Not all progressives are narrative-bound wokies, clinging to clearly wrong-headed policies to avoid being 'wrong'. Some are simply--newslessly clueless Listen, dude. Left-wing hate speech is so over. Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels I learned something interesting recently about certain progressives. They’re not always willfully ignorant, like the diehard allies of the dudes-in-dresses set, currently rending their robes and gnashing their teeth over Trump’s much-needed rollback of The (Democratic) Patriarchy . (Oh, the irony.) Sometimes these progressives can’t fix what they can’t see. The willfully clueless carefully avoids certain sources of information lest he start thinking too much, and then expressing thoughts that won’t them get invited to the good parties anymore. Wokeness is a problem on the right too, with the rise of their accompanying snowflakes. But not all progressives are insulating themselves, necessarily, from challenges to their belief system or are rigid dogmatics. Some avoid the news, period. Because they find it all depressing. So, I called my old college buddy the other night He, like myself, has always been reliably liberal. We dated, then continued to hang out together during the Reagan years, and we weren’t fans. We lived where Christian fundamentalists were constantly accosting you to get you to accept their personal Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, as your own. That’s the way they always phrased it, “Our Lord and personal Saviour, Jesus Christ.” I always thought it made Jesus sound like the ‘personal pan pizzas’ Pizza Hut was advertising at the time. Every time they said ‘personal Saviour Jesus Christ,” I got hungry for pizza. Sometimes we’d visit a beer dive in town dating back to the hippie days, which looked about 392 years older. We’d get drunk on cheap beer, scrutinize the ancient graffiti carved into the wooden tables, benches and walls, and bitch about Reagan, Jerry Falwell, Ed Meese, Nancy’s largely laughable Just Say No campaign, and Bill Bennett, the dumbass Christian head of the Department of Education, purporting to improve American ejimakation with Personal Pan Pizza Jesus. Or whatever cockamamie new idea the sorta fuzzyish President championed, and whether Nancy cleared it first with her astrologer . I could always count on Dean to be liberal, and he was when we reconnected on Da Internetz twenty years ago. Now we bitched about Bush The Sequel and his dumbass war with Saddam, long-distance. We weren’t fans. In recent years, though, he’s pushed back a little. Not because he got more conservative, as many people do as they move into and beyond middle age, but because he seemed sort of vaguely woke. But not crazy-ass. That would be his woke fanatic friend who was my friend too until she defriended me over an article she called ‘transphobic’. It was pretty arguably one of the least-critical arguments about transgenderism I ever made—in fact, I claimed it could be a force for good. What’s So Terrible About Race-Changers Like Rachel Dolezal? But you know how the indoctrinated get, MAGA or Loony Left. In the course of our more recent conversation—and since November 5th, for Americans, it invariably centers around OMFG! —I came to realize why Dean sometimes went a little quiet on me when I espoused liberal-but-not-woke ideas. He hasn’t been keeping up with the news. For years. He’s not completely blind but he’s missed a lot of the culture war nonsense. To his credit, he’s spent his time much more productively than many retired people. He reads beaucoup books. Good ones too, usually on politics and history. And not pop-political everyone-is-right-wing-except-us crap. He delves into subjects like how various wars started, and biographies of people he finds interesting. So his liberalism is, I now recognize, where mine was about 5-7 years ago before the progressive left went so undeniably wonky. When we had to address the growing cognitive dissonance we felt talking to people who expressed ideas we liked and were usually in sync with, but who now seemed a little weird and ‘off’. But we couldn’t quite put our finger on why. Like when I first learned about transfolk but didn’t know enough about them to do anything other than accept them. I accepted gays, lesbians, bi’s, polys, and friends with weird sexual practices as long as they didn’t talk to me about them, so, if someone wants to be the opposite sex, yay for you! It seemed weird that it turned into a thing, where, like, everyone and their brother (or was that originally his sister?) were ‘transing’, but I didn’t care until progressives insisted I go along with things I knew to be untrue, like that transwomen are the same as biological women. I sort of half-assed went along with it to be inclusive, like a good liberal; after all, the right couldn’t stand these people and some of them still hadn’t gotten over gay marriage, a law that doesn’t force them to marry gayly. I still value inclusiveness, but it was the gender identity movement that ‘woke’ me to the realization that inclusivity requires boundaries. This, and other out-of-date beliefs Dean still held, like that only the right censors and bans books, that authoritarianism is only on their side, and What do you have against Kamala Harris anyway? Whaddaya mean you didn’t vote for her? clarified to me that Dean wasn’t woke, he just had no idea what our side had been up to for the last fifteen years. Identifying your own dumbassery Dean doesn’t follow the news anymore because “It’s too depressing.” I get it. I stopped following the news for awhile years ago for the same reason, especially during Trump I: You Had No Idea This Was A Prequel, Did You. Also, Dean’s gotta live there in Fundamentalist Republican Hell, not me. He is, like most of us, just a person wanting to live his life without drama. He’s retired. He doesn’t have to deal with a soul-sucking job anymore and now he gets to do every day what he loves, reading and watching movies. He’s not watching Fox News, listening to the manosphere, and jumping on X, Outrage Central, to freak out about the latest fake or wildly exaggerated news (No, Trump never suggested feeding migrant children to alligators). I’ve got two countries to keep track of so I don’t spend as much time on American media, but I’m not retired. Also, I’m not sure who to trust anymore because mass media has gone from superficial and biased during Trump I to being unable to tell the difference between a real news story and the Babylon Bee today. Dumping unwilling Gazans somewhere else and turning their land into Mar-A-Gaza sounds like satirical fake news. Dean agreed to let me send him a whack of my articles specifically addressing the issues I felt he was misinformed about, and I did, expecting he wouldn’t read them, but he did admit at the end that he hadn’t researched our previous conversations before because, “I don’t know, maybe I just don’t want my beliefs challenged.” That’s more integrity than you customarily find with most. I didn’t handle my end of the conversation very well. I had that I’m so tired of educating people moment, and sighed kind of condescendingly sometimes. Later, I reminded myself this was exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, educate people, and it’s never effective when you put other people down or make them feel lesser than you. (Raise your hand if a DEI workshopper has ever convinced you that you’re a supremacist white devil.) I sent him an email several days later, apologizing for my attitude and explaining more plainly, and with less superiority, what he’s been missing and how what he thinks is liberal is no longer anywhere close, and it sounds like maybe he just needs to update his information. I’m not sure how much his friend, my ex-friend, is discussing these issues with him as I’ve lurked on her Facebook account to see how she’s doing and she doesn’t seem to be posting much about politics these days. I know she’s endured a recent deeply disturbing family tragedy. Here’s the thing: I think people like Dean are, well, reclaimable. He’s not an ‘activist’, married to beliefs it would be too painful to abandon if he acknowledged he was wrong. More importantly, he admitted, without my prompting or asking, that he might be afraid of the cognitive dissonance. We’ve known each other for a very long time, and were in a relationship for a year, and we’re too old to defriend each other over this disagreement, since neither of us are fanatics. Perhaps a better approach, when we meet people who embrace illiberal ideas or values (on either side), is to ask, “Why do you feel that way? Why do you believe that? What do you think about critics who say….” I’m not as good as I’d like at challenging people with, erm, challenging beliefs. Like most of us, I often slap a mental label on someone based on something they say. There’s still that petty little piece of me that wants to put others down for not seeing things my way. I have a friend who does what I should do. “Why do you feel that way?” with an open tone, inviting an information exchange rather than a challenge. Even if she doesn’t like their answer, she keeps probing to get a better understanding of why they believe whatever it is she disagrees with, without challenging them. That’s definitely an option I don’t exercise much, and should. There are people who are fanatics about whatever they believe—their religion, their politics, their position on abortion or guns or that transwomen are women. Others aren’t as fanatical as we assume, based on the simple fact that they believe something we don’t. We can’t open dialogues with hostility, patronization or condescension. I know Dean is an evidence-focused guy. He and I have always asked, “Where’s the proof?” He’s an atheist. I don’t think he’s given up on the Enlightenment values that fueled the growth of classical liberalism, unlike, I’m afraid, our mutual acquaintance. I got a response from my second email. I think it's a pretty safe bet to say we're very divergent in our political views. I'm not likely to change your mind on anything and, while I am open to new data, my core beliefs are also not likely to change. So, it's safer if we don't discuss politics. I still love you too… So much for being willing to challenge his beliefs. But, maybe his mind clamped shut due to my condescension and snarkiness. That’s my continuous fault. I still think he’s ‘one of the good ones’ on the left. His heart is in the right place. We often go many months without connecting, so his mind and heart may need more time to process what I’ve said. Maybe the next time we connect he’ll think differently. Or maybe he won’t and we’ll talk about our other fave topics, books and movies instead. I may put a note on my knee as I recline on the couch to talk: Be kind! Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

