychology that impels some women to fall in love with abusers or even worse, serial killers and other prison cons. I am reminded once again of just how much some people shouldn’t have children. Like, the sort of people who breed abusers and serial killers. The research started for a friend’s movie project, just as I was finishing up, ironically, a book called When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence by Canadian writer Patricia Pearson. She describes how female serial killers and abusers may be far more common than believed, and how polite society is far more willing to excuse violent female behavior than males’, especially if she claims prior abuse. The abuse defense doesn’t hold for men raised in similar circumstances. Prior to the Pearson book I re-read James Gilligan’s now-classic Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic which catalogues how some of the most violent men in prison can detail hair-raising stories of physical, sexual, and mental abuse growing up. Tales of being locked in closets, burned, starved, neglected, raped, tortured. Consider this: Behind many hateful, misogynist, violent men are little boys who were abused and neglected by Dear Old Mom. Not all men abused by the early women in their lives grow up to become abusers. Some learn to be victims. Not all women growing up with abuse become victims; some become abusers. Until very recently, women haven’t had many career options apart from traditional roles like nurse, teacher, and the wank fantasy of misogynist men everywhere, the stay-at-home mother. Throw in some pretty outdated expectations in a seven-billion-and-counting world that we need to ‘go forth and multiply’, and you’ve got a helluva lot of people making babies who shouldn’t be, not without a LOT of forethought and soul-searching. After all, not all abuse victims grow up to be abusers. Some make the deliberate effort to be a better parent than their own. The Hallmark moment. Image by Bessi from Pixabay Children who are beaten by their fathers tend to grow up to become victims, whether they are boys or girls. Children who are beaten by their mothers, on the other hand, are more likely to become victimizers. — Patricia Pearson, When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence We don’t appreciate the awesome responsibility of raising another human being nearly enough. I have maintained for many years, quite literally, that being a parent is the most important job in the world. Raising another human being to the best of your ability makes all the difference as to how that human will impact their environment and the people around them. You can’t avoid making mistakes, and sometimes you do your level best and the child still turns out a huge disappointment. Good parents sometimes raise mass murderers not because they were bad parents, but because the child is genetically predisposed somehow. Humans are incredibly messy, complex creations. The human brain, many scientists agree, is THE most complex creation in the entire Universe. As any engineer knows, the more complex a system (like 100 billion neurons in our brains with up to 15,000 connections for each), the more likely things will go wrong. Child abuse, whether it’s physical, sexual, emotional or psychological, creates disturbed adult humans. Most aren’t extremes, but they often become victims or abusers or maybe a bit of both. We speak mostly about male abusers and female victims and don’t ask about the abusers’ childhoods, nor do we seem to much care if they grew up in the circumstances under which they now make their spouse or partner suffer. We use abuse histories to excuse women’s behavior and ignore men’s. Pearson notes just about every woman in Da Clink blames her violence on prior abuse. Courts often grant more lenient sentences to women who claim this, or who fall back on a traditionalist, patriarchal facade of helpless woman without agency to excuse her violent behavior, even for murdering her own child. When we think about child abuse, we assume the abuser was the father. After all, men are more violent, right? Pearson explores SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) and whether they’re all as accidental as advertised. Deeper forensic investigation reveals ugly truth sometimes — when it occurs. Often it doesn’t because it’s widely believed maternal infanticide is rare. Some maternal murders that are undeniably not accidental, like the woman who put her incessantly crying baby in the middle of the road and ran over it with her car. Pearson examines women with cases of Munchhausen-By-Proxy, who make up or even create fictitious illnesses for their children, and in the most extreme cases kill them, seeking the love and attention they get from people afterward. Because no one believes women can be murderous predators, especially regarding their own children, they can get away with it for an incredible amount of time. One mother killed eight of her nine children before police investigated. Those are the kids who don’t grow up to be abusers or victims. What happens to the ones who do? “Children who are beaten by their fathers tend to grow up to become victims, whether they are boys or girls. Children who are beaten by their mothers, on the other hand, are more likely to become victimizers,” Pearson notes. And if they victimize the ‘right’ people, men, like serial killer Aileen Wuornos, they’re admired and sympathized with. “Imagine,” Pearson asks, “a TV movie about the Chicago serial killer John Wayne Gacy, assaulted by his father as a boy…Or the movie Helter Skelter, about child abuse victim Charles Manson, pitching him to us as a pitiable. From infancy, Manson was unwanted, neglected, mistreated, bounced from one rejecting adult to another.” Or Henry Lee Lucas, beaten all throughout his childhood and forced to cross-dress in public by his mother. And we wonder why he hated women? Yes, by all means let’s have a TV movie fetishizing these guys for striking a blow against ‘The Matriarchy’ for a change. NOT. I’d rather we not make excuses for either gender. Equality means we treat men and women equally, and give up flimsy excuses for victimhood. No one’s childhood is perfect, and we can all reflect back to try and