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.

It doesn’t love me. It doesn’t have my best interests at heart. It doesn’t want me to grow. And it will literally kill me if I let it. “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear! And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!” Creative Commons license photo by Daniel Oberhaus (2017) on Flickr Many mornings I wake up and think, “Shit, I’m still alive.” My favorite time of the day is night, when I sleep and enter oblivion — what death must be like, sans dreams, if atheists are right. I’ve read that a coma is one step away from death, and sleep one step from coma. Two steps from death, every night. Maybe one night I’ll get lucky, huh? I hate feeling this way. I’m not, by nature, an unhappy person. In fact my mental health support group sometimes wonders what the hell I’m doing there; I’m always smiling and cracking jokes and saying positive things to others. It’s no facade; that’s the real me. But I’m there because I’ve struggled on and off with depression since adolescence. I went through an entire life stage I call the Angry Drunken Bitch years. When sexually frustrated single guy George Sodini shot up a women’s gym in Pittsburgh screaming about feminists, I became fascinated with his blog because, as monstrous as his act and sexual entitlement were, I felt a certain uncomfortable weird kinship with him. Along with Elliott Rodgers, the Killer Virgin. I ‘got’ that sense of entitlement. They felt entitled to sex with women, and I felt entitled to romantic success, to love, perhaps spoiled by much easier pickin’s when I was under thirty and a popular belly dancer in a medieval re-creation group. It took me many years to figure out just how entitled I felt as an A.D.B. Now my jaded ennui has evolved from losing my job last year to a life re-evaluation revealing just how much my life has sucked for years and how I don’t want to do this anymore, but I don’t yet have an escape plan. Is it a good idea to just sell everything, move to an island, and die in a small community younger than I might have, or am I ignoring how I can stay put and find meaning and a happy life again right here? How much of my depression is actually my fucking Terminator trying to keep me from ever doing anything that makes me happy, and most of all personally growing? Resistance is insidious. Resistance is implacable. Resistance is indefatigable. Resistance is protean. It shape-shifts. It lies. It dissembles. Its aim is to destroy us, body and soul. The Terminator, i.e. Resistance, i.e. the yetzer hara, does not change and cannot change. — Steven Pressfield, Villain = Resistance American novelist and screenwriter Steven Pressfield writes books about the Resistance that dwells within us all and ceaselessly toils to keep us from achieving our true potential. It’s my fear of moving forward, the procrastination, the perfectionism, the excuses I make, the endless distractions I create for myself— Netflix series, movies, social media — so I can keep the Resistance — my own personal Terminator — at bay, where it waits patiently for me to get up to brush my teeth and go to bed, so it can resume whispering its destructive messages. You suck. You aren’t good enough. You’ll never succeed. Your business venture is a crock of shit. Don’t even think about trying to strike out on your own, you moron. Better than you have failed. What makes you think you can do it? You don’t deserve better. You’re the very definition of mediocrity. Yeah, you’re successful now but it’s all about to end. Then they’ll see the imposter you really are. Resistance is, as Pressfield explains, an ‘entirely negative force’ built into us whose ‘solitary aim is to block the soul from communicating with us and us from communicating with our soul.’ He defines ‘soul’ by the Jewish tradition, the part of me that wants the best for myself in a beneficent, non-selfish sense. The yetzer hara, Resistance, is my compulsion to self-obstruct and self-destruct. He compares it to The Terminator. Why the hell I have an Inner Terminator seems to be a mystery to brighter brains than mine, but we all have it. Even the most successful. It’s why so many young, promising musicians join the ’27 Club’. Why so many celebrity lives have been destroyed by drugs like cocaine and crack. I never understood why celebrities took such a self-destructive drug until I read about the sense of power and confidence it gives, especially before a big concert or performance. Okay, fair enough. I can’t imagine what I’d do if I had to perform in front of 45,000 people in Shea Stadium who’d paid good money to see me do — something or other. Someone I kind of admired, who always seemed to have his shit together, who’s more successful and more educated and more experienced, born into more privilege than I, just failed at his third attempt at being a senior leader. I know he failed this last time and I suspect he failed at his first two. He gave what I thought were inauthentic excuses for why he’d left the other jobs so soon. He got demoted at his last position and left shortly thereafter for a new job — where he’s no longer in a senior management position. Pretty sure he’s dealing with his own Resistance, as on top of the world as he often was. Something stops him, I suspect, from examining why he’s not cutting it as a senior manager when his stars are otherwise aligned. Image by Markus Distelrath from Pixabay I’ve spent the last year attempting to confront my own Terminator, a seemingly disembodied entity that lives within me trying to tear me down the way one particular guy in high school did. Dan is sort of my psychological bête noire. No matter what I did, what I tried to learn or accomplish, he was right there with me in a lengthy class hanging over my shoulder assuring me almost every damn moment that I was ugly, stupid, a dog, a Wolfwoman, that I can’t do this, I can’t do that, I’ll never be any good at anything. He’s not someone I think about a lot anymore, at least not until the past year when I came to realize my Terminator is a lot like Dan. It’s always there to keep me from being better than I am. Telling me I can’t do that, it’s too late, I’m too old, that’s not for me, success is for others, who do I think I am, I’m mediocre and always will be. But it’s not fair to hang this all on Dan. I only realized he’s a bit of a bête noire after I re-read my old college journal and was struck by how I was still going on about him two years after graduation. At some point I got over it. Maybe after I became a belly dancer and proved I wasn’t such an ugly dog who’d never get a guy after all. The Terminator speaks to me in a chorus of voices synthesized into one. It’s my parents overprotecting their little girl; other bullies from school; the nutty bosses who were either crazy, stupid or gaslighters; the legions of single men who found me utterly unfascinating after 35. But most of all, there’s a little girl’s voice there, feeling not-good-enough on some fundamental level that can’t be blamed on her parents, who always encouraged her to do her best, who always felt a little left out and left behind and dreamed big dreams that would never come to be. Her Birth Terminator. My Terminator has worked against me my entire life, and underlies most of my depression. Adolescence is usually when things go tits-up for kids, especially young girls. My happy life in Orlando was uprooted by a bad economy, and Dad’s job search landed us in a small Ohio town where I had little in common with the other kids and from which I nurtured a lifelong resentment for why I had to put up with these Midwestern numbnuts when things had been so much better in Orlando. It’s only in very recent years I’ve been able to release that resentment, once I realized that not only would adolescence have ended my childhood innocence no matter where I lived, but, with 20/20 hindsight, I see evidence that my life might well have grown considerably worse had we stayed in Orlando, where I’d begun attending an integrated junior high school half-filled with angry, impulse-uncontrolled black kids shaping up to hate my white middle-class blonde