It’s time to stop asking for it nicely. Just seize it, dammit. And stop voting for The Patriarchy. Photo by Caleb Woods on Unsplash I typed this and paused for the subtitle. The gentle throaty throbbing of pigeons reached my ears and I hurried out to the balcony to chase off any poopmonsters. The morning was early October-cool rather than put-on-a-damn-coat-it’s-November and I stopped to admire the sun rising behind a condo. A red-tailed hawk soared into view a few floors higher than I. With a flurry of wings several pigeons took flight en masse and chased the predator. I’ve observed this behavior many times. Before the daycare in my backyard removed the tall pole on the roof last year, I sometimes watched a hawk perch, ducking as the locals dive-bombed his head. Not just the larger pigeons, his favorite meal, but smaller songbirds too. Creatures one-tenth his size, all working together to eliminate the threat. No one likes a Hell’s Angel in the ‘hood. It seemed the perfect visual metaphor for an article on the pervasive female fear of personal power. There’s strength in numbers. Did you know that, ladies? Er, no you don’t. Pigeons and songbirds are smaller and weaker than a mighty hawk but banded together, they can chase his ass halfway across Ontario. When there’s a threat to another woman, too often we react by telling her to back down because ‘You could get hurt!’ Standing up to a larger and more powerful enemy is something best left to men, it seems. How supremely Patriarchal, mesdames. I’m toying with the idea of calling myself a feminist again, for the second time in twenty-five years. The first time was a couple of years ago, when I decided feminism wasn’t just for whiny victims. I thought it was time to put the power back in empowerment, but it just felt weird. Calling myself a ‘feminist’ still feels embarrassing, even though, as Caitlin Moran puts it, “Do you have a vagina? Do you think you should be in control of it? Then you’re a feminist!” Well, YES. But to say the F-word out loud, as a noun to describe me — it’s still cringe-inducing. I feel like I should add, “But I don’t hate men!” Maybe it’s time to Take Back My Power and reclaim feminism from what too often feels like a bunch of misandrist little girls in grown-up bodies playing dress-up. They’re feminist and empowered when they want to be but run back to the security of victimhood when it’s inconvenient. I struggle with it myself. The relentless North American culture of victimhood encourages us not to reflect too much, not to analyze ourselves, not to question the veracity of our feelings, lest we be led to uncomfortable self-truths we prefer not to acknowledge. The ‘dressup’ mentality is why I don’t do feminist rallies or protest marches and Goddess help me, you will never see me wearing a pink ‘pussy hat’. It doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have the labia to affect a change. I suppose it’s all good for ‘sisterhood’ but if you then go home and vote for a guy like Trump, or don’t vote at all, or don’t pay attention to the people politicians appoint with power over us all, then frankly, you’re not doing shit. It looks good, it sounds good, but how comfortable are any of us, really, in exercising our much-vaunted power? Pigeons get eaten around here but when there’s a predator in the neighborhood they band together and chase the mofo off. Can you imagine a bunch of women at a bar standing up for a woman getting harassed? Forcing the guy to back off with a pack o’ p**sy way scarier than a few hundred thousand women in a park wearing adorable little caps? If pigeons were people, this is what would happen. This is *my* idea of empowerment. Are pigeons too far removed from your DNA to consider them a metaphor for one possible feminist future? Then ponder our much closer cousins, the bonobos, a/k/a ‘pygmy chimpanzees’. They and the chimps diverged from us about two million years ago. Human and chimp females evolved to accept passivity and victimhood from a patriarchal structure of male dominance either formed or formed out of women’s passivity. Bonobo females, on the other hand, evolved to band together against and therefore limit male aggression. Male bonobos are stronger than females, but they’re no match for a girl posse. What a bonobo female wants, she gets. Bonobos are horny little devils and the females do as they please, and whom they please. Their mates have learned to deal. It includes wild les-bonobo action as well as multiple males. Female bonobos are the retro-misogynist male’s very worst nightmare — females in complete control of their sexuality, without a damn thing the boys can do about it. Once in awhile some asshole acts up and tries to push around a female bonobo. It almost never works out well for him. Female bonobos band together like the women in the Pat Benatar video and chase the predator