What do those rationalizations sound like when a man says them? Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay Guys, you don’t understand. Melissa checks my [credit card] statements. — Dr. Stuart Price The first time I watched The Hangover (2009), I thought to myself, Damn, every abused woman needs to watch this. She needs to see what it looks like. One character is an unaware domestic abuse victim. Dr. Stuart Price, derided as ‘Dr. Faggot’ by his sophomoric friends, lives with a deeply unpleasant control freak who controls and monitors him, who once hit him, and on one memorable cruise at which Stuart was not present, had sex with — some cruise member. No one can seem to remember his occupation. If you’re not familiar with the movie, it’s funny as hell and one of the few original movies Hollywood has managed to produce in the last twenty years. Which means there are no heroes in rubber muscle suits saving the world from improbable villains, no monosyllabic he-men inflicting far-right values and toxic masculinity on indigenous people, nor does it pretend to any deep meaning. It’s a hilarious whodunit in which they try to piece together what happened in Vegas during a bachelor party gone awry when one accidentally slips them roofies in Jagermeister. Stu has to lie to Melissa, his partner, to get permission to go on this weekend, because it’s easier than fighting with her over Vegas. He tells her they’re in Napa Valley. When he announces to his friends what he intends to do when they get home, they explode with disbelief, particularly Phil, a frat boy type unhappy with his suburban life and job, but he’s the genuine voice of reason when Stu shows them the ring. Phil : If it’s what I think it is, it’s a big fucking mistake! Doug : She’s not that bad. Phil : Doug, she beats him! Stu : That was once, and I was out of line. “Wait, have you not listened to anything I have ever said?” Phil asks. Clearly, he’s spoken to Stu many times over the three years he’s been with Melissa. Stu tells him it’s time, (for getting engaged), and ‘this is how it works.’ “A, that is bullshit, and B, she is a complete bitch,” Phil says, voicing what the audience thought when first introduced to Melissa, who reminds Stu to pack his Rogaine because she can always tell when his hair gets thinner (with a look of disgust) and hectoring him about not going to any strip clubs in case Phil should happen to ‘sniff one out’ in Napa Valley. She won’t let him kiss her goodbye; she’s miffed he even dared to go on an excursion without her. Maybe she’s afraid he’ll fuck the bartender, or whatever, too. “She beats him,” he reminds his friends. Stu tells him Melissa is ‘strong-willed,’ and he ‘respects that’. “Wow. Wow. He’s in denial. Not to mention, she fucked a sailor,” Phil states. There’s no difference when a woman says these things. It sounds no less ridiculous. Phil may be an annoying juvenile pig, but he talks real turkey with Stu and lets him know Melissa’s treatment of him is not okay. Melissa is a bitch and although no one ever utters the abuse word, it’s what we’re all thinking. He sounds and acts exactly like an abused woman. Except he gets less acceptance from his friends who care about him, who don’t want to see him ruin his life. Like many women, Stu doesn’t listen to those wiser than he. Years ago, when my father was still working, he told me about a young woman who worked in their office who came in with a black eye, and her co-workers asked her what happened. She admitted her boyfriend hit her because she’d refused to smoke marijuana with him. “You need to leave him,” my father said, in a position to know about such things. He told her about a relative who was in an abusive relationship and how she found it difficult to get out. How the partner showed no respect for her and hit her repeatedly. How it only gets worse, not better, no matter what he says afterward. “Why do you stay with someone who treats you like that?” Dad asked the young woman. And he related the line I knew was coming next. “It’s because I loooooooooooove him!” I told my then-boyfriend my father’s story. He was a kind, decent Pagan guy, the sort who would no more hit a woman than he would shoot a dog. He knew someone who’d been abused, and he couldn’t understand why she put up with it. He screwed up his face in disgust when he said it: “Because I loooooooooove him!” Male or female, Dr. Stuart Price is what someone looks like when they’re abused. The difference is, I don’t know, maybe male friends are more likely to tell you in plain speaking you need to dump the abusive asshole. There’s a bigger, more critical problem with female abuse victims. When they tolerate abusive partners, there may be putting their friends and family in danger. Far more often for women than men, their abuse isn’t, strictly speaking, a private matter. Because Melissa, if Stuart leaves her, isn’t likely to stalk him or try to kill him. That’s a real possibility for women — in fact, the most common way by far women get murdered. In a smaller number of cases, aggrieved dumped husbands and lovers will go after her family, and sometimes her friends. Texas man shoots his ex and her family Brooklyn Dad shoots his daughter’s mother and her sisters Ohio guy kills his ex and her family, with help from his own Guy kills family to get to ex-wife he wants to kill, also with help from his family It’s everyone’s business when a woman won’t leave an abusive man. Here in Toronto, I used to work for a company where, prior to my joining, they were forced to shut down the office one afternoon because a crazy ex was coming to kill one of the administrative staff, and police warned he might show up at the office. She put her entire office in danger because of him. I wonder if her friends and family said much before he went off the deep end. My family didn’t, when our relative was in that situation. Neither were we in much danger, since we weren’t immediate family and we lived in another state. We hardly ever saw her because — well, you can guess. Women are way too nice about abuse. We tolerate it far too much, whether it’s happening to us or to others. I’d like to see us find a medium somewhere between Stu’s friends — who are too derisive and condescending — and the rest of us who STFU and assume it’s her business. On perhaps some subconscious level, we acknowledge the dirty little secret about abuse: She’s letting it happen. I’ve been the warning someone ignored. I used to work with a very pretty married young woman whose husband was hitting her. She left him. He did exactly what my mother warned me abusive men do when she leaves: He apologized profusely, made a date to take her out to dinner at a nice restaurant, and surprised her with a chauffeured limo and flowers. She came in the next morning like a young girl in love. “He’s going to do it again,” I told her. I related my mother’s insight. “Oh no, it’s going to be different now,” she said. Photo by Julia Avamotive from Pexels I wonder how many more beatings it took before she left. Or if she ever did. I don’t know how it turned out as she left the company shortly after. I don’t know why. She made the choice to listen to him. She was young and inexperienced and we didn’t know as much about abuse as we do now. Women had a lot less financial power then. She made a bad choice, perhaps an uninformed choice, but it was still a choice. Life is all about uninformed choices. We all do it every single day because we can’t look into the future and see how things will turn out. We can’t know what we don’t know. She also made the choice to not listen to me, and possibly others, warning her this was a dangerous path to take. I hope her (I expect) ex didn’t go after her friends and family too. Or maybe she made too many choices to stay and then one day, she no longer had one. She was a co-worker, not a friend, so I couldn’t say too much. I’ve never been in a position where I had someone in my own circle actively talking about domestic abuse. It might have been happening quietly, but I suspect it wasn’t happening much. The kind of woman who don’t question abuse, or even recognize it, aren’t the sort of people who become my friends. Probably we have little in common. I wouldn’t want my phone number in the mobile of someone I know is being abused. I don’t want her crazy mofo to find it and decide I’m too good a friend or I was likely the fucking c—t who persuaded her to leave. I don’t want that sort of drama in my life. If a friend confessed her partner was abusing her I wouldn’t turn my back on her, especially if I didn’t think he was the sort to take out a family barbecue in revenge, but I would be stronger in my language than many women would be. I mean, we’ve been understanding and non-blamey and non-judgemental for like fifty fucking years and women are still getting assaulted, raped, beaten, put in the hospital, and often killed because they made a lot of really bad decisions all along the way. And clearly, they don’t fucking listen when people do speak up. We need to be less tolerant of abusive men overall, stronger with our language with friends and family and make it clear they have choice. And the longer they wait to choose to leave, the harder it’s going to be. And maybe even, if they don’t fucking leave him, you don’t want anything more to do with this shitshow because you don’t need him coming after you. Doing the same thing over and over is the definition of insanity, n’est-çe pas? The Hangover ’s Phil is an asshole — they all are — but I loved his reaction in the fancy Vegas suite when he told Stu in no uncertain terms what a big fucking mistake he was making. He removed a little of Stu’s future victimhood. He made it clear it was a choice and he stated the truth — Stu was in denial. I don’t like the other ways they treated him — calling him Dr. Faggot, ‘correcting’ him in public for calling himself a doctor when he was ‘just a dentist’. But I get their impatience and disgust with him. Why didn’t he fucking listen to them? Melissa needs Stu to call her as soon as he arrives somewhere, and one doesn’t get the impression she wants to make sure he’s safe. She gets really pissy if he doesn’t — like when his plane arrived late and he was the keynote speaker. She tells him she’ll kick his ass if he goes to a strip club, and she might mean it literally. We know she’s hit him already. He agrees with everything she says in a way suggesting he’s trying to keep the peace. He makes excuses for her sexual infidelity — She was wasted! And if you must know, he didn’t even come inside her! — and later she throws a loud expletive-laced tantrum at the wedding. Stu is in an abusive relationship, and his friends are a lot less tolerant than female friends are. We need to woman up. We need to hold ourselves, and others, to a higher standard than we have. It’s not 1988 anymore when my father told his story. We have more economic, financial, and political will, not to mention more power. But do we have the willpower to truly put an end to abuse? This first appeared on Medium in July 2021.