get at the source of whatever emotionally or psychologically ails us. Parents aren’t perfect, and they’re never responsible for everything wrong with our lives. The quick jump to blame parents for everything, the mindless go-to for too many lazy therapists and others in the psychology profession, abrogates critical thinking. We are more than just our parents, after all. Our peer groups, for example, impact us as well. But no one, except maybe people in weird religious cults, think it’s a good idea to raise children in abusive environments. Parents who abuse contribute future abusers and victims, even though not all abusers/victims were necessarily mistreated in childhood. As we debate victims and abusers, as we challenge traditionalist thinking and previously unchallengeable narratives about who’s responsible (the abuser, ultimately), we need also to challenge the same thinking and narratives surrounding parenthood — more specifically, Is parenthood right for me? Enough already with what you ‘should’ to do please others — your family, your friends, your church, your insular community where things have ‘always’ been this way. What kind of a parent would I make? Am I really willing to put my full effort into raising children? (This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work or be made to feel guilty for doing so.) Do I truly understand the ‘sacrifices’ I will make raising other humans? Better decisions before birth may well result in fewer violent people, fewer victims of violence, and a psychologically healthier world overall. We need to think longer-term, to prevention rather than cleaning up the messes afterward. We feel horror, pity, and sorrow when we read about a small child starved or beaten to death by their caretakers and wish we could have done something to save him or her. Perhaps decades later that child would have grown up to horribly victimize others, with many screaming for the electric chair. It’s easy to feel sorry for a helpless child, much harder to feel sorry for an adult accused of raping, torturing, and murdering. Something to think about. This post originally appeared in The Bad Influence on Medium in August 2020.

Why do personally strong women refuse to challenge the outdated feminist narratives in their head? Confronting our inner dinosaur. Image by Lothar Dieterich from Pixabay I’ve always been disappointed when personally strong female friends, who would never take crap from a man, much less outright abuse, passively enable continued female victimhood with their outdated, unchallenged views. This ain’t the ’80s anymore. Second wave feminism was barely old enough to get into bars when I became a young adult and could only legally drink super-light beer. In university, I took part in my first and only feminist protest march for Take Back The Night. Violence against women was greater, part of a crime spike that began in the 1960s and didn’t abate until the ’90s. Rapes and sexual assaults were far higher, and women weren’t much believed by the courts. The victim received the blame. Nobody talked about male privilege. It was much harder for women to get better-paying jobs, and fewer graduated from college or university than they do today. We had little political representation in Washington. In short, the same problems we have today except — back then, with far less economic, educational, and political power. Not all women yet understand we’ve made a lot of progress in the last 35–40 years. Some still point the finger at men, which they should do, but only if they point their other finger at themselves, which they rarely do. Disappointing women are the ones I know to be strong and personally powerful, but don’t seem to have challenged the narratives in their head as dated as the coifs from bad ’80s hair bands. Anyone who thinks dinosaurs and humans haven’t lived together isn’t alive in the 21st century. Lead singer of the ’80s band Def Lizard. Photo by Joel Muniz on Unsplash Most recently, a friend and former roommate in the year or so after I graduated university accused me of ‘blaming the victim’. I forget why, but it was probably one of my Facebook feminism critiques observing how much women allow mistreatment of themselves. She was quite liberal back when we lived together, and still ‘progressive’ (the newer word) today. I think I’d upset her suggesting, as I often do, that women now have more control over how they’ll be treated by men than we acknowledge. I’d expect her reaction from a garden-variety younger feminist, the kind steeped in victimhood mentality, but I knew this gal to be strong and powerful even when she was twenty. She’d dated a friend of ours who was famously controlling and ‘patriarchal’ (a word we never used back then) and she never took any of his shit. He had to accept her as a full equal. There are many other examples I can think of where she exhibited the kind of take-no-shit attitude you found among many feminists back then, before they neutered themselves in the ‘90s. I responded, as I always do to her cliche, “Why are some women BEING the victim?” It dismays me to think that in the 35 or so years since we’d lived together, her feminism was as calcified as the outdated views of the Trumpies who are still fighting their feminism Waterloo. She hasn’t challenged her Inner Dinosaur. She hasn’t acknowledged how too many women are aiding and enabling female victimhood by ignoring what women do to put and keep themselves in danger. She’s never, to my knowledge, been abused by a partner and neither have I. She’s still on her first husband, thirty-plus years and counting. Any man who tried to bitch-slap either of us in the ’80s would have found himself hanging by a tree from his testicles tied around a low-hanging branch. I want other women to be as intolerant of abuse as we were and still are. I just wish my friend would embrace it for all women. Other friends I’d considered strong women got mad when I took a more balanced view of Toronto’s Jian Ghomeshi trial a few years back. The scandal that erupted in 2014 and culminated in a ‘sexual assault’ trial in 2015 was a personal watershed moment, when I realized just how weakened modern feminism had become. Ghomeshi was accused by a few women, 10+ years