off. They will assault any males with the notion in their silly little heads that they should dominate females and when The Girls bring down a forest antelope guess who eats first? Not the males, that’s for damn sure. (Take note, Indian men!) They throw temper tantrums in the trees while the girls feast first. Scientists assumed that patriarchy was only natural. Bonobos proved them wrong I don’t believe switching from patriarchy to matriarchy is the answer for humans, but I offer these examples of safety in numbers to point out that if women bond together and take a few risks, how much could we move society forward instead of backward? After watching the way the American election went down last week, it feels like one step forward, two steps back. When over 50% of American white women voted for an accused rapist and established sexual predator again, don’t tell me I’m ‘blaming the victim’ to suggest not enough women want violence against women to stop. It will stop when women want it to stop, and legitimating the rule of a sexual predator is a clear signal to The Boys it’s business as usual. This ain’t your bonobo United States. I’ll also point out Trump only suffered a slight decline in support from white men. He received a tad increased support from every other racial demographic, and women overall. They may have voted far more for Biden as a bloc, but we have non-white voters, including women, to thank for the edge-of-your-seat fingernail-biting cliffhanger. How exit polls shifted in 2016 and 2020 So I wonder. It doesn’t say much for women’s sense of personal responsibility. Why are so many women still afraid of personal power? Too many pay lip service and then turn around and vote or work against their own interests. Or re-arrange deck chairs on the Titanic. Guaranteed next week’s big Twitter pile-on will be over some guy referring to a woman’s ‘rack’ or fat-shaming Melissa McCarthy, when the big story for the new decade (virii aside) is Women Who Aid And Abet The Patriarchy. I have a few theories as to why female power-phobia persists, why many women leave power on the table rather than seize the day. It may challenge their identity if they relate more to victimhood than power. Recognizing their complicity in their own oppression could be psychologically damaging and reveal an intolerable possibility: Were they wrong all along? Following a weaker path than they might? Propping up The Patriarchy? If other women take charge and seize their power, taking more risks and progressing more, will the fearful ones be left behind? Watching other women accomplish what they themselves don’t have the courage to reach for could force the reticent to confront the ways they hold themselves back, rather than a male power structure. They may be in denial of how in thrall to ‘The Patriarchy’ they are. When women believe they must keep asking The Patriarchy to stop violence against women, they accept powerlessness and keep it where it’s resided for centuries, with men. Looking for sexism and misogyny in all the wrong places, or making minor annoyances with males into giant kerfuffles, is another example of feminism re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Girlfriend, the new president-elect you couldn’t support because he was sometimes a little handsy with women doesn’t compare to the unqualified woman from a creepy Christian cult now sitting on the Supreme Court thanks to a sexual predator The Sisters keep voting for. Challenging ‘The Patriarchy’ between female ears may prove a far bigger task than challenging toxic masculinity. If they acknowledge they can change, then they’ll beat themselves up over why they didn’t do it sooner. I’m convinced it lies behind a lot of the subconscious female resistance to power. It’s not female-specific. Achieving one’s full potential is one few ever pull off, and recognizing what we’ve done (or not) can send us spiralling into an endless cycle of self-blame and self-abuse. “Why didn’t I do/learn/realize this sooner?” White women have a lot to answer for, but we can’t let off women of color, either. The numbers for women voting for Trump in 2020 should have gone down, rather than up. Maybe conservatives aren’t the only ones with a deep suspicion of qualified candidates. It’s time for some serious soul-searching, girlfriends. What are you really afraid of? Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash This originally appeared on Medium in November 2020.