...Let's talk about how no prisoners, male or female, should ever be subjected to prison rape. Including the victims no one cares about: Male inmates. Photo by Ron Lach on Pixabay I’m disappointed, but not surprised, that the Regressive Left, for now, has won a round for violent convicted males’ rights with a US judge who temporarily blocked Trump’s Executive Order to return female-identified male convicts to the men’s prisons where they belong. It was ruled ‘unconstitutional.’ I’d like some legal beagle to point to me where in the Constitution it states that men have the right to declare themselves women and be believed by any human being with an IQ above a leopard slug, but we live in strange, evil times and not all the cognitive underachievers are on Team MAGA. I will remind ‘progressives’ that fake-female bepenised sex offenders were bound to result in real female inmates getting raped, as one lawsuit against the State of New York demonstrates. If you’re a woke progressive who needs further persuasion that putting convicted sex offenders and sadists in women’s prisons is the most colossally bad idea since a real estate developer said, “Let’s build mega-expensive homes here in Pacific Palisades!”, here’s my running list detailing men committing crimes against women before transition, after transition, and in prison. Here’s A Running List Why ‘Transwomen’ Don’t Belong In Women’s Spaces Prison rape: It’s still a cinch Inmates of both sexes live constantly with the potential for rape and sexual abuse. Prison guards, male or female, often just can’t resist; one guard at the Central California Women’s Facility was called a ‘serial rapist’ by his nearly two dozen victims, and he was convicted for 64 counts of sexual abuse in mid-January. It’s no secret that rape is as common as worm-infested food in prisons, although it’s far worse in male ones, and it’s one of the many reasons the number of ‘transgender’ prisoners has skyrocketed to an estimated 1,500-2,000. New convicts customarily ‘realize’ they’ve ‘always felt like a woman,’ right after conviction, since in women’s prisons a man will rule the roost as no one is going to rape him , and if he so desires, he can even continue raping with the blessing of the state since accusing a ‘transwoman’ of rape is ‘transphobic’. It’s a huge misogynist miscarriage of justice and further dishonor on the Democratic/woke progressive record for allowing cross-dressing sex offenders into the ladies’ at all. Justice systems around the world haven’t questioned or fought it very much either. But, this article isn’t about transgender prison rape per se. It’s about how no one took notice of prison rape until a few high-profile ‘transgender’ prisoners were reported allegedly raping, molesting, intimidating, threatening, or otherwise making life even further hell for female inmates. The 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) has been less than a resounding success. According to an overview published in November 2024, “PREA 2003 has not been implemented accurately due to practical problems related to it, such as limited staff, financial constraints, overcrowded prison conditions, and failure to build separate spaces for transgender inmates .” (Italics mine) It’s hard to blame male convicts for not wanting to go to a male prison, but, yeah, they should have thought about that before they committed their ‘special crime’. The first male prison rape victim to publicly recount his experience was 1970s political activist Stephen Donaldson, whose hellish experience was detailed (excruciatingly) in The Punk Who Wouldn’t Shut Up . (You’ve been warned.) Here’s what we don’t think about, talk about, or mention even in impolite company: Why prison rape is allowed to exist at all. Sympathy for the devils I’ve written about how I think the horrendous way we treat prisoners will be future generations’ shame the way the history of slavery in America is today. The moral blot of slavery wasn’t readily apparent in human history, anywhere, until 19th-century Western abolition movements. What the hell were they thinking??? future generations always ask. When we speak sympathetically of prison rape, it’s almost certainly for female prisoners. When we speak of it for men, it’s a laugh; a joke; a punchline; a jeering threat. “You’re going to jail for this one, bitch! They’re going to LOOOVE that pretty little ass of yours!” Very few have sympathy for male prisoners, who, granted, didn’t get there because they blew up a mailbox. Female prisons are brutal, and feminists and women’s rights activists express more sympathy for their prisoners, pointing out that many have suffered abuse and trauma in their past, sometimes from childhood. The not so subtle implication is to excuse whatever her ‘special crime’ was that landed her in Big Girls’ Prison, and to argue prison wardens and other staff members shouldn’t be able to get away with raping female prisoners. It’s a fair point, but few ever ask about the backstory of the male prisoners. No one asks how traumatized they are when they come to prison, or speculate on how they may have been abused before incarceration, which many of them certainly were. Some, as recorded by New England prison psychologist James Gilligan , have endured such hellish existences before entering prison that it’s a wonder they’re still alive. Yeah, they don’t usually look this sexy. Judging by the condition of his fancy shoes, this guy’s been In Stir for no more than fifteen minutes. And was arrested for being criminally hot. Image by Frank Davis from Pixabay And they have been traumatized. One black male prisoner’s story starts when he was eight years old and sent to live with his father for a year. He came back a broken child, having been sexually abused. The typical story proceeds as customary—drugs, crime, poor grades, and eventually prison. One study on male prisoner trauma exposure found their subjects had experienced “near universal trauma exposure in adolescence with the most frequent exposures involving witnessing or being proximate to violent deaths of family and friends.” It cites previous research showing that between 62%-87% of incarcerated men experienced it pre-prison. It notes national survey data showing one in six suffered physical and/or sexual abuse as children. Female prisoners aren’t much different, experiencing pre-prison multiple forms of trauma including intimate partner violence. It’s bad enough to come to prison and be raped by your fellow inmates or advantageous prison staff, and it’s worse to be incarcerated with convicted rapists who faked their way into girl jail and have a real hate-on for women—who now can’t run away or fight back. Why can’t we acknowledge that prison rape isn’t supposed to be part of the criminal justice system? When are we going to learn that throwing abused people into highly abusive environments is barbaric, and not exactly conducive to producing less violent ex-cons? We can cheer Donald Trump for ordering men back to men’s prisons - and he deserves our kudos for trying - but we need to express as much outrage for male prisoners trapped with rapists and vicious sadists as for women. Trauma is trauma, and male safety isn’t any less important. It’s easier to feel sympathy for female convicts, most of whom haven’t committed acts as violent as their male counterparts. Theirs aren’t as often featured in true crime books; and when they are, their stories are usually less dramatic. Male serial killers or gang assassins pull off wildly violent crimes; murderesses are more subtle by necessity—violent crime is more difficult for them so they quietly poison or over-medicate medical patients or the men in their lives . There’s also, undoubtedly, gender stereotyping breaking switches in our compassion circuits—men’s need to appear strong and manly, especially when they’re in prison, as well as a hyperfocus on female victimization. But rape is a horrifically violent act that has to be even worse when a penis is stuffed into an orifice that wasn’t built to take one. The United States incarcerates more people than any other country, at 1.8 million in 2023, and our treatment of them is infamous. More than half suffer from mental illness. Sixty-thousand are kept in solitary confinement, which can be the worst form of torture. Mental health services are poor in many prisons although better in others. It doesn’t bode well for those of us on the outside, either. U.S. recidivism rates are atrocious; one Department of Justice analysis showed that 82% of people were rearrested at least once in the decade that followed. Within one year, 43% were back in the bighouse. After a life of trauma and more of it in prison, ex-cons find it exceedingly difficult to find a job and often commit new crimes just to stay alive. They’re difficult on their families and they can’t maintain stable romantic relationships. They reoffend. Everyone knows the prison system needs a massive overhaul, but no one ever does anything about it. I hope that some future judge who can read the Constitution will rule that female inmates will no longer have to deal with the incredible and unnecessary stress of sharing cell blocks and sometimes even cells with violent men, but I also share sympathy with anyone housed in a male facility, trans or not. Because prison rape isn’t part of our criminal justice code and neither is extended solitary, or lousy food, or kicking a man with a protruding hernia in his stomach, simply because he asked for medical attention. Every year, 650,000 inmates are released from prison. One hundred twenty-nine thousand will be back inside in a year. There should be no tolerance for rape, anywhere. Men aren’t somehow more deserving because they’re responsible for most violent crime. Not all prisoners are convicted of such. If they weren’t violent when they got there they may be unpleasantly trained. The problem is too often politicized: Conservatives want this oversized punishment for their crimes, and liberals’ compassion ventures too often into the realm of idiocy. Or prisons are simply overcrowded and the system has to make room for the never-ending conveyor belt of new bodies. Male prisoners’ stories are no less horrific than womens’ stories. If female prisoners are worthy of our reasonable compassion, then so are male inmates. They’ve all suffered enough, and made others suffer as well. We can keep them locked up with the acknowledgement that they’re still human beings. Even the most vicious animals are treated better than vicious humans. Is it in any way humane to torture them further? We’re not, after all, like them. Or maybe…..we are. Did you like this post? Do you want to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter  Grow Some Labia  so you never miss a damn thing! There are also Substack  and Spotify podcasts of more recent articles!