ass in one of America’s most racist states. ‘The road not taken’ is sometimes the one best avoided. Now I challenge my self-doubting self-image, questioning whether I’m really as much of a loser as I sometimes think. Am I lazy and unmotivated, or is this a siren call to do something different that doesn’t make me want to rip my brain out of my head? I’ve explored freelancing and becoming a solopreneur as I realize what’s truly been missing is a sense of meaning or purpose. I’ve got a lengthy career in I.T. sales and the first twenty years were awesome; only in the last eight or nine did I start taking jobs for the money, which is almost always a recipe for misery. Now I’m preoccupied with personal development and growth, which the Terminator doesn’t mind as long as I don’t actually attempt to change anything. I’m always allowed to dream, I’m just not allowed to change. I do, though. The Terminator gets over it, but always worries about the next one. “Where there is a Dream,” Steven Pressfield tells me in a different blog post, “there is Resistance. Thus: where we encounter Resistance, somewhere nearby is a Dream.” There it is: The Terminator, Resistance, exists to keep me from achieving my dreams, unless I become very good at working to overcome it or just not fucking listen. It’s a sign, however, that I’m on the right path. The Terminator doesn’t care about unimportant pursuits. It only needs to keep me in the Safe Place where it doesn’t have to face potential failure, rejection or shame. What’s on my fridge. What’s the secret? How I push past The Terminator is what I’ve always known: Just do the work. Just fucking show up to work every day, whether that’s at an office, or to look for a job, or to turn my side hustle into a real business. A few things I keep in mind about The Terminator: It’s not personal. It’s not me holding myself back. My true self wants to be happy, to achieve, to accomplish, to live a meaningful life, as long as that definition is mine and not others’ standards. Resistance is there to stop me. I don’t know why; I can’t imagine what evolutionary purpose it serves. It just is, like the mold in my bathtub. I’ll be bock! Everyone on the planet lives with their own Inner Terminator, even if they don’t show it. I’m not alone. Everyone else fights my struggle too. I don’t need to be ‘motivated’. The Terminator binges on ‘motivation’. It kicks up and convinces me I need a ‘mental health day’, often with a lot of ‘navel-gazing’, which amounts to an utterly wasted day I could have spent moving closer to my dream, and now I feel like a loser because I allowed myself to be sidetracked. I can’t work toward my goal when I feel like it; I have to show up for work and do so every damn day. I can’t kill it. Just like James Cameron’s Terminator, it will be with me until I die. But it doesn’t have to be my giant robot Adversary, blocking me at every turn. Satan tried to distract Jesus in the desert by promising riches and power; Jesus was like, “Nah.” The most important thing I must remember about my own Terminator, though: It can kill me. I hear it in myself, and the voices of friends and colleagues who fall prey to the army of Terminators tweeting, posting and botting messages of hopelessness and despair. If I listen to that negative voice long enough, it will wear me down and one day I might toss in the figurative towel and say, “Okay, I agree. Enough is enough.” And then do the deed myself.This morning I woke up and The Terminator said, “Shit, we’re still alive.” And I said, “Fuck you, Terminator.” And I settled down to work. Photo by Igor Miske on Unsplash This originally appeared on Medium in August 2020.

We can’t do anything about Andrew Cuomo, but we can start setting boundaries with today’s baby Cuomos-in-training Photo of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, accused by multiple women of sexual harassment, by Diana Robinson on Flickr And you thought former-senator-now-Prez Joe Biden was bad. Six women have come forward with multiple claims accusing New York Governor Andrew Cuomo of inappropriate touching, questions, and potential ‘trial balloons’ to see if they were amenable to a sexual affair. The predictable accused’s response to the outrage began with the usual denials, and, as more accusers stepped forward, the customary slow pivot to reluctant admission that certain actions from the past may have caused unintended pain to others, followed by the venerable utterly unconvincing apologies. One response one never hears from these touchy-feely Old Boys: Asking why the women didn’t say something at the time, let him know he’d crossed a boundary. Most perps would rather women didn’t; they don’t want to know. They want to remain unchallenged which works out well since many women won’t. It’ll only come back to maybe bite them in the ass if they are or become a public figure. We’re at a point in history where we have more power to challenge boundary breaches at the time when the offense occurs, and handled properly, it‘s arguably less risky. As in, a minor blip in your day versus a punishing shitstorm of Twitstorm. The question is, have we got the labia for it? We can’t do anything about Andrew Cuomo from a behavioral point of view, nor could anyone have forty years ago when he entered politics. He may resign, or get impeached, but his predatory misogyny is entrenched forever. We can, however, teach the baby Cuomos boundaries as soon as they offend, beginning today. This includes more adult harassers and offenders. We can’t easily challenge them all — yet — but we can begin with those closest to us in power and status, inside or outside the workplace. It’s quite simple, and relatively low-risk: Speak up at the time of the offense, if it doesn’t put you in real danger. Challenging male breaches of engagement starting with the offender is an idea introduced to me early by a new boss. If you’ve got a problem with me, he told the new hire and I, don’t go running to my boss about it. Bring it to me first, and let’s discuss it. Give me a chance to change or fix it. By the end of the first week, I prepared to have That Talk with him. I needed his flirtation and mild sexual harassment to end. But he never arrived at work. Management found out about the gun in his briefcase. The new hire and I were okay with it; the managers above fired hm. I don’t know how that discussion would have gone down, but his logical response would have been to say okay, no problem, and then stop, recognizing I showed him the consideration he’d asked for, and been grateful I didn’t complain to his boss (he was a relatively new hire, too.) That’s how I would have felt. I’ve never been accused of sexual harassment, but I have occasionally made others feel uncomfortable and I, too, would rather be addressed by the offended party first. Why not give people the opportunity to clean up their act before escalating things? Yes, men should know better, especially in the MeToo era. No, we don’t like confrontation. But it’s the lowest-risk way to handle minor overtures and if the guy is smart, he’ll realize you saved him a meeting with HR. Or didn’t pitch a feminist scene in a public place. Even if it’s a non-workplace offense, it’s a first step. Handled properly, it doesn’t escalate the issue. A few times I’ve told a handsy guy to back off. I do it politely but firmly. When women don’t speak up at the time, it gives the guy tacit approval to continue harassing, either her or others. Other times, it’s best to let it slide, but consider what you might do next time. I’m not judging anyone. Good reasons abound why one might not speak up at the time, and Andrew Cuomo is Exhibit A. He’s famously bullying and vindictive, and not only against women who’ve dared to speak out about his predatory behavior. His first accuser, Lindsey Boylan, published an article on Medium recently detailing the toxic work environment others have begun to speak out about. Now I wonder, theoretically, and without judgement of anyone today: What if women had challenged Cuomo when he was younger, newer, less powerful? I don’t know how long Cuomo has been a harasser but it’s not beyond the ken to speculate