Roy Den Hollander shows just how utterly silly and irrelevant ‘men’s rights’ has always been. The movement needs a reboot. Graphic by Philip Taylor on Flickr Ladies Night? THAT’S what this moron had a problem with? I visited dead emasculated male Roy Den Hollander’s website to learn more about the so-called ‘men’s rights activist’ who gunned down a Hispanic judge’s husband and son and has been connected to the murder of a fellow MRA. I figured there must be a woman behind this whole thing and sure enough, he was obsessed with his ex-wife who he claims screwed him by marrying him for a green card. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s just his take, which is pretty massive. She claimed he abused her. Maybe that’s true, too. We haven’t heard from Angelina Shipilina, wherever she is. She may be this actress here and/or this model here. Roy Den Hollander was, by all accounts, another MRA raving nutbag, driven by hatred for women before he ever married, rendered all the more dangerous with terminal cancer. He had nothing to lose. Best to go out in a blaze of vainglory, perhaps he supposed, than to waste away in a hospital bed, unloved and unmourned. He’s right about one thing only: We need men’s rights activism. But the movement is so beyond salvaging men need to FDISK and reformat, as us computer geeks said in the olden days. And for fark’s sake, guys, focus on the right issues! His name sounded familiar. I riffled through my library and found Den Hollander profiled in Michael Kimmel’s Angry White Men: American Masculinity At The End Of An Era. Kimmel outlined his silly-ass crusades against Ladies’ Nights as well as Columbia University’s women’s studies classes. Den Hollander was the god of unsuccessful lawsuits, interviewed on The Colbert Report. Reading his petty, fatuous complaints about the justice system’s alleged lopsided favor for women’s grievances irritated me because I’d just read earlier that day about genuine, serious, life-and-death ways the justice system does favor women. The book is When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence by Canadian writer and journalist Patricia Pearson. The book’s focus on anthropological, psychiatric and criminological research ‘smashes the matriarchy’, as it were, the notion that women are mostly non-violent and non-aggressive towards men and children. She builds a strong case that infant deaths diagnosed as SIDS may actually be infanticides. Undetected and un-investigated by legal, justice, and medical professionals, they can’t fathom that, apart from so-called ‘outliers’ like Susan Smith, women might murder their own children. She explores female domestic violence against men, destroying the notion that women usually only hit defensively, when in fact they often hit without physical provocation. Clearly the case in the ugly Johnny Depp-Amber Heard divorce. Amber & Johnny: A Violent Tale With No Innocent Victims Female domestic violence also victimizes women, as lesbian relationships, Pearson documents, are no stranger to physical abuse. Women are, literally, getting away with mayhem and murder, and a lawyer like Roy Den Hollander wasted his entire life tilting at windmills when he could have tackled critical inequality and injustice. He could have saved lives. The Men’s Rights movement, which originated in the early ’80s largely as a backlash to feminism, was poisoned from the beginning with hatred for women and male resentment of women’s ‘encroachment’ into their traditional realms. It also contained genuine male grievances: Frustration with a family law system that did and still continues to favor women over men for the same traditionalist reasonings that also can’t conceive of common female violence. As Kimmel points out, the ‘father’s rights’ movement’ points to legitimate discrimination against fathers, but is more about generating rage against women’s control, rather than a sense of responsibility to be a good father. That energy that would best serve gaining better custody, joint custody, or satisfactory visitation rights. Instead it’s funneled into vengeful rage directed at ex-wives. It’s always all about the women. Den Hollander raged against the Violence Against Women Act, coupling them with immigration laws he also didn’t like, alleging “the process can also grant permanent residency to alien husbands of U.S. citizen wives, it is intended, geared toward, and overwhelmingly used by alien wives — aided by private feminist advocacy organizations — against U.S. citizen husbands,” and that “The laws creating the process are bills of attainder meant to punish American men for going overseas to find wives and to deter them from doing so.” No, not too much the vengeful ex-husband. I can’t figure out if he’s for or against marrying foreign women. He raged against Columbia University’s women’s studies programs, alleging feminism was a ‘religion’ and that the program violated Title IX legislation, which states: No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. — Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute (20 U.S. Code § 1681 — Sex) (1972) While I’ve a lot of suspicion for ‘women’s studies’ programs myself, and a growing suspicion of ‘race studies’ for indoctrinating students with a chronic