after the fact, of ‘sexually assaulting’ them even though by my own admittedly American standards it was physical rather than sexual. Not only was it weird to see face-slapping and neck-throttling defined as ‘sexual’ under the flimsiest of pretexts, but the trial turned into a giant feminist embarrassment as emails dug up by Ghomeshi’s attorney demonstrated the women weren’t nearly as traumatized as they’d claimed. Victim feminists twisted themselves into knots to avoid admitting these starstruck groupies deliberately put themselves back in danger trying to get into Ghomeshi’s pants after each initial physical assault. Then the case really fell apart when the court discovered private collusion between the witnesses. Ghomeshi was acquitted. Victim feminists threw tantrums about how women are ‘never’ believed, a gross exaggeration in a case where pretty much everyone believed the women, only the hardest-core anti-feminists supported Ghomeshi, and even the judge said he thought he was guilty but there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him. I was as disgusted by my so-called ‘feminist’ friends whining about victimization when Ghomeshi’s dizzy bimboes were anything but. My friends’ Inner Dinosaurs ran rogue, unconsciously denying other women the agency that they themselves owned. I expect squishy reactions from the perma-victim set but I expect better from those who know their boundaries and have never, ever, let a man assault them. For whom a ‘date’ with Jian Ghomeshi would have ended right after the first slap-’n’-throttle incident. They’d have never emailed him ‘I love your hands’, or photos of the emailer wearing a bikini, or given him a hand job in a park later. Worst of all: “You kicked my ass last night and that makes me want to fuck your brains out.” Sure makes it sounds like she ‘enjoyed’ the abuse, huh? That’s what feminists with calcified thinking won’t question, even as they would never tolerate such treatment of themselves. Instead, they ignore female ‘agency’ and refuse to ask women to be as accountable for themselves as they do of men. My mother taught me well: “The first time a man hits you should be his last. No second chances. He’ll do it again if you let him.” They went back for more. But he had sex with none of them. One wonders what might have happened if he had. We should want for others what we claim for ourselves. We should also be willing to revisit what we believe in periodically and see if it still remains valid today. Back when my friend and I were twenty, ‘Don’t blame the victim,’ was pretty relevant. Women simply had less power back then and they weren’t supported if they claimed a rape. #MeToo has changed all that. The court of ‘justice’ may still not believe an assault victim but there’s much power and support to be found on social media. Today, women have far more power to Just Say No than we had. At least those of us who’d defined our boundaries. I don’t fault young women who don’t. They’re young and inexperienced. Not everyone had my mother growing up. So reciting the venerable mantra, ‘Don’t blame the victim,’ is getting a little tattered around the edges. I think of this as I better understand the dynamics of abuse for both the abuser and the victim as I finish up the book Why Does He Do That? Inside the Mind of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft. It was recommended to me by a fellow Medium writer. It’s an amazing book. He only touches upon the mistakes women make, how they keep believing the abuser’s lies and keep hoping the ‘good periods’ will eventually take over and eliminate the ‘bad periods’, and how they don’t listen to their friends and family who try to warn them this guy’s bad news. I wish he’d have acknowledged the bad decisions women make in this regard, but the book is eighteen years old so he’s a product of his time. I don’t know if he’s revised his views since then. Maybe it’s difficult, when you work so closely with abusers. An unwavering commitment to ‘don’t blame the victim,’ is an example of calcified feminist thinking. Asking why a particular woman did this or that or made this or that decision is more of a ‘post-mortem’, I believe, like the corporate world engages in after a completed project. You figure out what went right, what went wrong, and resolve to the right things again and to not repeat the wrong things. I can’t swear I’m not calcified in some of my thinking either, but I make an honest effort not to be. It’s why I’ve moved more toward the ‘Murky Middle’ politically, and try to see more sides than the blinkered view of my own ideological persuasions (still left, but closer to the center than before). I have never been abused or seriously sexually assaulted, partly due to occasionally doing dumb shit and being fortunate nothing bad happened, but more often because of the decisions I’ve made, most of all in who I allow into my environment, social circles and dating realm. Controllers and potential abusers get the boot pretty quickly. I make conscious decisions. I want that for other women. I especially want to get the word out to young girls and young women who aren’t as experienced. I want them to understand that they have more control over their lives than they know, and I want to empower them to make the right decisions. I seek my tribe of women, men and anyone else who feel empowered and want others to be as well. Who aren’t calcified in their thinking, ‘dinosaur’ lefties who haven’t had an original thought since Reagan talked about a ‘nuclear umbrella’. They’re no more able to think critically than the Trumpies who operate from their own increasingly-shrinking political bubble. The world evolves, and our thinking should too. Some values and beliefs never change — like that people of color are as entitled to the same rights and treatment as white people in America — and other values and beliefs may not be as applicable anymore. It ain’t the ’80s anymore. It also ain’t the ’60s, ’70s, ’90s or the ‘oughts’. As we head into Decade Three of the 21st century, we need to remember that one day it ‘won’t be the ‘Teens or the Twenties’ anymore. Whatever you believe today…..may not work as well tomorrow. This post originally appeared on Medium in September 2020.