Marilyn Manson's #MeToo moment has arrived, but his victims have nothing new to offer about how women get sucked into these abusive relationships Do NOT date someone with a 'bad girls room'. CC0 3.0 photo by Rockman on Wikimedia Commons You don't have to be Marilyn Manson to abuse women the way he's accused, but it undoubtedly makes things a smidge easier. Last year ex-fiancee Evan Rachel Wood outed the previously alluded-to 'powerful' man who cruelly abused her for years. She was 19 when she met the 36-year-old Manson at a party while he was still married to burlesque queen Dita Von Teese, whom he divorced the same year. Wood told Insider that they looked into each other's eyes and 'knew'. Whatever she 'knew' wasn't much, because she says she went through several years of hell and still doesn't appear to know why. She walked into a relationship with a man almost twenty years her senior, young and headstrong, telling her mother she was getting on a tour bus to see the world with Manson for eight months and if people aren't okay with that, well sorry, she can't live her life for others. Sounds like some may have been warning her it was a bad idea. That's one of the first things you do when you're entering a bad relationship: Don't listen to wiser voices. What do old people know? If anything was less than happy-happy-joy-joy after that, Wood didn't mention it. She spoke fondly of Manson until the mid-teens and prior to that, she publicly commented favorably on their relationship, and then former relationship. Today she details horrific tales of rape, abuse, degradation and humiliation, echoed by several other former partners and lovers who've stepped forward, empowered by her bravery, to tell similar stories. Manson, of course, denies it all, offering the same tired typical abuser explanations: They're lying, they're doing it for gain, they're trying to ruin me. That last allegation might arguably be true, but no one seriously believes anymore that women get rich lying about famous men raping and abusing them, and the 'attention' is often doxing, swatting, rape and death threats. Wood's documentary, Phoenix Rising , about her abuse by Manson, just premiered at the Sundance Music Festival, re-opening examination of her and others' abuse allegations. I'm glad she's finally calling him to account, and has decided to stop lying. The long hard road down to hell Ex-fiancee Rose McGowan and Von Teese weighed in last year, both stating they didn't have abusive relationships with Manson, yet they were supportive of the women. Von Teese, who says she ended her two-year marriage over Manson's drug abuse and infidelities, states he never treated her that way and she wouldn't have married him if he had. "Abuse of any kind has no place in any kind of relationship," she stated on Instagram and encourages "those of you who have incurred abuse to take steps to heal." It's almost like they don't think it's beyond him to behave like that. Worst of all for Manson, even men support his accusers. Nine Inch Nails frontman and former Manson mentor Trent Reznor hasn't hesitated to voice his dislike for Manson, with whom he severed ties 25 years ago. He's also still pissed about a story Manson told in his autobiography that he and Reznor raped a groupie, which Reznor vehemently insists is fiction. Reznor supports the women's allegations with his own testimony of abuse, misogyny, and Manson's violent, dark personality. Former Limp Bizkit guitarist and Manson collaborator Wes Borland said on Twitch, "Every single thing that people have said about him is f---ing true. So relax about the allegations towards the women. Like when people say these women are coming after him right now… f--- off, they are speaking the truth." The 'worst-kept secret' What's always missing in these #MeToo moments for soon-to-be-formerly rich and powerful men like Marilyn Manson is anything more than a cursory look at the deeper meaning of their victims' testimonies. It's extremely unlikely Wood and the others are lying now; three have filed lawsuits against him, and you don't do that unless you're willing to go through the hell of the backlash, including genuine fear for one's life and personal safety. This ain't some immigrant Uber driver you're accusing, it's Marilyn Manson. There's always an unaddressed deeper credibility issue in these stories that doesn't concern whether they're lying about the abuser now, but when they were, or maybe just being highly disingenuous. To the public eye, for Wood's entire relationship with Manson, she made out that they were happy, described their relationship as 'healthy', bristled at the criticism she got for being with him, and never indicated publicly she was unhappy, depressed, or frightened. That's typical for abuse victims, to deny deny deny until one day they tell the truth. For about eight years no one who didn't know the couple had any reason to believe they had anything other than a healthy, functional relationship. Young women who desired a life like Wood's - beautiful girlfriend to a globally-recognized rock star - were encouraged by her seemingly fabulous life. Wood and her compatriots in victimhood presented one view to the world while suffering in silence, while others looked on and did nothing. Then again, neither did any of the others until now. Meanwhile, Manson's abuse of Wood and others has been described as 'one of the worst-kept secrets'. Men like Manson persist because it's a collective collusive effort, including his victims, to enable them by remaining silent. As Kory Wood and James Newman detailed in their Rolling Stone article about Manson, he was The Monster Hiding In Plain Sight. When we dissect the abuser/victim dynamic we ignore how many others are adversely impacted too, whose lives may also be put in danger because of the relationship. Like children, of course. How to learn how to mistreat women, like the example Manson set. Impressionable teenage girls and young women watched Manson's public appearances with glamorous young women beaming in the spotlight on the arm of their freaky-looking Bad Boy. While lights flashed all around them, they gushed to reporters about how Manson was such a wonderful, great guy. Each woman was accomplished at something in her own right, but none were as famous or powerful as Manson. Don't you wish you were me, girlfriend??? You can be someone important if you nail a rock star! That's what Manson's pretty little liars taught girls all over the world. The explanations why they did it, the Stockholm Syndrome, the brainwashing, the cult-like control over them only go so far. These women sought fame, on their own terms and then Manson's, and held themselves up as role models for others, consciously or not. I'm glad they're finally telling their truths, but I'd like to see them undo the damage they've done by telling their fans the whole truth. Like how this happened to them, without mention of anyone else. The 70-year Golden Age of Grotesque There's probably no industry worthier of a glaring #MeToo misogyny-hunting spotlight than Planet RockMusician, where men still rule and women with less power do what women have always done, used their bodies to get a status guy. The problem with Manson's victims' #MeToo stories is that for anyone who's been around for more than a few decades, they sound awfully same-old same-old. Manson claimed in a 2015 Guardian story that he was with his then-unnamed girlfriend "because she is willing to do whatever it takes to be with me." I think he's referring to photographer Lindsay Usich, who he married in 2020. She's not one of his current accusers but is accused by some of them of attempting to silence them. One of Manson's former personal assistants claims he's witnessed Manson abuse Usich on several occasions , and threatened to kill her. So the cycle of abuse by women perpetuates itself: Lindsay Usich shuts the hell up and helps her hubby like a good little collaborator until one day, almost certainly, she will stop lying to herself and the world. Rock 'n' roll is nearly 70 years old, and allegations of sexual wrongdoing, misogyny, abuse, and retaliation against young women and girls have been there from the beginning. Rock pioneers Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jackie Wilson, Little Richard, and Elvis Presley also pioneered sexual abuse of women, especially underage girls. So what have we learned, children? Seventy years of rock 'n' roll have taught us that boys aspire to become rock musicians so they can have unfettered, unquestioned access to naive girls and women who think they know better, who think they know what they're doing, who think they're in control of their sexuality--except they don't and they're not. We learn nothing as each generation passeth away: Every year, every decade the cycle repeats itself: Older, wiser women call out some celebrity who abused them for years and get lauded for being brave and 'telling their truth'. Yes, they're brave, but they're also complicit in perpetuating the cycle of abuse. When they complain, 'Many knew but no one stopped him,' no reporter dares ask, "Did anyone warn you, and did you listen? What kind of example did you set for other young women when you repeatedly lied about what happened to you until now?" Silence is violence, isn't it, gender theory feminists? When will we acknowledge that with celebrity comes a certain level of responsibility to one's fans? To be honest about what the industry, your career, your partners are really like? When you're 'willing to do whatever it takes to be with him', there's an internal power greater than concern for one's personal safety in play. No woman wants to be abused, but it's sometimes the price you must be willing to pay to stay with him. We don't acknowledge that for some women, it's a profit/loss calculation. How much of his shit are you willing to put up with to be with him? We never learn the deeper truth these women really owe their fans, the ones who supported their idols in their careers, and support them now as they crawl out from under a very sick man's rock. Why did you allow this? It's no longer enough to speak out on what happened and take the kudos for being 'brave' and 'honest' and finally bringing on a much-needed takedown of a deeply misogynist artist. They need to do some introspection, a post-mortem, and tell the truth about why they took the step down that long ugly staircase