victimhood mentality, I wish Den Hollander had sought to protect adults’ and childrens’ physical safety. Even convicted baby killers and female serial killers, Pearson points out, often get lighter sentences from judges and juries, with prior claims of abuse taken into account as partial justification for their violence, when no one accepts similar excuses from male murderers or abusers. I get male anger against feminism. In many ways, it needs a reboot, too. I’ll admit: As much as I publicly proclaim I’m ‘not a feminist’, preferring the label ‘egalitarian’ who stands for equal rights instead, I also admit I’m a non-feminist in name only. Rip my label off and there’s a feminist underneath. Just the kind not afraid of personal power, or female responsibility and accountability. I can support #MeToo, recognizing real tales of abuse and harassment, even as I cringe when Alyssa Milano shows up. I try to understand the psychological dynamics of those on the receiving end of domestic violence, as I explore how victims might take charge of their lives and bodies and make better partner choices. The bennies are, as Louise Sawyer 2.0 points out, Life Is More Fun Because I’m Not A Victim. I can’t imagine anyone beating the snot out of her. And living to tell about it, without his penis dangling from a chain around her neck as an example to the others. Feminism brings unpleasant, uncomfortable conversations to men, making them squirm the way Black Lives Matter grievances makes white people squirm. Women want equality just as people of color do, and their message won’t make male POC happy just as white women shut down on BLM. Feminism requires all males, even fellow victims of Da Man, to confront their own internal misogyny, however deeply buried it might be, even as they challenge us to do the same with our own Inner Racists. The men’s rights set today are the most virulent examples of men who simply refuse to evolve and grow the hell up. What would the world look like if feminists acknowledged some of the men’s-righters’ genuine grievances, and if the men’s righters also engaged in similar genuine soul-searching? What if feminists and men’s righters also talked about what they admired about the other, rather than what’s wrong with them and how they’re running and ruining everything. Identity politics equally divide us, and victim feminists, casting women into the traditional, patriarchal role of helpless, weak, forever damsel-in-distress, fuel the 911-addicted ‘Karens’ of America as ‘anti-feminists’ like Den Hollander fuel the violent fantasies of incels, MGTOWs, and other emasculated-feeling guys who feel like losers in our brave new world. Lurk in a few of their forums, particularly the incels, and you find the same cognitive distortions, emotional neuroses and self-hatred regularly exhibited by women, who think their experience is uniquely female. If we fight with each other, we can’t effectively fight The System. Past Imperfect: Wallowing in Ancient Grievances Serves The Oppressors Feminists, like anti-racists, need to stop driving our (male) allies away with divisive rhetoric casting us as chronically besieged with a list of endlessly pettier grievances about ‘manspreading’ or the alleged sexism of Thomas the Tank Engine, a silly complaint reminiscent of Jerry Falwell’s campaign against a ‘gay’ Teletubby back in the ‘90s. The unpleasant fact is that even nutbags like Roy Den Hollander have some core genuine grievances against feminism. I see the demonization of men because I resist the demonization of white skin in today’s civil rights protests. This is why I support the idea of Men’s Rights Activism, but not MRAs as they stand today. Men, especially those not involved in the various movements, need to FDISK and reformat. Wipe it clean and start over again. Pick new battles, and ones that address real problems, rather than nonsense like ‘Ladies Night.’ If buying overpriced drinks for women is your biggest problem, you are privileged indeed. The focus shouldn’t be on what’s wrong with women, but on how men can be better men, more mature, as willing to accept personal responsibility and accountability as I try to be as a feminist-in-denial. I love the The Good Men Project. Men’s Rights 2.0 can start here. I encourage it. Feminists, we need to do the same. We need to stop blaming men and ‘The Patriarchy’ so much and do a little soul-searching ourselves. If we can point to how the Roy Den Hollanders of the world hold themselves back, we must acknowledge how we do it, too. Take back your power! Those men who haven’t been driven to today’s failed toxic ‘men’s rights’ narrative by entitled male privilege, or man-hating feminists, are our potential allies, and they need language to resist the victim feminist ideology just as white liberals and lefties must resist the divisive and racist language of some on the black left. ‘Men’s rights’ is a forty-year-old mess but with a real place in the world. Time for a new label, a new membership, and a new vocabulary for men who are in favor of equal rights as long as female oppression comes with certain recognition: Women must take some responsibility for our own lives, safety and decisions, and at some point the oppression we experience stops with the man on the street and picks up with the woman in the mirror. It’s a joint effort, folks. If you liked this article you might also enjoy these: Mama Didn’t Raise No Victim Feminist Men, We Need You To Tell Your Truths Too How Can Men Tell Their Stories & Challenge Toxic Feminism? This originally appeared on Medium in July 2020.