Because guess what, we’re *all* narcissists! Seriously. “Are you a good narcissist, or a bad narcissist?” Creative Commons 2.0 image by Insomnia Cured Here on Flickr Calling someone a narcissist is like accusing them of being a carbon-based life form. Duh. I tend to roll my eyes when people talk about the ‘narcissist’ in their life or past, except for experts. I sometimes read Dr. Sherri Heller, a therapist who specializes in complex trauma and narcissism who writes extensively about genuine toxic narcissism. She’s an eminently more informed source for diagnosing it than the average layperson. Everyone else? Not so much, unless they have something new to say (they mostly don’t), or describe what sounds like a genuine malignant narcissist, or to learn more about the psychology of people who think they’re narc detectors. If you were to ask them if they themselves are narcissists, you’d almost certainly get a negative, if not outraged response. If you can’t even recognize the narcissist you see every morning when you brush your teeth, how can anyone trust you to recognize narcissism in others? Someone’s narcissism article caught my eye and it taught me something about narcissism I didn’t know — it’s not a character fault, it’s a spectrum, rather the way we now understand autism as a brain development condition with a wide variety of symptoms people experience universally, without regard to our identity labels. Some of us fall in the socially skilled range; they’re popular and well-liked, and others falling further down the spectrum are socially challenged and unable to function well with others in countless different iterations. Narcissism, as it turns out, isn’t much different. The question isn’t are you a narcissist, but what kind of narcissist are you? The article referenced an intriguing book: Rethinking Narcissism: The Secret to Recognizing and Coping with Narcissists by Dr. Craig Malkin. Snagged it! Malkin says psychologists and psychiatrists have begun to look at narcissism as something that evolved in us as self-preservation, and it’s a healthy psychological trait in moderation. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 isn’t the best place to be. It’s the worst, maybe even worse (personally) than being a 10. Who’s a 10? I don’t know, and Dr. Malkin doesn’t say, and everyone has an opinion. I expect Donald Trump springs to mind on the subject of the über-narcissist, with some pretty good cases made that he’s a malignant narcissistic psychopath with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (without evaluating him personally). It’s not a unanimous call, either. I’d call Trump the gold standard so far, along with Kim Jong Un and possibly Vladimir Putin. The way Hitler is our gold standard of ultimate evil, but someone one day might prove worse. On the lower end of Malkin’s narcissism spectrum, echoist narcissists (also called introverted narcissists) are about a 1–4. They’re the ones without enough narcissism. They don’t like being the center of attention; they give too much but fear taking; they don’t feel special at all, but ironically, unappreciated. They’re happy to tell you how much they give, lacking the Trumpian bravado of I’ve done more for black people than any other President! The high-ranking extroverted narcissists are at 7–10. These are the ones people read and write about the most. The narcissists for whom it’s all about me me me. Public domain image from PxFuel The kind of narcissist you want to be is in the middle, the communal narcissist, at around 4–6. Maybe 6.5. Who’s at the lowest end of the spectrum? The 0–2s? Malkin’s descriptions reminded me of the very most miserable men about whom American psychiatrist and author Dr. James Gilligan called the ‘living dead’ he found in prison hospitals with inmates so bereft of self-regard, so completely and utterly shamed, that ‘living death’ was, “The most direct and literal, least distorted way to summarize what these men have told me when describing their subjective experience of themselves. Many murderers, both sane and insane, have told me that ‘they’ have died, that their personality has died, usually at some identifiable time in the past, so that they feel dead….They cannot feel anything…They feel like robots or zombies…one inmate feels like ‘food that is decomposing’. Human beings, in other words, who had zero or near-zero narcissism. Men who wished for death because, as Gilligan notes, psychological pain can be far crueler torture than physical pain. You can heal a wound; not as easily a soul. Other interesting factoids from Malkin’s book Narcissists can change, but like other compulsive addicts (narcs are addicted to feeling special) they have to want to change. How do you know who can change and who can’t? If they can’t display empathy, they may not be a ‘lost cause’, but Malkin points out it’s not your job to be their therapist. People slide up and down the narcissism scale; it’s