it began before he became governor. He’s 63 years old. He began his political career at age 25 working on his father’s gubernatorial campaign (Mario Cuomo served as Governor of New York for three terms). That was 1982, the start of a decade marked by entrenched over-privileged male entitlement. A former HR manager friend and I talked about the Cuomo allegations. I said the time has come for women to speak up when things happen, not months or years later. “I understand why women, especially young women, are afraid to,” she said. It’s an uncomfortable, frightening, and maddening position. Inside or outside a work environment, one worries about an embarrassing scene at least, damaged friendships, political/professional fallout, and physical danger at worst. Young women especially, we agreed, don’t often have the confidence to speak up, inside or outside the workplace, nor the career stability if HR doesn’t support them, which it often doesn’t if the man holds too much power, particularly over their own jobs. I understand why Cuomo’s accusers didn’t stand up to him at the time. Boylan’s article describes one helluva culture of enablement. But here’s the thing: When it comes to public figures and celebrities, I suspect speaking up at the time may carry less risk today than waiting to one day tweet your grievance on social media. MeToo has demonstrated how women are punished for challenging male power and bad behavior, even minor infractions. When women speak cobwebbed truths about handsy, huggy public figures, they face vicious backlash by trolls and cyberbullies. They’re inevitably accused of lying ‘for the attention’ (because nothing feeds your narcissistic desire for public idolatry quite like doxxing and swatting!) followed by ugly memes and a tsunami of misogynist derision. Whereas the fallout is often far less in the moment, especially if you handle it as maturely as you can. Hey, let’s keep our hands to ourselves. We’re friends/work colleagues/casual acquaintances. I wonder: What would happen to a 25-year-old overly-entitled man today continually challenged and reminded of boundaries? What will he be like at 63? My friend and I disagreed on how we would handle a touchy-feely man, especially a work colleague: She would employ ‘broken record’ reminders — no, this is not good, let’s don’t do this, this isn’t the place for touching, co-workers don’t touch each other, etc. I would handle each breach with escalating levels of firmness and attitude. Hey, we’re not touchy. Let’s keep things professional. Er, remember when we agreed we weren’t touchy people? (Note the editorial ‘we’.) Hey! We’ve had this conversation before! I will remind you: NO TOUCHING. (Or inappropriate questions. Or sex talk.) Dammit, I’ve had enough! If you want a date that badly the next one will be with the HR manager. (Or their boss, if no HR department.) One reason women don’t speak up more is fear of what might happen. I wonder what would have happened if campaign staffers made uncomfortable by then-Senator Joe Biden’s close physical style had challenged him. They might have feared losing their jobs, but what if someone had said to him, politely, “Hey Senator Biden, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t touch me. We need to keep the workplace professional.” Hard to think she’d have lost her job, unless she worked for Donald Trump. The woman photographed at a 2019 wedding with Cuomo clearly looked uncomfortable with his hands on her face. She described other minor physical liberties he took with her, touching her back and asking to kiss her. I don’t fault her for why she didn’t remove his hands from her face and said, “No touching, please.” But what if she did it to some guy who wasn’t New York’s infamous bad boy? Like her father’s work colleague or someone she’d just met? She might get more forceful. Like removing his hand from her back and when he put it back, saying, “Knock it off! Keep your hands to yourself!” I wonder how it might go down if she removed it again, turned to face him, and said, “No means no. Have you learned nothing from MeToo?” A reminder of what she could do later, now with photo documentation, might make today’s Young Cuomo think twice. Nobody wants to be MeToo’ed, but clearly the current Cuomo had already learned the rules didn’t apply to him, rather a lot like a certain former President who bragged women ‘let him’ do anything because of his fame. Challenging Cuomo today carries genuine risk. He clearly owns a history of bad behavior with women, and we may not have heard the last of it. Men continue to harass and assault because women refuse to challenge it. If we want it to stop, the movement starts now. Let’s not fault the victims and non-reactions of the past. Let’s acknowledge that predatory men are grossly unfair and we shouldn’t have to be put in the awful position of having to confront and challenge men who should — who do know better — to stop harassing us. Let’s also acknowledge the many circumstances under which it’s a bad idea to challenge, along with how not pushing ourselves to move beyond the freeze mode encourages men to continue harassing women, but more importantly we train ourselves to accept the harassment. The more it happens, the more we feel powerless to stop it — the more powerless we become. It’s one way we unconsciously run from our own power, pretend it doesn’t exist, fail to develop as assertive individuals with the confidence to challenge others taking liberties. We worry about the risks — and they are real — but this is our world. The risks aren’t always what we think. Life isn’t risk-free for anyone, including the guy doing the groping/grabbing/date-seeking. One reason why men continue to dominate in places of power is because they’re not afraid to take risks. They challenge others, they challenge power. Sometimes they lose and are smacked down. The ones who will succeed get up and do it again. They recognize it’s an unfair, hierarchical world and they fight to rise within it. Many women shrink from assertiveness, preferring the safe zone and allowing themselves to feel, and ergo become, more victimized. Taking these risks is a terrifying notion. I understand. I’ve been in a far more stressful position with a sexually harassing boss than the one I described earlier. Perhaps a future story. It’s not fair. It’s a shitty, patriarchal world we live in, and the onus shouldn’t be on us to make them change, but these men won’t until they’re forced. What if there’s nothing more than a lovely warm spring about a foot and a half under the bottom of the picture? Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay This ain’t 1965, when Bill Cosby is accused of assaulting his first rape victim, or 1982, when Clarence Thomas asked Anita Hill if there was a pubic hair on his Coke can, or 1993, when Joe Biden got handsy with his female staffers, or even 2017, when Harvey Weinstein made MeToo a household word. Here’s the bright spot: You may find your what-if fears are unfounded. He doesn’t make a scene, retaliate, gaslight you, or complain to his friends on Facebook what a bitch you are. We shouldn’t put ourselves in real danger. Sometimes it’s better to remove one’s self from the scene rather than make one. Just because we can’t do it with everyone doesn’t mean we can’t resolve to challenge men more today when they overstep their boundaries — whether it’s talking over us in a meeting, touching our back or shoulder, or asking if he can kiss us. ‘No, that wouldn’t be appropriate,’ is a polite but firm response. Refusing to tolerate men’s behavior, taking a few risks, pushing ourselves to assert our rights and personal boundaries strengthens us against future intimidations and even outright abuse. We can’t change or fix Cuomo, Trump, Weinstein, Cosby, R. Kelly, LaBoeuf, or other harassers or abusers, but we can challenge the mini-Cuomos, mini-Trumps, mini-Weinsteins et al, young boys and men today not yet with power, who need to learn early they can’t treat women like that. What will gender relations look like in twenty or thirty years if women began doing this now? Starting today? This first appeared on Medium in March 2021.