of abuse. They need to talk about the weaknesses in their psychology that permitted someone like Manson into their lives. They need to address why the well-established, no-news-here serial predator grooming tactics worked so well on them, and really be honest about who warned them about him and why they didn't listen. That's the funny thing about serial celebrity secrets: While the world at large may not know them, absolutely everyone in the industry does. Only people who weren't in Hollywood in the '50s were surprised when classic masculine movie sex symbol Rock Hudson outed himself as a lifelong homosexual by dying of AIDS. My mother learned about it from a friend who'd grown up in Hollywood, played with Loretta Young's daughter, and was friends with Elizabeth Taylor. Everyone knew how many movie stars were homosexual back then, but only whispered. There's no way Manson's maidens hadn't heard the rumors, and the warnings, and seen a lot of shit with their own eyes. If 19-year-old girls can still see vaginas on the walls, swastikas everywhere, be personally acquainted with a 'bad girls room', and not realize this is not a boy you want to take home to mother, we're not doing a good enough job raising young women to not know misogyny until it's chasing you with an axe. In the HBO trailer for Phoenix Rising , someone comments that it customarily takes many victims 7-10 years to recognize they were abused, which in Manson's accusers' case means any alleged crimes are outside the statute of limitations. In 2016, Wood testified in front of government committees in support of bills to raise the statute of limitations. "Something needs to change" I applaud Wood's and the others' efforts and agree with them that something needs to change. In addition to making it easier for domestic violence victims to seek justice, what would help most is if they could offer insight into what permitted them to get into such a relationship at all. How did they not get blown into the next county by all the violently waving red flags? We're not learning anything new with each new tedious story. Abuse, brainwashing, gaslighting, yadda yadda yadda. Young women don't pay attention because they don't think it could happen to them. Where victims can add REAL value to the conversation and reduce the mistreatment of women is by helping young women understand how this can happen to them by addressing the common gaps in female psychology. Like: How easy it is to be impressed by a rich powerful man. How older men like younger women not just because they're young and pretty, but because they're so much easier to manipulate. Especially when they look to a man to define them, and especially a celebrity. How easy it can be to be dazzled by the classic manipulator's move, 'love bombing,' to suck you in so he can groom you to do what he wants and put up with his shit. How partner rape is a real thing. How you can have clear good examples of healthy, functional relationships (they must have seen some, at least) and not want the same for themselves - or wonder if perhaps love doesn't mean tolerating the vile abuse they're subjected to. Most importantly, can they PLEASE tell young girls and women to listen to older women who know more than they do? At least some of them will listen . I did. I thank my mother. What would be most valuable is better understanding how you can see swastikas, knives, an unused Zyklon B gas container from World War II, listen to the misogyny expressed at Manson's concerts, and hear a song you know was written about you, I Want To Kill You Like They Do In The Movies , and still think it's okay to be with this guy. I want to know about every Manson woman's first two weeks with the guy, before the serious brainwashing started, because I really want to know what some women are completely missing. Today, black people of all ages are hyper-aware of racial hostility and slights, but somehow women see rank misogyny hitting them in the face (literally) and blithely walk Manson's long hard staircase down to hell. The point is not to beat themselves up for cluelessness at 19 or 20 back then but to help young women understand today how they can avoid the mistakes of the past. Not looking within and asking one's self the hard questions without finger-pointing is what permits the cycle of abuse to perpetuate generationally. Feminism isn't ready to examine and analyze what psychological weaknesses we all have, as women, that allow men to exploit and abuse us. These time-dishonored techniques for controlling and grooming women have been utilized every day by countless men for thousands of years because they work. Manson won't likely be held legally accountable for any of this, but his victims can push this aging, pudgy, slightly less relevant rocker into has-been oblivion. All the hand-wringing and worry from celebrity men about #MeToo 'lies' come mostly from those who lie awake at night worrying about who from their own past might be the first woman to break the silence about their own behavior. Après moi, le déluge. Many won't mourn Manson's faded passing. But what about future targets who might listen if Manson's victims, and others after them, tell the truth about themselves about why they succumbed to his predations and what they'd tell their younger selves? While we're trying to fix the ones who were broken, what can we do to educate the young and naive, so they listen now, because they're hearing something new, so they can avoid the ugly web the Marilyn Mansons of the world, celebrity or not, draw some of them into? Not every teenage girl is so naive Indie rock musician Phoebe Bridgers recounts a story when she was a teenage girl and went to Manson's home with a few friends. He joked about a 'rape room' in his house which she chalked up to horrible 'frat boy' humor, but that day she 'stopped being a fan'. And that was the end of that. Knowing that is more valuable than anything Manson's victims have offered thus far. This article originally appeared on Vocal.media in March 2022. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Smith's WTF moment encapsulates how badly Americans need a time-out. Everyone go to your room and take ten years! CC0 Creative Commons image from PeakPX WTF happened at the Oscars? Right now I feel like an exasperated mother who wants to send Will Smith and Chris Rock to their rooms so they can both think about what they did. And the rest of us too, as this story unfolds. The exasperated American in me understands, if not condones, how Smith felt, because frankly, I'd love to bitch-slap some sense back into a country backpedaling to the maturity level of a sandbox brawl. Both of you! Go to your room! Image by rickey123 from Pixabay Smith demonstrated even the nicest Hollywood stars can lose their damn minds in the moment. I'm disappointed in him. I think we all expect better from one of Hollywood's most well-loved stars. Where did his out-of-the-blue moment come from? Not truly out of the blue. An unkinder, darker Hollywood I didn't understand why Chris Rock's 'G.I. Jane 2' joke was supposed to be funny until the camera cut to Pinkett-Smith rolling her eyes, clearly unamused. Okay, she was bald. A fashion statement, right? Lighten up, girlfriend! I bet Lupita Nyong'o would have laughed. I didn't understand Smith's anger until the backstory. I hadn't known Pinkett-Smith suffered from alopecia and that black women are especially at risk. Any woman can relate. Black women may have a very special relationship with their hair , but we all get the emotional devastation of alopecia. Hair is our 'crowning glory', as the Book of Corinthians, Oliver Swinburne, and others have noted. It's been deeply traumatic for Pinkett-Smith, and going bald illustrates a milestone in her journey of owning her condition, encouraged by her daughter. Rock says he didn't know about her alopecia. If so, he thought he was making a fair-game joke. Had her baldness been a fashion statement, I'd have expected her to suck it up. She's not, first and foremost someone's wife, she's an established actress in her own right, and Oscar fashion is fair game. At the time of this writing Rock hasn't apologized to Pinkett-Smith but he sure owes her a public apology. His unintentionally cruel joke ridiculed her in front of millions. Hopefully he'll be man enough to do so, and soon, because Smith has already apologized to Rock. Rock has known Will Smith from his Fresh Prince of Bel-Air days and there's existing friction. Several years ago Rock joked it wasn't fair about Jada Pinkett-Smith not getting invited to the Oscars, and that it also wasn't fair Will Smith got heavily paid for 1999's Wild Wild West , not exactly his greatest movie. Comedians make fun. It's the intrinsic nature of humor, pointing to egos and the hypocrisy of life. But humor has gotten a lot nastier in the last twenty years, particularly in Hollywood. Unkind digs received a rocket boost from Ricky Gervais, who slaughtered Hollywood celebrities at the 2020 Golden Globes. One watches, cheering him on for rooting out Hollywood's ugliest hypocrisies, like how Jeffrey Epstein was their 'friend' - touché! - and LOL when he eviscerates them with a verbal machete: "Well, you say you’re woke but the companies you work for in China — unbelievable. Apple, Amazon, Disney. If ISIS started a streaming service you’d call your agent, wouldn’t you? So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg." Simultaneously, I cringe when he leverages nuclear-level cruelty, calling some actor I never heard of a 'fat p--sy' and 'jokes' about a venerable actress 'licking her own minge'. So, blame Ricky Gervais too. But why did Gervais think he could do that? On social media people freely utter much worse, often behind anonymous accounts, with little pushback from platforms who only grudgingly step in when enough politicians ponder aloud about 'potential legislation' and the public accuses them of altering the course of elections or prolonging a pandemic. So, blame Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Let's turn our attention now to Kanye West ruining Taylor Swift's big moment at the 2009 Video Music Awards, except at least he didn't slap Swift for getting an award he thought should have gone to Beyoncé. Blame Ye, or whatever the hell he's calling himself now. And we can't forget Donald Trump, encouraging and further normalizing violence, laying the groundwork