Because what we all need is another howtuhnotberacist article. But let’s give it a twist! If you want to add some class to your racism, you can dress like a head waiter while espousing black superiority and look more credible than your badly-dressed distant cousins, the Klan. Black supremacist trainees Nation of Islam photo by Nancy Wong on Wikimedia Commons , Creative Commons 4.0 International License Call me racist, an ally, a conservative, a libtard, or whatever makes your little ideological heart go pitter-patter-ker-PLOTZ, but don’t call me a Karen. Not if you’re serious about ending racism. More on that in a minute. There’s no end of articles instructing us ig’nent white people (oh, sorry, ***W***hite people) how to not be so damn racist, some of which are valuable. Only a few will be found in the most popular Medium publication on race, which has become too much a platform for black racism couched in obfuscating race theory and stultifying academic jargonbabble. So every once in awhile I like to remind black people (sorry, I’m too old and un-woke for capitalization nonsense) that yes, racism IS a cancer, and they, too, need to see an oncologist stat! All snark aside, comparing racism to cancer is pretty apt. When you’re fighting cancer, you’ve got to get all of it, or it comes roaring right back. If white racism is the cancerous tumor America needs to excise from its suffering soul, black and other non-white racism requires chemotherapy. The residual danger lies in removing the tumor but not treating the body political. Otherwise, we’ll be right back where we started in a matter of months. Maybe weeks. It’s time for black folks, and other folks of color, to recognize their own contributions to the problem. Here’s a handy starting guide. You’re welcome. 1. Stop referring to color when describing someone When you’re referring to another person, don’t mention color unless you’re sure it has something to do with what you’re saying. ‘Some woman cut me off in traffic!’ rather than ‘Some white woman cut me off in traffic!’. What does her race have to do with it? Did she flash you the Klan hand signal? Does she have a Confederate flag sticker on a side window? Are you absolutely sure she cut you off because you’re black, or did you just assume it? Unless you’re a mind reader, leave race out of it. It makes you sound ignorant and racist. 2. Stop lumping us in with ‘white supremacists’ If you don’t like being followed around in a store, we don’t like getting thrown into the same cesspool with some of the most execrable people in America. White supremacy is specifically an ideology stipulating whites should dominate over other ‘inferior’ races; races should ‘stick to their own kind’; and God knows they shouldn’t ‘race mix’! Genuine white supremacists think white people are on the verge of extinction despite being more numerous than face masks. Racist blacks have tried to expand the definition to include all white people according to our birth skin color. Careful, folks. Your birth skin color was once designated as reason to enslave you. Skin color is not ‘original sin’. 3. Knock it off with cutesy ‘Karen’ and ‘Kyle’ labels I got in trouble for this one myself. I made a ‘Karen’ joke on Facebook recently. One friend named Karen didn’t take offense. The other did. She said it was racist and misogynist and a bit of a kerfuffle erupted. I deleted it before World War III broke out, mostly between the offended Karen and those who like to tweak ‘snowflakes’. But I thought about it later and decided Offended Karen was right on one level. Sure, there’s a well-established reality of overprivileged often middle-aged white women who ‘want to speak to the manager’ when something doesn’t meet their exacting standards, and white people in general calling the police on people existing while black. We can give them unkind labels, though, rather than tarring all Karens and Kyles. (Or Kellys, Rhiannas, Kanyes, Chappelles or Cosbys.) What shall we call the following example of a Black Woman Behaving Badly? Latifah? Shanice? Kiara? Or shall we name her and her kind after a famously violent black supermodel? The victim was a cancer patient, Naomi. 