Men may be the consumers and drivers, but women's silence, or turning away, is complicit CC0 Public domain photo from Pxhere It makes my blood boil to read of 'Jane's' testimony this week as Ghislaine Maxwell, accused groomer and sex trafficker for now-dead Jeffrey Epstein, stands trial. Jane was 14 when she met Maxwell. She and her family were groomed for abuse by both. I don't know if Jane had a father in the house but she testified she didn't tell others about her abuse because her mother 'discouraged her from speaking her mind." She and Mom met Epstein in Florida for tea in 1994 and he offered to 'mentor' Jane. Her mother allowed her to visit Epstein's home by herself after that. WHAT THE HELL WAS SHE THINKING??? My mother would have been all over Epstein like a fly on you-know-what had he offered me such a proposal. "My mom was so enamored with the idea that these wealthy, affluent people took an interest in me." I wonder if Mom was thinking was, 'If she just keeps her trap shut she can nail herself a rich husband and be set for life!" It might have helped that Jane's mentor paid for her voice lessons and school, and housing for her family. Mom was living in an Epstein-financed apartment when Jane cut off contact with him in 2002. I don't know what Mom knew about the Lolita Island escapades but she didn't need it engraved on granite tablets. She should have known a guy like that taking an interest in her pretty blonde daughter was a chicken hawk. Jane's mother was complicit in her child's horrific enslavement and abuse, as were many others. I focus on the mothers and women because there's enough discussion about patriarchy, privilege, and male entitlement to women's bodies, and how men are always 100% responsible for what they do with their dick. Agreed. But we look away and make excuses when women help, aid, and abet sexual abuse of girls and women by doing nothing. Then we ask plaintively, What will it take to make it stop? It DOES have to stop. We're accountable too even if we're not the ones teaching the child how to 'massage' Jeffrey Epstein just the way he likes it. She let him get away with it Earlier this year, I read a woman's testimony on an Internet platform about how she aided and abetted a consumer of illegal porn. That wasn't the focus of the article, of course. She centered on her initial 'Mr. Perfect's' abuse after she moved in with him. It was pretty bad. The nadir of the nightmarish relationship arrived when he tried to kill her by pushing her down a marble staircase. He drove her to the hospital and took her powerful prescription pain meds for himself after they patched up her broken arm, which she might have lost, when he drove her home. She described the sick, violent, almost certainly illegal porn with dangerously young girls she knew he watched, some of it so vile it made her physically ill in the bathroom. She never reported. Was she afraid of retribution? Maybe initially, but she's not now. She posted under her real name, and gave what she claimed was his real name, hoping other women in the San Francisco area would avoid him. She never reported his highly questionable porn use to the authorities. He stopped having sex with her after the first year because she wouldn't indulge his desire for degrading, humiliating sex (giving as well as receiving). Darwin only knows where he went when he went out. Did he seek the same sick sex he sought in his pornography? If so, how mutually consensual was any of it? What unknown abuse did she not stop with her silence? The Woman Who Abetted Child Trafficking - And no, her name wasn't Ghislaine Maxwell I've witnessed women's silence or complicity in the sexual abuse of others for decades, and the temporally farther we get from those earliest naive, clueless first years of Second Wave Feminism, the less patience I have. "Where the hell are the mothers?" I was 15 when I heard my first incest testimony from a friend in 1978. It wasn't as much of a surprise as you might think; the previous summer I'd read a Reader's Digest article about how incest was far more common than people believed and I discussed it with my mother. Ergo, I wasn't surprised when I heard other familial sexual abuse stories from girls, or heard them through others. 'Yes, Rachel said she was going to put an end to Sarah's abuse, that she'd dealt with it herself and she wasn't going to let it go on for her,' a friend, the school gossip who knew everything about everyone, told me. I privately added two new names to the list of classmates in my head who were incest victims. "Mom, I'm beginning to think I'm the only girl in town who's not having sex with her father," I said. "Where the hell are the mothers?" Mom wondered. We called the suicide hotline multiple times together, me asking advice on how to handle my often-suicidal friends and my mother on the other phone, assuring them I really was asking for a friend. What angered me about that first testimony was I encouraged Pauline to tell her mother. She did. Her mother told her she was a liar. Neither did her minister believe her. As the '70s turned into the '80s public tales of incest, rape and sexual abuse proliferated, including in the Catholic Church. Contentious divorce proceedings in the media now came with an unpleasant twist: It became almost de rigueur for mothers to include alleged sexual abuse of the children along with other grievances in a divorce. It had become more acceptable to talk about sexual abuse publicly, but sometimes I wondered why the allegations had become more common in divorces. It sounded more believable when wives cited it as the primary reason for filing, whereas I wondered if others were taking advantage of a trend to hit back harder at the soon-to-be-ex. I read books about incest and abuse and learned that sometimes the mothers knew, or suspected, what was going on but didn't want to rock the boat, instigate a divorce, or in the worst cases, were kind of grateful they didn't have to have sex with their husband. Many women had been rape or incest victims and never told anyone about it. How many of these mothers had endured either? Did they not empathize with or want to protect their own daughters? WHAT THE HELL WERE THEY THINKING??? Denial of personal power Not everyone is afraid of the perp. Not everyone fears he'll kill her if she reports him to the police. Women aren't as powerless as much as in fairly recent days of yore. What she fears, perhaps, is public shame judgment she's bound to receive, not all of it perhaps fair, if she hadn't known about the abuse for long. Or what life will be like if she has to raise the children on her own, with no financial help from the jailbird. Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels It's a tough situation, but consider this: Sexual abuse ruins a child's life and future while the pain and shame of others learning the truth will one day subside, especially if you move elsewhere where no one knows you. When will we have public conversations about how female silence and ignoring of sexual abuse and trafficking of women and children perpetuates the problem? After all, aren't we instructed that Silence = Violence? Men, however sympathetic, will never rally together to end it themselves because no one likes challenging their own tribe, no matter how worthy the cause. My conversations with Pauline happened over forty years ago, when mothers truly didn't have the financial or political power and independence we have today. So what's stopping us now? How serious are any of us, really, when we prefer to limit the plan for ending sexual abuse and trafficking to going after men, when we're unwilling to acknowledge our own contribution? We aid and abet the sexual abuse of the truly powerless by ignoring it, looking the other way, pretending we didn't know, or just wussing out about reporting the SOB to the proper authorities. Maybe they'll do something and maybe they won't, and maybe he'll get punished and maybe he won't, but let there be a record of that complaint in case anyone else decides to file one. The trail starts with the first report. Pretending this problem is only the fault of 'The Patriarchy' renders us disingenuous and unserious about ending sexual abuse. We are accomplices when we fail to report, when we let him get away with it. We have the power to end sexual abuse once and for all. The question is, have we got the labia for it? This originally appeared on Vocal in December 2021.

Or, ‘Dear God, how do I refer to — Him? Her? Them? Zed or something?’ Photo by Dom Brassey Draws Comics on Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0 Who knew something once as boring as pronouns could be such a touchy subject? Several years ago I belonged to a Canadian writers group and I remember someone who’d written an entire book about pronouns. She sought helpful advice about getting it published, because even publishers specializing in writing and grammar didn’t want an entire book about them. This was a few years before a previously unknown Toronto university professor named Jordan Peterson turned pronouns into a worldwide culture war. I don’t know if she ever found a space on the Indigo’s/Chapters shelves for her brave little non-gender-concerned pronoun book, but if she didn’t, maybe it’s time to pull it out of mothballs again for a rewrite. Now, she can add useful information people need rather than — whatever it was she found so fascinating about pronouns in 2007. I left the pronouns fuss to depressed 19-year-old university snowflakes until I watched a LinkedIn training video a few years ago, conducted by a….person. I didn’t know what pronouns they used but I thought of them as ‘her’. They looked like a guy, but sounded like a woman. I liked them. They had a nice, friendly smile and an engaging way of speaking. I thought, She sounds like someone I’d like to be friends with, but what would I do if I met her? What would I call her? What if her name was something unenlightening, like Pat? The ongoing SNL sketch about ‘Pat’ from the 1990s would be considered offensive today, but it deftly illustrated the discomfort and confusion people felt about non-gender-conforming others before we had the language and knowledge to appreciate it. I hadn’t met any gender-non-conformers myself but I began to worry. I’d met some perfectly lovely transwomen who didn’t offer pronouns but my assumptions were spot-on. Thus far though, no Pats. I looked up the trainer’s LinkedIn profile and they didn’t offer their pronouns. I can’t remember their name but I think it was female. I began to notice a few Linkedin members stating their preferred pronouns. Some were diversity specialists which made sense. Few needed to, apart from the courtesy for their profession. Anyone could have guessed. Knowing how to refer to someone would go a long way in addressing some of the fear and discomfort surrounding folks who don’t conform to gender expectations. Seems a pretty small ask. Recently I visited an LGBTQ organization website and one officer was a person with a female name who looked exactly like a man. I clicked the bio. It referred to ‘she’ and ‘her’ throughout. Okay, helpful! Out of curiosity, I visited her LinkedIn profile where she looked as male as she did on the website. No pronouns. Exactly the sort of person who would make my stomach tighten with nervousness if I hadn’t seen her bio. I found other non-conformers on LinkedIn who also didn’t make it clear. These folks must know they don’t conform, unlike the blithely clueless ‘Pat’ from Saturday Night Live. Offering their pronouns would be less stressful for those of us who just want to get along with others without creating discomfort or drama for them. A few weeks ago I embarrassed myself by messing up pronouns with someone I couldn’t see. I called a customer for a client whose freelance sales campaign I was working on to reinvigorate a ‘dead customers’ list. “Hello,” said a man’s voice. “Hi, can I please speak with Johanna?” “This is Johanna.” “You’re Johanna?” I said. It sort of slipped out but my first thought was — psycho controlling husband. “Yes.” “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get it wrong,” I said. I flashed on that Seinfeld episode with the man who sounds like a woman. “Oh, don’t feel bad. I’m on a hormone treatment that lowers my voice.” “Oh, okay,” I said, relieved not to have screwed up after all. I’d read about women who took such hormones for female health problems who experienced that side effect. I asked her how she was doing, how was she surviving the pandemic, and in general reminding her the client still existed. That was the protocol for a customer list friendly and loyal to a company with a very high customer satisfaction rate. I got to updating the contact information. “Obviously the phone number’s still good,” I said. “And is blahblahblah still your email address, Johanna?” “Yes,” she said, “and it’s John now, not Johanna.” Oh! It hadn’t occurred to me I might be talking to a transman. She wasn’t a woman experiencing a side effect, he was a man in transition who wanted the deeper voice. “No problem,” I said. “I’ll update that too.” “Thank you so much!” he said with more gratitude than I expected. “That’s so kind of you!” As though I was