for a future riot when for four years he chronically vomited a constant twitstream of hate speech, slurs, violent musings, bald-faced lies and insults. No one was safe, not even a journalist with cerebral palsy or the family of a gold-star military veteran. I'm glad Rock and Smith didn't meet on the street, or they might have settled their differences the Wild Wild West way, with Rock bleeding out his life on the curb. Will Smith is 100% responsible for his lack of self-control. Guaranteed he wouldn't have smacked a female comedian. Maybe he would have yelled at her, even challenged her on stage, but I'll bet he wouldn't have hit her. Not in the #MeToo era. He. Was. In. Control. #WeAreAllWTF Smith's moment encapsulates how crazy America has gotten. An Insider writer who attended Vanity Fair's Oscars after-party describes encountering an unnamed famous comedian who mentioned how 'thin-skinned' celebrities have become and compared Los Angeles, currently experiencing a spiraling crime rate, to Gotham City. He may well have a point; stress levels have risen even for tony, celebrity neighborhoods experiencing brazen home invasions and stick-ups, and Angelenos calmly stand on line at the Rite-Aid while smash-'n'-grabbers take what they please. Smith exhibited the worst excesses of 'honor culture', where a man is 'compelled' to violently defend himself and his family from insult. In our Founding Fathers' time, (white) men settled these differences by dueling. Smith felt his wife was dishonored and his emotional hijacking dick-tated his behavior. Any of us would have gotten as angry. But no one, even celebrities, has the right to lash out. Unfortunately, a fair chunk of Americans disagree. When they have a 'bad day' they feel entitled to grab the nearest firearm and blow away as many innocent people as they can. Or they 'pop a cap in someone's ass' when they feel 'dissed'. Or they storm the Capitol because an election didn't go their way. I'm glad Rock isn't filing charges against Smith, and I'm gratified Academy board member Whoopi Goldberg says Smith won't lose the award he received 45 minutes after going all Sean Penn. I hope this will be a learning moment for Americans. I'm not real hopeful, but an ex-pat can dream. I hope Rock and Smith both lay low and think about what they did. Just because Smith reacted like a spoiled, entitled child doesn't mean Rock shouldn't think long and hard about the way he treated Pinkett-Smith, whose accidental humiliation he prefaced by saying he 'loves' her. We've all been overreacting to slights and insults for much longer than our emergence from what may or may not be a post-pandemic world. Our human connection skills have degraded for decades thanks to digital technology, near-psychopathic social media, coddled self-esteem-addled Gen Z-ers taught to believe any opinion they don't like is 'violence', growing income inequality, cruel reality TV shows, police violence, and a state capital resembling Israel and Pakistan more than Washington D.C. Only animal life and the environment have benefited from the pandemic; with humans off the streets the Himalayas re-emerged for Indians and the Bay of Pigs has been invaded again; this time by crabs. Mass shootings, rare occurrences beginning roughly forty years ago, are today a daily occurrence, often with multiple separate incidents in a single day. Blame also the descent of trust in the government, politicians, the justice system, the '1%', and journalism, from which arose the monstrous plethora of conspiracy theories, fake news, ungated bloggers and the demonization of those who don't think, act, look like, or share the same political opinions as you. Will Smith is all of us, yes, even us 'decent' folk who would 'never do that'. We just haven't each had our Chris Rock moment yet when we decide the hell with it, and chuck civilization aside to whack someone else who crossed us, like our cave ancestors with clubs. Maybe it's time for all of us to take a timeout in our rooms and think about what we've collectively done. Not ten minutes. Ten years. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Trevor Noah's tribal whataboutism sparks my own. Whatabout your own moral blindness, Trevor? Ukrainian refugees crossing into Poland. CC0 4.0 image by Міністерство внутрішніх справ України on Wikimedia Commons I'll call what Trevor Noah expressed at the beginning of the Russian war on Ukraine 'tribalism'. He accused both journalists and news consumers of racism for viewing the war differently from wars in other parts of the world. He isn't wrong, but he blithely ignores other important reasons why the West is more het up about an illegal invasion by a fading superpower of a prosperous, democratic, and yes Trevor, civilized country like Ukraine. Gas prices didn't shoot up when Rwanda broke out in massacre. Maybe we paid more for coffee for awhile. We're about to pay a lot more for wheat-based food since Russia is the world's largest wheat exporter and Ukraine, until the war, was the sixth-largest global and a top producer of rye, sunflower seeds and barley. Rwanda wasn't producing much of anything except drought and internal tribalism. More critically, cultural differences help explain the concern disparity. "And beyond the war itself ... there's a really interesting thing that I learned. And that is: A lot of people on TV didn't expect a war like this to happen in, let's say, certain neighborhoods." You're right, Trevor, we didn't. To put it into perspective for a New Yorker like you, this is like a crack gang war in the Hamptons. "You do realize that, until very recently, fighting crazy wars was Europe's thing? That was Europe's entire thing. That's all of European history." Yes, it was, and it's why the United Nations was created. One of its primary raisons d'être was to prevent another world war, as the last two had been exceedingly brutal, and the next would be nuclear. Today, less than a century after the end of the last world war, western Europeans have conspicuously been not killing their countryfolk for many decades. (Eastern Europe is another story.) The Middle East and Africa, on the other hand.... Noah played clips in his viral rant in which various reporters and commentators said things like, "...Ukraine is not a place—with all due respect—like Iraq or Afghanistan," and "This is not a developing third world nation—this is Europe." That didn't play too well with our man. "What were you going to say if you weren't choosing your words carefully? 'I just hope the next time this happens, it happens back in the Middle East where it belongs.' No, more like, we hope one day they'll decide to stop murdering each other over political and religious ideologies. You know, the way Europe once did. Maybe the Middle East could form their own United Nations, or something. "Now people are going to be like, 'Ugh, to see this in Europe!' To see this, I don't know about you, but I was shocked to see how many reporters—around the world, by the way—seem to think that it's more of a tragedy when white people have to flee their countries. Because, I guess, what? The 'darkies' were built for it?" No, because...that's how certain non-First World cultures do, in the 21st century. Like mass shootings is how Americans do. Like blowing things up with your body is how Middle Easterners do. Like gang rape is how Indians do. Like mutilating baby girls' genitals is how Africans do. FGM (Female Genital Mutilation FCC0 3.0 image by Nederlandse Leeuw on Wikimedia Commons Whatabout everyone's misogyny? I agree with Noah's racism charge. Racism is one of many tribalisms: My people before yours. Black Lives Matter formed in response to high-profile killings by white police officers of often unarmed, sometimes innocent black men. Of course, who knew back then that cops kill unarmed, sometimes innocent white men more than black men? Noah watches the West rally behind the uber-white Ukrainians with a tribalist eye as the conflict re-engages old Cold War enmity, making the left blush and wonder whether ol' semi-senile Ronald Reagan was right about that whole 'Evil Empire' thing. After all, thirty years ago we had better things to do when one set of Rwandans began hacking up another set of Rwandans and the latter fled the country in droves. I don't think we'd have been quite as sanguine had it been, rather, the French filleting Germans, but that's because frankly, we expect better from them now. France and Germany haven't gotten along since at least ol' Caesar's day, back when they were known as the Gauls and the Germanic tribes. This ain't the first century BCE, mes amis! Public domain cartoon by John Tenniel, Punch magazine, August 6, 1881 from Wikipedia. On the other hand, I don't know how sanguine I'd have been had Kim Jong-Un invaded South Korea, for the same reasons I'm outraged by Russia's naked attack on Ukrainians: South Korea is a prosperous, civilized country, dammit, and they're total technology geeks! And the North Korean government is a totalitarian nightmare run by a fat psychopathic dictator who starves his own people! That is NOT how the South Koreans do. Social media critics, drunk on critical theory about racism, oppression, and Western ethnocentrism kick-started directly into whatabout mode: "Where was your concern for the Palestinians? The Rohingyans? The Chechnyans? The Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenians?" Yeah, let's--talk about those folks. When I listen to Noah and his supporters whatabouting, I respond as a woman and look at the always-overlooked victims of those same conflicts: Women. Those victimized cultures are, well, problematic. I wasn't happy when my prime minister, Justin Trudeau, vowed to bring in 50,000 Syrian refugees after the shock and awe of the famous rescuer carrying drowned toddler Alan Kurdi. It wasn't that my heart wasn't moved by the photo, or the plight of Syrian refugees-- Bashar Assad, for Darwin's sake! --I just didn't want all Syrian refugees. RIP. CC0 3.0 photo by Defend International on Wikimedia Commons Most specifically, their misogynist men. Gender-based violence is rife all throughout the Middle East, where women have fewer rights and recourse to escaping male violence. Syria had a high rape rate before the Syrian conflict , and as is the case for any woman living in a truly patriarchal culture, they don't report not only for fear of not being believed, but of being