not a fixed born trait. One person can be an introverted, at other times extroverted or communal narcissist. Often people in narcissistic relationships blame themselves because it’s easier than admitting s/he’s never going to change. If you do admit that, then what? Do you leave them? Do you strike out into an unknown world alone? What if they’re right and you’re nothing without them? Separating is painful. Blaming one’s self becomes a good excuse to stay. The problem isn’t him/her, it’s me. Malkin describes self-blame as a powerful fear that you’ll lose love if you ask for what you want. Here’s a thought-provoking nugget on the lure of the ‘bad boy’ for women and, for men, the ‘bad girl’, often described as ‘crazy’. “Why are all the crazy girls so sexy?” one male patient asks, which reminds me of what women often say about bad boys. The bad babes may be high-spectrum narcissists, and part of their appeal may be the high drama and unpredictable excitement that only wears thin after awhile. Something to think about with the guy who complains all his exes being ‘crazy’. He might be an abusive asshole who blames women for his inability to sustain relationships, or he might be attracted or addicted to ‘crazy’ narcissistic women just like some women dig narcissistic ‘bad boys’ they know aren’t good for them. Hmmm…women who complain all their exes are crazy… Photo by Flood G on Flickr Melody Wilding, an executive coach and Human Behavior professor, notes that one can exhibit narcissistic traits without being a genuine narcissist. In an article in Business Insider on alleged workplace narcissists, she points out how much complainers of ‘narcissist’ bosses and coworkers often fail to recognize how their own self-absorption may contribute to workplace stresses. She argues against ‘pathologizing’ people with an uninformed psychological disorder label, that it stigmatizes people with genuine mental disorders, and trivializes Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which is a very serious diagnosis that applies to less than 5% of the population. Where are you on the Narcissism Spectrum? “Where am I? Where am I? Where am I???” Exactly my narcissistic thought as I worked through the book. I wasn’t more than thirty pages in when I stopped and Googled Narcissism Spectrum tests to figure out where I was. I found short tests and longer ones and I tried to be as honest as possible. I scored myself in the communal range, which is exactly what you’d expect a supreme narcissist to do, right? Isn’t that where your off-the-charts ex would score himself? I took one of the shorter tests, but I also took a longer, more comprehensive one and came up with the same. I want to go back and do it again, and pay close attention to my answers, because it’s too easy to let your ego tell you what you believe about yourself, which may be different from how you actually rock and roll. It did force me to recognize the times in my life when I was lower on the spectrum, and higher. Lower? High school. Higher? In the ’90s, when I was writing for an alternative community newspaper and ‘putting people in their place’ when I thought they needed it, namely Republicans and Christian evangelicals. I cringe to remember some of the articles I wrote back then. It wasn’t what I said, but how I said it. All right, my fellow narcissists! Here are some good narcissism self-tests from respectable sources: PsychCentral’s 40 statements (PsychCentral is rated as High for factualism and Pro-Science by Media Bias Fact Check) Open-Source Psychometrics Narcissism Personality Inventory (Source cited in a number of journals) You can Google for others, and your mileage may vary. Are any of them truly reliable? Judge for yourself. If you search on your own, include the word ‘spectrum’ or ‘scale’ to find the ones that measure not whether you’re a narcissist, but what kind. Something to think about as you take inventory: Are you where you want to be? If not, how will you get there? Be honest. It’s hard. It’s why I want to set aside an hour to take the 40-question one again and make sure my narcissistic ego isn’t protecting me from the truth by telling me, Oh no, you almost never do that! Maybe once or twice. Under stress. Or something. People genuinely committed to being the right kind of narcissist will be more inclined to police themselves than others and make an effort to recognize when they’re veering off into the danger zone — which is likely acting a little narcissist occasionally rather than sliding up the scale. And, we can take a cue from Melody Wilding and ask ourselves how our own self-absorption contributes to narcissist drama. How many narcissists does it take to change a light bulb? “Me? Change a light bulb? Why? The illuminating light of my supreme everlasting being and intellect is more than enough to push back the darkness, you plebeian.” Public domain image from Pxfuel This first appeared on Medium in July 2021.