doing him a huge favor instead of my job , which was also to make sure the customer information was correct. I got off the phone thinking how nice he’d been about it. No drama. No tears. No remonstrations about what an insensitive unwoke asshole I was. Just a grown-up man-in-progress who didn’t pitch a tantrum. And I thought, “I really hate social media.” What should have been a minor conundrum over the world’s most uninteresting words had become an explosive culture war thanks to unsocial members with too much time on their hands on media platforms. Was it okay to ask for pronouns? Who would be pleased, and who would be offended? Would it turn into a galaxy-wide Twitter fiasco if I guessed wrong? Last year I met an aspiring diversity trainer in a women’s professional empowerment course and I asked her: What do I do if I meet someone whose pronouns I’m not sure about? “You can always ask,” she said, “but another way to do it is to offer your pronouns first. Hi, I’m Nicole, and my pronouns are she/her. How are you?” Helpful. But still, with the potential to embarrass someone, since I don’t customarily go around introducing myself with my pronouns, and wouldn’t do it with people who clearly don’t have a pronoun identity differential. Everybody can figure them out. I can figure out everyone else’s. I haven’t had to try this yet, mostly because meeting new people doesn’t happen much for me anymore. Maybe someday. If Ontario ever gets out of stay-at-home lockdown. I’ve become more aware of gender non-conformance and why I still feel a little uncomfortable about it. It comes down to this: Snowflakery. Others, not me. I give social media waaaaaay too much of my power. I believe that when I meet someone, no matter who they are, no matter what they look like, my responsibility is a baseline courtesy. You are who you are, and my job is to treat you the way I’d like to be treated, with a default decency. It’s important to remember social media isn’t representative of the world; it’s one expression of our collective multiple biases, prejudices, fears, cognitive distortions, self-serving personal narratives, and most importantly, a way to take out our hostilities on total strangers, often behind the cowardly protection of a fake or anonymous account, because it’s less psychologically invasive than therapy. Pronouns get way too much attention, in my opinion, but in order to keep the peace for everyone I would respectfully submit that anyone who clearly non-conforms make it clear to the rest of us which pronouns you prefer. We’re not mind readers. So what do you do when you meet a non-gender-conformer for the first time and don’t know how to refer to them? Here’s something awkward: I wanted to reach out to my somewhat ambiguous-looking aforementioned aspiring diversity trainer colleague for help, and when I looked her up on LinkedIn…no pronouns. I know which she prefers but — she needs to provide them for those who don’t know her. Uh, did I mention awkward? For an article like this? I turned instead to an article on Workopolis about accommodating transgender and non-conforming folk advocating what my colleague did: Offer your pronouns first. The other person might not reciprocate, but that’s on them. Another way to handle it is to ask, How would you like to be referred to? The article points out we might meet someone whose professional name is Michael, so we ask, Is it okay to call you Mike? What’s not okay: Are you trans? However, there’s a whole website devoted to pronouns (who knew?) called MyPronouns , with some excellent advice for handling the Social Pronoun Challenge. Its first bit of advice combines the two previous bits. It offers a more proactive question: Hi, I’m So-and-So, and I like to be referred to as ‘they’. How shall I refer to you? But don’t force it. I figure, if they’ve been given an opportunity to share their pronouns and they haven’t, others will likely pick some, and it may be the wrong ones. One is always able to politely correct them. I haven’t found any firm rules yet, so I propose we make it a rule of common courtesy that when someone offers their pronouns, you offer your own in return, even if you’re as macho as Stallone or as girly as Jolie. For me, pronouns are neither interesting nor a big deal. I accept that some folks are changing or identifying as something other than what they were born with and it doesn’t much matter to me why. My goal is a drama-free social experience for everyone. Chances are you’re a far more interesting person than your pronouns, so let’s move on. This first appeared on Medium in May 2021.

What if you’re white and you just don’t know it? Image by Robin Higgins from Pixabay O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! — Scottish poet Robert Burns I may be old and slow, but at least I’m dumb and blonde. It took days before I figured out why the half-Native, half-white woman at the party got testy when I said she looked white. I forget the context under which it surfaced. We sat next to each other, chatting. She mentioned early on she was half-Ojibway, and I don’t think we were talking about race or racism. Not the kind of potential conversational IED you open with when you’ve just met someone, unless you’re at a Black Lives Matter protest. I said something to the effect of, “Oh? I couldn’t tell.” She replied, “Really? Everyone else says they can see it!” I looked at her. Older woman, about my age, a little wrinkled, as we usually are, long straight white or grey hair. Nope, nadda clue she had Ojibway blood in her. “No,” I said. “You look white to me.” I didn’t mention a full-blooded Ojibway friend I made when I first moved to Canada who could never produce a baby that white if he impregnated Scarlett Johansson. “Really?” she asked. “I swear to God you’re like only the THIRD person ever to tell me that! Out of all the people I’ve ever met EVERYONE said they could see it except for like TWO people until now!” I found that very hard to believe. Her underlying anger genuinely mystified me. If she was half-white, what was the big deal? So was Barack Obama, and he didn’t care. We chatted awhile longer, and we didn’t argue, but we found another point of contention: She was That Kind Of Liberal. The kind who likes to be offended and thinks it’s okay to change group labels constantly. “It’s the evolution of language,” she informed me. “It’s bullying and needless hectoring of others,” I replied. “We all understand the historical reasons why the N-word for blacks and the K-word for Jews is no longer okay, but come on, it’s pretty silly when we say ‘people of color’ but we can’t say ‘colored people’, perfectly