murdered in an 'honour killing'. Spousal rape isn't a crime in Syria, and a rapist can escape prosecution by marrying his victim, which relieves the family of the inconvenience of murdering her. And of course you can always count on terrorist groups like ISIL to wield sexual violence as a weapon. "Can we allow in 50,000 women and children, not including boys over, say, ten or twelve?" I thought. You know, after it's probably too late to cleanse them of cultural toxic masculinity. Chechyna? Same ol' story, different part of the world. Wahabbism, an 18th-century Islamic movement to restore 'purity' to Islam and behind pretty much every extremist Islamic government today, also infected the Chechnyans leading to little bon mots like this from president Ramzan Kadyrov in 2011. "I have the right to criticize my wife. She doesn't [have the right to criticize me]. With us [in Chechen society], a wife is a housewife. A woman should know her place. A woman should give her love to us [men]... She would be [man's] property. And the man is the owner. Here, if a woman does not behave properly, her husband, father, and brother are responsible. According to our tradition, if a woman fools around, her family members kill her... That's how it happens, a brother kills his sister or a husband kills his wife... As a president, I cannot allow for them to kill. So, let women not wear shorts...". Yeah, that's the ticket. Make sure she doesn't make him kill her. Ban shorts. The Rohingyans? When mass rape by an invading army occurs , Rohingyan men do what patriarchal men do, blame the victims . My heart was hardened to the plight of Rohingyan men when I read of one who castigated his wife for 'not running away' when the soldiers came and raped her. She was eight months pregnant with a terrified toddler wrapped around one leg as her husband took off with the other children. The Palestinians? They want freedom, a country of their own? Freedom for whom, exactly? I'm guessing not their women, for whom it will be brutal business as usual. Afghanistan? Women's rights predictably slid right back into the medievalism of their pre-9/11 world. It's only because of 9/11 that they were granted a twenty-year respite. Iraq was a totalitarian mess under Saddam and remains a violent and unstable part of the world. The US's illegal invasion didn't help, most specifically because countries have to fix themselves. It's like Alcoholics Anonymous: They have to want to change. You do realize, Trevor, that even before European contact, African, Middle Eastern, and most other human societies were a patchwork of raiding, massacre, sexual violence, slavery and oppression? That was Africa's thing. That was the Middle East's thing. That was all of humanity's history, with the only exceptions a half-handful of societies so remote they didn't have anyone else to fight with. Oh, and they all demonstrated how much they hated women. Revolutions aren't for girls Revolutions are first and foremost for men, who don't give a fig about women's rights until forced. The American women's liberation movement emerged directly out of the New Left in the '60s and early '70s, once the chickie-boos realized their part in the democracy and civil rights struggle was to fetch the coffee and part their legs. I'm reminded of revolutionaries' blindness to women's lives as I read Nelson Mandela's autobiography Long Walk To Freedom . Inspirational for his civil rights fight as well as his insights into power--over one's self and from where it derives--it also starkly highlights how obliviously he ignored African women, especially South Africa. (Listen up, Trevor!) Mandela only cursorily mentions women's rights, mostly references to how his wife Winnie fought against the system and paid for it with constant harassment, banning, arrest and occasional imprisonment. He acknowledges how his struggle, and his 28-year imprisonment, were far harder on her than it was him. But otherwise, so removed from women's concerns was Mandela that he pondered what an 'odd sensation' it must have been for his mother to show up at his sentencing at which he was expected to get the death sentence. "Try 'emotionally devastated,' you emotionally constipated twit," I thought. 'Odd sensation', indeed. Mandela divorced his wife three years after his release, citing infidelity. He was still married when he met and fell in love with her at a Soweto bus stop. Would he have remained faithful for 28 years if the roles were reversed? Nelson Mandela was utterly blind to his male privilege. CC0 2.0 image by Archives de la Ville de Montréal on Flickr South Africa has made a lot gains in equalizing women yet remains a frightening place to be a woman, regardless of color. It's no picnic for children either. Child murders have climbed by 'nearly a third' . Rape and domestic violence are up, and have been described as 'like a second pandemic' . One of the vilest rape-murders I've ever read was the horrific case of Anene Booysen in Bredasdorp on the Western Cape. ( WARNING: Extremely graphic content.) According to the African Health Organization , "Femicide is five times higher in South Africa than the global average, with South Africa having the fourth-highest female interpersonal violence death rate out of the 183 countries listed by the WHO in 2016." Noah's yardstick for measuring the civilization of a culture may be how it treats its minorities, particularly its darker-skinned ones. I accept that. It's a good yardstick, but it's not the only one. My yardstick compares one half of a so-called 'civilized' society to the half that almost always gets thrown under the bus when the cow patties goes down. Mahatma Gandhi's yardstick was how a society treats its animals. We could count many more moral progress measures, extending beyond other species to how we treat our environment. Sadly, we all fall short at some point. Whatabout what's right about whataboutism? Europe's nearly century-old commitment to end intra-continental violence is still in its infancy, and may be sorely tested in the coming years with the far right's global rise. The United States, a country coming up on its quarter-millennial birthday in 2026, is arguably flirting with a second civil war as the identitarian far left and right work to divide America further. To be honest, Trevor, I don't really think of my mother country as very much civilized anymore. And certainly not Russia. I consider Canada a civilized country. For now. First World countries fall short for the same reasons others do: Hatred against colors and ethnicities, hatred against women, an increasingly violent society. Europe has spent most of its existence fighting each other. Other parts of the world still haven't won that precarious battle. Like Africa. Like the Middle East. Like Russia. Like the United States. 'Where were you when...?" is a fair question we should ponder and discuss. Why didn't we care as much about the Rwandans? Or the Chechnyans? Or the yadda yadda yaddas? More importantly, why don't we care--or not--only when we frame it in identitarian terms of how much the victims look like us? And how much 'my' tribe is victimized by 'your' tribe? Regardless of what color they are, what part of the world their ancestors initially invaded or what's between their legs. Why do I consider Ukraine--or South Korea--more 'civilized' than South Africa or most parts of the Middle East? It's not like racism and misogyny don't exist there. Ukrainians themselves demonstrated racism trying to cross borders. I don't like how the latters treat one-half of their population. We can't move forward as a global order until we abandon our tribalisms. One reason why I don't support slave reparations for African-Americans is because they only help one small group of Americans, and it's hard to see how handouts for grievances they haven't themselves suffered will 'help'. A more balanced, just, equitable society benefits everyone , not just black Americans. It's nothing but tribalism, as has become the #MeToo movement which ignores women's grievances when they happen to men (domestic violence, abuse, custody battle child abductions, rape, sexual harassment). Whataboutism is annoying to those trying to fix a problem - like the swift destruction of Ukraine - but it forces us to think about our own biases. Trevor Noah is biased towards darker-skinned people. I am biased towards vagina'ed people. Others are biased towards marginalized groups like transfolk, religious communities, the disabled, or people in certain age groups. Our biases serve real purposes. I thank Trevor Noah for making me think a bit about my bias regarding the Russian-Ukrainian war. Revolution: It's best when it's personal I know people affected by the current war. A good friend and my neighbor's families are Ukrainian, with family members there. My cousin's children are half-Ukrainian. And, I live in Ontario, with Canada's largest Ukrainian community. We have a Ukrainian festival every summer not far from my home. We have Ukrainian banks and credit unions. Ukrainians, literally and figuratively, are my 'hood. So's everyone else. My street is a United Nations of humanity. I care more about today's war than I did when the Rwandan conflict occurred, because I hadn't yet become friendly with a Rwandan refugee I worked with years ago and with whom I maintained a friendship until we grew apart. I care more about Rwanda, I know more about it now, because of her. It's personalized. I think of South Korea as more 'civilized' than North Korea, but but forgot about my niece when I first pondered the question; I don't think of her as South Korean, she's just my niece. Racism against Asians in America seemed remote to me last year until weeks after the infamous spa killings in Atlanta. After I remembered the family Asian. Point taken, Trevor. I need to think about my own moral blindness, but I hope you and your tribe will ponder your own. African men, especially black Africans, have a lot to answer to women for, and I didn't even get into how Africans likely invented female genital mutilation (and I can't imagine it was originally a female idea). The true path to progress, like all revolutions, is a long walk to freedom, but if we can move beyond our own personal identitarianism, we can make it revolution for everybody, not just the white set or the guy set. It'll be a huge improvement for everybody. Yeah, even for white guys.