This is just a taste of what we might get if the Sun goes all megastormy on us this year. By NASA Goddard Space Flight Center — Flickr: Magnificent CME Erupts on the Sun — CC BY 2.0 Look, I don’t mean to panic you, I know you’ve got the coronavirus to worry about and stuff, but there’s a 12% chance a Sun megastorm could erupt this year, and it could be very, very bad for whatever part of the Earth is facing it. So said a Wired Magazine article from 2012 that didn’t seem to have appeared anywhere else except in one esteemed periodical like National Geographic, and somewhat a less esteemed source like UK’s Express, a nutty site that broke the major news story of a potential fairy space alien corpse in Mexico City. That’s according to Media Bias Fact Checker, which dings the site for being right-wing and factually mixed. If this goes down, you’re going to wish your biggest problem was a spiky little bastard that looks like a microscopic World War I landmine. It could be even more catastrophic than the last time, which was the 1859 Carrington Event, named after a guy named Carrington (duh) who happened to witness a mega-speedy solar flare that sparked beautiful auroras when it hit the Earth’s atmosphere, and set not-so-beautiful fire to telegraph stations. It also booted magnetic observatory recordings sky-high and made the scientists working there go all WTF??? Hawaiians and Chileans were all like, Ooooohhh, look at the pretty auroras! and New Yorkers were all like, Hello! I can read the New York Times by the light of the auroras alone! which is what Americans exclaimed until the far more modern Gadzooks! was invented in 1945. So, like, back in 1859 there wasn’t nearly as much of an electronic infrastructure as there is today. If the Solar Apocalypse hits us this year (Wired pointed out eight years ago it might happen ‘in the next decade’ so it might not be until next year, or the year after, or quite possibly at all), it will trash electrical power grids in a way that’ll make the Great Blackout of 2003 look like your drunk neighbor hitting the telephone pole outside your house. It’ll also hose up oil and gas pipelines, mess up GPS satellites and potentially destroy all radio communication on earth. But don’t worry, it won’t hurt actual people, animals or plants. I mean, we won’t get fried to a crisp like in a nuclear war. No, it’ll just be chaos and panic and doom and really annoying Jesus freaks on the street. Don’t think it’ll be all kum-ba-ya like it was during the Great Blackout because that only lasted a few days; The Great Blackout Of Like 202X will cost us trillions of dollars and last for an entire decade! Look, I’ll leave you and your overactive imagination currently on overdrive paying scalper prices for Purell and toilet paper, to speculate on just how bad the world’s going to get with no refrigeration, no functioning hospitals, spoiled food, and Gen Z going all Lord of the Flies on everyone without access to Instagram or TikTok. Greta Thunberg got downright stern and pissy in her media release about the potential impending doomsday. Greta Thunberg would like to have a word with you. Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license by Anders Hellberg on Flickr With brows knit together so tightly some reporters mistook them for two caterpillars fighting over the bridge of her nose, the teenage activist blamed everyone older than her, the oil companies and Donald Trump’s gross incompetence in failing to prevent this toasty nightmare, thundering, “How dare you! You have stolen my obsession with global warming and my heavily-exploited childhood with an even worse thing to think about than dead polar bears and banana crops in Canada! Entire social media ecosystems are collapsing! I can’t make a damn phone call! I’ll be nearly thirty before my ATM card will work again and I’ll have to run faster than the massive sewage blob chasing me!” Then she sent all world leaders to their rooms to think about what they’d done. Or not, as the case may be. So look, I’m just saying, you’re worrying about dying from something that most people recover from, and that can be washed away with old-fashioned soap and water, so you might as well worry about something that would wreak far more havoc than canceling tech conferences and the Summer Olympics. And which will probably never happen. And if it does, all the Purell in the world isn’t going to save you from F2F-phobic Gen Zs. This first appeared on Medium in March 2020.

And I enjoyed every damn minute of it. No apologies. Photo from PxFuel I blasted Celestria with my finest feminist are-you-out-of-your-damn-MIND face and exploded, “BELLY DANCING?” “Yeah, wouldn’t that be cool? I want to get Chabi to teach a class.” Chabi was a new addition to our Society for Creative Anachronism medievalist re-creation group. We learned the skills, created medieval ‘personas’, called each other by those names and lived a pre-Renaissance life in the past lane. “Come on, it’ll be fun!” Celestria teased. But I was a feminist, dammit! My recollection of belly dancing’s heyday in the ’60s and ’70s tasted a bit sour, shimmying visions of background decoration in movie nightclubs or a half-naked woman dancing for men’s, and particularly Sean Connery’s James Bond’s pleasure in From Russia With Love. It seemed vintage now, like beehive hairdos and pedal pushers. And while I didn’t object to flirting or suggestive dancing— Belly dancing? “I don’t have the body for those costumes,” I replied, cutting through to the heart of the matter. “We don’t have to perform, let’s just have fun.” It’s good exercise, I rationalized. Without the embarrassing belly-baring costume, and no need to perform publicly, I was in. Ha. Ha. Ha. Yah, okay, this is good. You can call me a witless tool for ‘The Patriarchy’ if you like, but I enjoyed every damn minute of my 15-year side hustle. “I’ll teach free weekly classes on one condition,” Chabi said at our