acceptable when I was growing up. Including by black people.” “It’s eliminating language that has become offensive,” she told me. “Fine, as long as there’s a rational reason,” I volleyed back. “It’s the People’s Front of Judaea versus the Judaean People’s Front. ‘People of color’ and ‘colored people’ mean exactly the same thing.” We wrapped up the conversation, clicked our wine cups together to signify a polite end, and she got up to sit next to someone else. Thank Goddess. I wondered for days: Why had she been upset at hearing she looked white? Finally, Old and Slow, Dumb and Blonde figured it out. She didn’t want to be accused of having white privilege. White privilege is like pink slime: It’s plentiful, but no one wants any. I read the occasional article on race, racism, or white privilege, if it doesn’t look too right-wing denial or lefty-progressive-racist, and I’ve noticed some writers provide up-front racial identity labels the way academics offer their education credentials. Sometimes, I look at the photo and think, “Are they really black/mixed race/Southeast Asian/whatever?” I click their profile for a larger look at the pinky fingernail photo. I take off my glasses, press close and squint. “That’s weird. She doesn’t look black.” They begin with the racial pedigree: “Proud black Southeast Asian Native American Cajun…” and add several more non-racial labels so you know exactly where they fall on the gender/autism/sexual preference/sexual identity/preferred sexual fetishes spectrums. (They’re almost always wome — fema — er, people born with a vagina.) And I scrutinize the photo and think, She looks white to me. A few times I’ve even looked for the person elsewhere, like LinkedIn or Facebook, for a better photo. Uh, no, sorry, girlfriend. You still look white. But what do I know? I don’t doubt them. I know what you look like isn’t what you are. I met a guy many years ago who claimed he was a quarter black, a quarter Native American, and half white. He looked black. No way he could have ‘passed’, as they said in my mother’s day, signifying a black person who was white-enough looking that s/he could enter white society and enjoy all the benefits of white privilege, as long as they kept their mouth closed about their family. I worked with a guy from Jamaica who looked white. I was surprised to learn he’s mixed race — so mixed even he couldn’t provide the ‘proper’ blood fractions. His sister looked black, he said, from the same parents. Go figger. What you look like doesn’t define what you are — to you. But here’s the dirty little secret the color-obsessed label-makers already know: White privilege isn’t conferred by how you see yourself, it’s by how others see you. The half-Ojibway lady understood this. She informed me early on of her non-whiteness and I don’t remember a genuine reason for it. I suspect she did it with everyone she met. Once she established I’m not white, no one could accuse her of white privilege. She’s got it. She knows it. She denies it. Welcome to our world. The watercress sandwiches and autographed Celine Dion CDs are to the left. Help yourself! You deserve it. Barack Obama is as white as he is black, but no one calls him white. Certainly the Tea Party didn’t, which arose after his election in 2008 and disappeared, not coincidentally, with a white man’s election. They normalized calling Obama a Nazi, a more acceptable insult than the one they wanted to use. There’s no such thing as half-white privilege. No second prize, no honorable mention, no slightly less violent beating because of your Establishment-smashing hippie grandmother. Barack Obama has zero white privilege because he looks black. Hence the writers who inform you up front about their non-white blood; they want readers to be clear they’re not some virtue-signalling clueless white person. They need you to know that regardless of how they look, of how much better they get treated if they keep their mouths shut, they don’t identify as such. Rachel Dolezal’s big mistake: You’ve got to have the pedigree to claim non-whiteness. The obsession with pedigree on the left demonstrates it’s no less racially identitarian than the wannabe Aryans terrorizing the Capitol. “Race is nothing more than a social construct!” the left crows, and at the genetic level, they’re right. As more people get tested by spit-and-mail genetic analysis companies, the more we realize not only are we not as ‘pure’ as we think, but our DNA can even contain traces of extinct humans like Neanderthals and Denisovans. (Fun historical side note: Our sole surviving species, Homo Sapiens, likely genocided them both.) Now white supremacists are learning they’re slightly less white than advertised. Um, awkward! Even more awkward: Native Americans suddenly discovering their Inner Racists when it comes to sharing casino profits with people who don’t ‘look Native’ but who contain more Native DNA than the ones who fit the stereotype. What’s their racial recipe? Hell, I can’t even tell their gender from here. Image by Pexels from Pixabay Optics are everything. It’s why Elizabeth Warren received much-deserved derision when others accused her of using her minimal (genuine) Native American ancestry to gain favor in her legal academia rise. Critics rightly noted she looked white, lived white, and never suffered any sort of racism. No one ever followed her around in a store or stopped her for Driving While Native. ‘White privilege’ is a conceptual football casually tossed around, correctly assigned only to those in power, white people. And since we racist (and species-ist) Homo Sapiens insist on judging each other by what we look like, white privilege is conferred upon anyone who can ‘pass’. Time for our fellow whites-in-denial to get real with themselves. Regardless of how stone-soup one’s personal recipe is, how you get treated depends on how you look. It’s stupid and toxic, but the Regressive Left’s obsession with racial labels — ‘impurity’ as a point of pride — is no less comparable than ‘white pride’. It even mirrors the racism: White supremacists hate anyone who’s not white, while the Regressive Left hates anyone who is. The benefits of identifying as non-white include no debilitating ‘white guilt’, and unquestioning obedience from those who have it. Victimhood is sacred. If you look white, you have white privilege. Your opinion doesn’t matter if you walk into a bank and don’t tell them about your black great-grandaddy and your half-Southeast Asian mama. Which I’m guessing you won’t, if you want to increase your chances of getting the loan. This article appeared first on Medium in January 2021.