4. Stop overusing the application of ‘cultural appropriation’ Cultural appropriation is not a battle cry for picking up your toys and going home because you don’t like the skin color of the other kids. The accusation has real value when genuine harm is demonstrated. My sympathies lie more with those arguing white people take black contributions and monetize them in a way black people couldn’t because of systemic oppression. And being ignored by society at large until white people decided their contributions were worthy and thank you, we’ll take it from here. It’s still problematic, though. In the grander scheme of things, adopting others’ good ideas is how humanity evolves. In business and technology, it’s ‘innovation’. It’s finding a better way to do things. Racist hypocrisy is on full display when blacks make a fuss about corn rows or dreadlocks but ignore their own ‘cultural appropriation’. How’d *that* happen? Permission-free photo by Tony Duran on Wikimedia Commons 5. Stop it with slavery already I am so so SO tired of hearing about American slavery. We ended it 150 years ago. Deal with it. If there was something uniquely American about slavery, I’d care more, but considering it’s a universal crime against humanity, practiced in all times and places, and still going on in 94 countries today, including several African ones, I’m not interested in revisiting one example banned a century and a half ago. Not a single American alive today was ever a slave, nor have any ever owned another human being. Obsessing over the slavery period is just keeping the wound raw and bathing in lemon juice. It does have one useful function, for some: It keeps black eyes distracted with a past no one can change and keeps attention off the future, which they can change. If you care about slavery that much , I have great news for you! You can do something about it! Because guess which continent has become the ‘epicenter of modern-day slavery’ again? That’s right, AFRICA! It suffered the distinction of hosting the highest rate of modern-day enslavement in the world in 2018. My Great-Grandfather, the Nigerian Slave Trader African-Americans outraged that some of their fellow Africans are still enslaving many more of their fellow Africans (an uninterrupted practice in some parts of Africa for many hundreds of years) can go over there today and set them all straight. And here’s an uncomfortable thought: If their ancestors hadn’t left Africa — voluntarily or not — would they themselves be enslaved today — in Africa? (P.S. While you’re there, can you please get Africans to stop butchering baby vaginas? ) 6. Stop justifying your racism by claiming only white people can be racist Racism is nothing more than old-fashioned tribalism, identifying with and sticking with your in-group and identifying everyone else as Others. Arguing one must be in the dominant group to be racist is accepting only the most egregious, worst example of racism, while ignoring the lower racism standards to which you exempt yourself. It’s trying to escape your own ‘original sin’, arguing that white people answer for all white people while non-whites don’t answer for all non-whites. Most racist non-whites fall closer to the lower end of the scale. With the exception of some groups like the racist, misogynist, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ Nation of Islam , which preaches a hardcore black supremacist agenda, most non-white racists aren’t part of the ugliest massive tumor, but they’re still part of the problem. Everyone can be racist. Or prejudiced. Or bigoted. You can call it what you want, but it’s bad old-fashioned tribalism. If it’s ‘original sin’, we all own it. I may be snarky, but I’m serious. Anti-racism has become Civil Rights 2.0 in the 21st century and will accomplish real equality we’ll all benefit from, even those idiot Trumpers, but only if we expend as much effort in changing things now, rather than ruminating over and wallowing in the past. We shouldn’t ‘ignore it’ or ‘get over it’; but leave it to our historians and philosophers to drill down, dig ever deeper and derive new insights about human history and behavior, regardless of how beautiful or ugly. We need to learn from all truths, however unpalatable they may be to any particular tribe. Sometimes it’s easier to just slap a label on Another or get outraged by petty nonsense on social media than it is to challenge a brutal, militarized police force or consider running for political office. Or to make a fuss about an institution ended in 1865 rather than do something about the same institution in over 90 countries around the world today. Or in an altered iteration in your own country . Racism is universal. You can fight the tumor but you still need to confront the racist in the mirror. This article appeared on Medium in 2020.