first class. “You all have to dance for the Mongolian Horde this summer at Pennsic War.” Perform? That struck a level of terror historically reserved for the words ‘Mongolian Horde’. Okay, so this re-created SCAdian subculture to which Chabi belonged was far more civilized than the original Horde and treated women a helluva lot better than the era’s affluenza-addled yuppie frat boys. The ‘Pennsic War’ was a giant SCAdian weeks-long extravaganza featuring epic battles (of course) at a western Pennsylvania campground. This is what I did on my summer vacation for the next seven years Perform for the Horde? Oh what the hell, they’ll all be drunk anyway. “I don’t want to wear a skimpy outfit,” I said. “I don’t have the body for it.” “No problem,” Chabi said. “It’s not period anyway. Women covered up. You’re thinking of modern American cabaret style.” You mean like this? (Three months later.) I still felt sort of embarrassed and unfeminist about the whole thing. Then came the first lesson. Chabi taught us some hip moves and a simple ten-second dance routine set to the sexy throbbing, thumping Middle Eastern music of Eddie ‘The Sheik’ Kochak. As my hips swung, I felt an unexpected sexual thrill race through me. I felt strong. I felt confident. I felt, and I couldn’t believe I was feeling this, damned sexy. There it was. The Power. Moving and feeling like a beautiful, desirable woman flooded me with an unfamiliar wave of empowering sexual confidence. I am woman, watch me dance! The high school wallflower, about as desired as a pop trigonometry quiz, who’d agreed to this adventure never wanting a man to see her making an idiot of herself in a (too much belly)-baring costume suddenly wished her male friends could see her, even if she was only wearing a T-shirt and shorts. I imagined one of those stupid costumes. I’d be like those women in the movies! The Power felt anything but degrading. Feminism was deadly serious in the ‘80s. Women moved into the boardroom, with big-shouldered suits to emphasize their power in male-dominated corporations. A woman who’d murdered her abusive husband was considered a feminist hero and sexual assault was a bigger threat than it is today (The 63% reduction in rapes since the early ’90s is one of feminism’s greatest victories). Many feminists had no sense of humour, as I found when the biggest feminist in my feminist literature college class caught me dressed as a Playboy bunny for Halloween. The feminist narrative, enmeshed in a circle-the-wagons worldview, didn’t yet acknowledge the need to be yourself, or explore the many facets of being a woman. Female sexuality was a bit taboo except for those edgy and outré enough to chose lesbianism as a statement. Popular literature of the era abounded with political lesbian characters. We’d have to wait for the ’90s before women could explore pole dancing, stripping, burlesque and Girls Gone Wild before we could shake loose our restrictions and argue such actions were ‘empowering’ and ‘embracing your sexuality’. As I moved and shimmied in that first class, I reveled in the assertive confidence of The Power. I’d joined this class on a lark, figuring it would peter out after ‘Pennsic’. Now I was all-in, along with everyone else. "Hot buttered puppies!" In the months after Chabi’s classes began, we emerged like butterflies from a lifelong cocoon of never being attractive enough. We started losing weight. It was good exercise! My roommate Liliana and I belly danced to the music on the radio. Anything with a beat! Even The Monkees. JoAnn’s Fabrics drew excited neophyte dancers to purchase yards of fabric on sale for big brightly-colored Middle Eastern ‘circle skirts’ and bras. Excited, Liliana and I debuted our belly-baring costumes to Chabi and her partner Torogene, who exclaimed, wide-eyed, “HOT BUTTERED PUPPIES!” I still don’t know what that means but I think it was a compliment! In the fall I followed my parents to Connecticut after my father got a new job. I hated leaving Chabi’s class. I’d transformed from a baby butterfly into both a medieval and modern sex kitten. Feminists didn’t talk about ‘patriarchy’ much back then, but I was sometimes challenged for being a ‘tool for sexism’ . I never felt I was a ‘tool’ of something degrading, maybe because SCA men treated all women, of all body sizes, so well. About a year and a half later, Chabi encouraged me to explore doing ‘bellygrams’. I wasn’t sure I was good enough. Belly dancers weren’t common in New England SCAdian groups. I practiced and performed at SCAdian medieval events, but felt like I knew just enough to be dangerous. “You’re good enough,” Chabi assured me, having seen me dance again at my second Pennsic War. It was Gisele, not Giselle, but whatever. I insisted on covering up my face (rather than my belly!) for the next ad. I didn’t want my outside sales clients to recognize me. I terrorized forty-year-old (on average) birthday boys in a tri-state area for the next fifteen years. Fifty+ was my favourite age range. The older men got, the less they gave a crap who thought they looked like an idiot. They happily got up and danced with me. Feminism and I broke up in the ’90s, citing irreconcilable differences. My ex was fabulous in many ways, having pulled off numerous victories, real accomplishments that had made the world more equitable to women in the thirty-odd years I’d been alive, but feminism just got too — embarrassing. Women’s financial and political power grew, but so did a dismaying sense of ever-increasing female victimhood, rather than the accompanying personal responsibility that joins new power. Feminism seemed stuck in the ’80s, unwilling to admit it was making a real difference. Now it was the ‘90s. Why was it the more empowered women became, the more disempowered many seemed to feel? The lack of recognition for individual responsibility, the growing demonization of men and a nascent ‘political correctness’ disturbed