Keep your eyes on the p̶r̶i̶z̶e̶ past! General Thomas F. Drayton’s slaves, 1862. Public domain photo by Henry P. Moore, Wikimedia Commons My mother spoke a lot about her ‘dialogue class’ at the church where they listed topic ideas and picked one to debate. They never picked Mom’s: Integrate the schools by first integrating the neighborhoods. I guess it was a tough sell for Christians living in the formerly Confederate state of Florida in the early 1970s. Forced school integration had come to Orlando, less than twenty years after Brown v. Board of Education and Little Rock, with the force of several court decisions and a lawsuit by the NAACP. While others debated busing black kids to white schools and vice versa, Mom argued the only way to fight racial prejudice was for people to live together in the same neighborhoods. After living in ultra-diverse Toronto for fifteen years, it’s obvious Mom had the right idea, never in doubt; Americans self-segregate as much as they redline. It’s important to remember and learn from history, but humans too often wallow, picking at ancient injustices like scabs and not allowing them to heal. It feeds the victimhood mentality which serves all our masters far too well by taking our eyes off the prize — a better future. A tale of two victimhood cultures I’ve been party to victimhood cultures preoccupied with past grievances. I’ve been a Pagan for thirty years. Wicca is a religion inspired by pre-Christian polytheistic traditions, with modern twists like a respect for life, the earth, the interconnection of all, and its unique value prop: Putting spiritual power in the hands of women. I learned about it from my new Pagan boyfriend after I moved to New England. I read books in his personal library and attended a few circles. I was drawn but resisted, put off by intense young people who I suspected were just exploring identities, and who seemed preoccupied with victimhood, going on about European witchcraft persecutions and what they did to women. Point taken, as I was already familiar with the horrific history, one I revisited after I broke down and ‘came out of the broom closet’. I grew tired of the constant emphasis, the notion that women were perpetual victims of men, and the undercurrent that fundamentalist Christians would bring back the ‘Burning Times’ if we weren’t very, very vigilant. We burn the a witch at an SCA event in 1993 at a Spanish Inquisition party. Photo from my archives. Paganism was a sub-group within a larger victim culture to which I also belonged, feminism and its obsession with ‘the patriarchy’. Patriarchy is real, more entrenched in some places than others, but it’s pretty weak in North America, even back in the ’90s. I came to identify less with feminism as a result of its growing debilitating message of relentless victimhood. Where’s the empowerment? I’m white, so I don’t have personal experience with POC victim mentality, but it’s a third distraction keeping the eyes of the oppressed focused on a past we can’t change, with inattention to the present and future we can. 2 Past, 2 Curious About ‘Reparations’ Focusing on ancient injustices keeps one crazy and triggered. Especially those already addressed, and when everyone’s ancestors are guilty of the same crimes with which they charge others. The U.S. banned slavery over 150 years ago; which is more than can be said for parts of Africa today. Yes, there’s an ugly legacy of systemic racism here, as there will be wherever systemic slavery occurred, which is to say, everywhere. Black Lives Matter focuses on the here and now, the problems facing black people today: Police brutality, poverty, lack of educational opportunities. Some ‘anti-racists’ would rather do nothing. Easier to share posts and memes about ‘slave reparations’. Because, George Floyd. Debating the idea diverts necessary attention from real problems. Who gets reparations? How do people prove they’re descended from American slave-owned ancestors? (Not all African-Americans are.) What if they’re mixed race? How ‘black’ do you have to be? What if their black ancestors owned slaves? (See: Africa) What if you look white but had slave-owning ancestors? Do you get X dollars? How much is enough? What’s the result? Does that fix everything and end the racism conversation? The most critical question: Who will pay for it, and how will you convince American taxpayers, none of whom ever owned slaves, to give free handouts to blacks, in accordance with the stereotypes, none of whom have ever been enslaved? I rolled my eyes when Pander Bear Elizabeth Warren said it was time to have a national conversation about reparations. I heard, “I’m torpedoing my chances for sitting in the White House.” Was she trying to get Donald Trump re-elected? Why are you marching if you’re not voting? It’s no secret I have little use for victimhood mentality. I recognize we’re all victimized, sometimes specifically and sometimes by The System. Victimizing someone takes their power. Identifying with victimhood and refusing to take it back allows the victimizer to keep it. It’s why I no longer identify as a feminist, even though I’m non-feminist in name only. Rip off my ‘egalitarian’ label and you’ll find a feminist underneath. Busted! But I don’t like to label myself as such. I don’t want to be seen as misandrist and victimized. I don’t identify with weakness. I don’t care anymore about The Burning Times. Or medieval tortures devised for women. Or how women were designated as property in the Bible and forced to marry their rapist. Or harems. Or Scarlet A’s. Or that American democracy wasn’t granted to women until 1920. I care about these things if they’re happening today. What I most care about is people claiming to be against injustice but can’t be arsed to vote. “My vote doesn’t count.” “The system is stacked against us.” “The corporations control everything.” “Putin decides who becomes President.” “My fave didn’t get the candidacy so screw the one who got it.” “They’re all a bunch of crooks.” “They both suck.” If you can’t be arsed to vote, I can’t be arsed to care. Voting is the fundamental Number One thing you can do to change the system, and if you don’t like the system, VOTE, GODDAMMIT! If the system is stacked against you, the corporations have outsized control of the process, foreign hostiles are allowed to hack our elections, and all the candidates suck, it’s BECAUSE YOU DON’T VOTE! Barack Obama noted voting among young people is ‘usually pitifully low’. It raises the question how useful they are putting their lives on the line in the streets if they don’t back it up with something concrete. Obama notes you can’t just vote at the federal level; who’s in charge at the state and municipal levels are just as critical. Consider this: About 70% of the states with the highest increases in COVID-19 death projections are Republican-governed. One notable exception is Ohio, whose Republican governor acted with precaution early, winning the confidence of both Republican and Democratic voters for keeping infection rates lower than in your typical Republican-governed state. Now he’s under pressure from his party to resist crackdowns and to require masks. Wanna die? In the end, it call comes down to YOU. Don’t forget school boards and “…The elected officials who matter most in reforming police departments and the criminal justice system [who] work at the state and local levels,” as Obama wrote. Do your part to keep religious fundamentalists away from the education system and lip service-paying officials who forget about reform when the elections and protests are over. Voting to change the here and now and most importantly, the future is the single most important thing any American can do to directly impact their own life. It doesn’t mean you always get who or what you want and you never get a ‘perfect’ candidate but you send a message even when your candidate loses. Donald Trump knows part of why he has so little respect is because he lost the popular vote and squeaked by on a constitutional technicality. The GOP knows it, too, and they now face a Morton’s Fork: Support Trump and potentially lose up to the entire Congress along with the White House, or not support him and watch him destroy their own chances by ruining them with his idiot supporters. But, if enough voters wallow in the past and argue for things they’re never going to get, like slave reparations, or scare each other with horror stories of the return of witch-burning and The Handmaid’s Tale, or tell themselves this has never been a worse time to be an American woman, they’ll perhaps stay at home licking their wounds and perpetuate the system they say they hate. The masters would approve. Crisis averted. This originally appeared on Medium in July 2020.