me. I began calling myself an egalitarian. I still believed in equal rights for women, but I could no longer bear the f-word with pride. As a belly dancer, it’s ironic I received as little pushback from feminists as I got. A few made snide comments suggesting my activity was hurtful to women. I didn’t get mad. I’d felt exactly as they did before Celestria dragged me into this. So I explained and educated. How confident and assertive I felt, how I loved my audiences. How with few exceptions, men treated me very well. How men and women are different and we should embrace that. Vive la difference! The extra income for better accoutrements than the handmade costumes of my early, low-wage temp job days, and how I could afford to visit Europe didn’t hurt either. In an Irish bar in Torrington, CT. I never removed more than a few veils. I made that clear to those who confused belly dancing with stripping. I didn’t look down on strippers. Celestria and I, early in our tutelage, had a Stripper Adventure. We wanted to experience a strip club, so we asked a couple of our guy friends to take us to one of the better ones. We wanted to see good stripping, we stipulated, not amateurs. “We know just the place,” they said. These gals were impressive, with obvious formal dance training. Ballet. Jazz. Gymnastics. They were beautiful, slim, and seemed to enjoy teasing men, seated beneath them in supplication to the goddesses. I admired their joy in their bodies, and their hypnotic influence over their audience. They had The Power. It looked like patriarchy and objectification to some, but I recognized an unspoken mutual agreement between the dancers and their audience. By day they got paid for clerking and managing. By night they got paid for dancing. “The men aren’t allowed to touch them,” one of my friends whispered. “The guys get tossed out if they do. This place can lose its liquor license if they’re reported for anything sexual. The girls can’t touch them either, but they can accept money.” The dancers couldn’t show their breasts or nether regions. They pulled out their flimsy bikini bras and revealing panties (no g-strings), but my friend noted, “You never see anything. They know exactly how to do it.” Later, Celestria looked for me when I didn’t return from the bathroom. She found me teaching one of the strippers some of our belly dancing moves. The dancer made a fair chunk of extra money in addition to her regular job. Like me, she didn’t tell employers what she did. This was Bible-thumping Ohio, after all. She laughed about it. She didn’t seem to feel degraded, not unlike Celestria, myself, and the other aspiring goddesses in Chabi’s class. It was an art form, and it took a helluva lot of labia to do that. The only performing art harder than stripping, I think, is stand-up comedy. I know of darker corners where women who perform for men’s pleasure are treated very poorly. I know about the seedier side of stripping, along with stories of what it’s like to be a Playboy bunny or a Hooters waitress. The touchers. The misogynists. The sexual assaults. The harassment. The fat-shaming. For strippers, even worse if you’re not fortunate enough to perform in a ‘nicer’ bar. (The term ‘gentlemen’s club’ — ha! — wouldn’t be coined for several more years.) I once found myself in a dirty, grungy strip club. I forget why. The dancers were sad shadows of the women Celestria and I had watched, shaking in poorly-fitted makeshift costumes. They reminded me of the way I used to look at the end of a long nightclubbing evening. No one, I’m certain, was watching out for them. Nothing feminist about that. Period. I’m sure some belly dancers can tell grim tales depending on who they were, where they worked, and how much self-esteem they possessed. Belly dancing was a big tease for me, done with fun and enjoyment and rarely men-only. I adored my biggest fans, excited, wide-eyed little girls. I understood why. I was small during belly dancing’s heyday, when it was everywhere. And, growing up in Florida, I witnessed many hula dancers and wanted to be one when I grew up. I ‘got’ the sensuality of The Power on some deeper level even when I was three or four. These ladies were beautiful and I loved the way they moved. I lost that joy somewhere. Sensuality is almost verboten today, in an age ruled by a renewed feminist sexual puritanism, political and religious fundamentalism and men who are afraid to so much as look at women lest they be publicly excoriated for ‘misogyny’. Female sensuality/sexuality comes with many choices, complex and faceted. Some women argue they’re empowered by pole dancing. I agree. I understand. The Power. Other women find it degrading and downright embarrassing. I understand that too. I would never pole dance. Female sexuality and sensuality offers a strange dichotomy. First Night Hartford, 1993 As for ‘objectifying’…we all do it. Witness women lining the streets waiting to catch a glimpse of George Clooney during the Toronto International Film Festival. Or Beliebers screaming for their idol Justin. Girlfriends chucking down pinot grigio and rating the men in their social circle, married or otherwise, in the order of who they’d like to have sex with first. Belly dancing taught me how to move my imperfect body more confidently, to sew my own garb and create new ideas. It taught me how to flirt, how to play the doumbek and how to break down music. I performed in a troupe for a year. I learned how to dance with a sword — always a crowd-pleaser. I taught others, and watched them emerge from their cocoons as Chabi had once observed us. I was responsible for that. That’s a greater feeling than The Power. I made people laugh and feel happy when I danced, including a terminal man in a hospital just days before he died. Learning to belly dance is one of the most feminist actions I’ve ever taken. I was no tool for anything. Je regrette rien. This first appeared on Medium in June 2020.