I didn’t get raped, but I sure made it easy for them Photo by Jody Halsted on Flickr I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can protect ourselves better against sexual assault, particularly young girls and women. Especially what us older and more experienced women can offer, because the earlier you teach women how to take charge of their own safety, the less likely they’ll be sexually assaulted. An ounce of prevention, etc. Female psychology, some biological, some socialized, makes us vulnerable to male predation. We want to be liked. We want to be nice. We value relationships. We’re good at communication. We recognize an actual feeling when we have it. I wrote something a few years ago about how you shouldn't do dumb shit, evidenced by some whiny female celebrity who got hacked and her nude photos seized, then cried publicly when Whoopi Goldberg informed her quite clearly that you can’t do dumb shit. I guess being scolded by your symbolic mother in public is worse than having your nude photos stolen. I don’t know how many times this has to happen before young women come to understand that just because you have a right to privacy doesn’t mean others will respect it. You don’t have to be a celebrity; teenage girls have been ‘slut shamed’ and sometimes committed suicide over such events. If someone can violate your privacy, they will. It will probably be a man. My mother raised me to not do dumb shit. She taught me some great lessons about how not to become victimized. She drilled into my head that if I had sex, I was the one who’d get pregnant, and the man had the option of skipping out on the whole thing and leaving me holding the baby. I could handle it however I wanted, Mom said, except for one unavailable option: Living with my parents and the baby. “I’m not going to raise your child for you,” Mom told me. “I did my bit raising you and your brother, if either of you have children they’re you’re responsibility.” My brother’s non-option was skipping out on the girl. “If you get someone pregnant,” Mom told him, “she makes the decision and you will support it. If she wants an abortion you help pay for it. If she wants to keep the baby, you either marry her or you pay child support.” Neither my brother nor I made any little bambinos before our time. Mom, who said neither her ex-husband nor my father ever hit her, also taught me never to let a man abuse me. She made it perfectly clear I had a lot of say in the matter. She said never let him hit you a second time. If he hits you a first time, there WILL be a second time, and many more after that. She said the sooner you get out of a bad relationship the better. Point taken. I’ve never been in an abusive relationship and I recognized early on where the potential abusers lay. Honestly, I don’t know where my Depression-era mother got this stuff. Her generation was raised to be good little helpmeets to their husbands. Maybe it was marrying the wrong guy at 19, a manchild who couldn’t handle the responsibilities of adulthood and marriage, despite having survived one of the toughest outfits — the 82nd Airborne — in World War II. When the American soldiers parachuted down from the sky the Germans made a game out of trying to shoot their legs off. Mom’s ex escaped from the war with his body, but not his mind, intact. Nevertheless, sometimes, despite Mom’s best advice, I did dumb shit. I did things that she warned could get me raped and/or murdered. Sometimes it was a mental lapse, or an unwarranted opinion of my own good judgement. Sometimes, I think, I was lulled into a false sense of security because I did have pretty good judgement overall about men. I avoided the ones that created trouble for my friends and came to recognize toxic male subcultures before ‘misogyny’ became a household word. I made mistakes. We all do. I got lucky and nothing bad happened. “Don’t get in a car with a strange man. Never hitchhike!” Before I could read, Mom saved Ann Landers articles about young women who came to a bitter end because of bad judgement. It might be drinking and driving; excessive speeding; not watching your drink at parties; drug-taking; and one of her favorites, the perils of hitchhiking or otherwise getting into a car with a strange man. Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker — 1979 TV movie Mom told me absolutely never to do this dumb shit. I never did hitchhike until one extremely rainy evening I ignored Mom’s warnings, and all the 1970s TV movies too, and I did some dumb shit. My uncle had just passed away and I needed to drive down to Long Island for the funeral. A nor’easter was blowing up the East Coast and making the drive quite miserable. I drove carefully, but traffic was horrible on the Merritt Parkway (as always) and at New Rochelle I had to rethink my route as the Merritt had flooded under an overpass and there were cars stalled in the middle of the mini-lake. (Never try to cross a very deep highway pool with your car. That’s some seriously dumb shit.) I pulled off to a diner, grabbed dinner, and got directions on how to re-route myself (this was in the days before GPS). All was fine until I pulled off somewhere on the Long Island Expressway for a potty break and to gas up. When I was ready to roll, my car wouldn’t start. I accepted a ride from two brothers from Guatemala who were also headed out to my end of the island, against my best judgement. They seemed nice. I didn’t want to spend the money on a motel. And, to be perfectly honest, I’d always felt a little bit invincible. Long Island is well-named and to drive it takes even longer in a nor’easter in the dark. I sat in the back, with the two brothers up front. Almost immediately, one of them began trying to get a date. I kept hearing how beautiful I was. How he wanted to see me again. How he wanted to see me again. How he wanted to see me again. How he wanted to see me again. I explained I had a partner in Connecticut. I told him about my uncle’s death and how I was down here for the funeral. I said I’d be very busy and couldn’t meet up with him. But I was so beautiful. And he really wanted to see me again. I was so beautiful. I was so beautiful. I was so beautiful. I was patient, didn’t lose my temper, realizing that being dumped by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere was one of many bad possible options. I don’t remember being terribly scared although I knew I was in a bad situation. I knew I needed to keep my cool and act ‘nice’. I know women chomp at the bit at having to act ‘nice’ to get out of bad situations but that’s how the world works when men are bigger and stronger than you. It’s not a particularly female thing. Smaller men confronted by bullies and other ass-kickers often have to rely on their wits, too. I remember being mostly annoyed that I had to put up with this shit for hours because Mierda -For-Brains wasn’t gonna let it go, no matter how much I tried to turn the conversation away from my alleged beauty. When we got to Southampton I said just drop me off at a popular diner on Route 27. I’d call my cousin and he could pick me up. They insisted on taking me all the way to East Hampton. First we were going to their house where we’d switch cars; the driver wasn’t going with us, and we’d switch to Romeo’s car. Oh yay. This was turning into the longest night of my life and I was well aware that it might be my last. We loaded my shit into Romeo’s jeep and headed out, even though I kept trying to talk him into just dropping me off at the diner. No no no, he insisted on taking me all the way to my cousin’s house, presumably so he could spend another half hour nagging me for a date. You’re so beautiful, if you say it often enough eventually she’ll wear out and spread her legs for you! Every man knows that! It’s never failed in the history of the world! I did some quick risk calculations in my head and realized I had a near-zero chance of getting raped although murder was still a small possibility. There was so much shit in the jeep there was barely any room for either of us to sit, much less sexual assault. And outside, it was so cold and raining so hard I found it highly unlikely he could keep it up long enough to rape me. Dumb shit I did: When we finally got to my cousin’s house I kissed him as thanks. I figured it was the least I could do because he did, in fact, get me to my cousin’s house and saved me a motel bill and didn’t rape or murder me. And because I was nice. Far nicer back then than I am today. “I want more,” he growled in what I think he thought was a sexy come-hither tone as I pulled away from him and grabbed my suitcase. I wanted to yell at him, “YOU’VE HAD YOUR FUN, ASSHOLE!!! YOU’VE NAGGED ME FOR THREE FUCKING HOURS ABOUT A DATE WHEN I’VE SAID REPEATEDLY I HAVE A PARTNER AND I’M OUT HERE FOR A GODDAMN FUNERAL! YOU SCARED ME AND I THINK YOU KNOW IT! NOW FUCK OFF AND DIE!!!” But of course I didn’t. Because I was nice. And because I was hoping he wouldn’t shoot me in the back. That was one of the worst nights of my life because I did Dumb Shit. Don’t get in a car with a nearly-strange man, Part II This was the event that made me seriously question just what the hell is wrong with female psychology because, well into middle age, I put myself in danger because I wanted to be liked by a guy who I frankly found kind of boring. I’d met him a week or so previously when I’d walked into my apartment building and he greeted me and told me how pretty I was. Thank you, I said, and went on my merry way. He followed me down the hall and asked if he could get my phone number. He was tall and cute and several years younger and, well, I have zero problem with younger men, so I gave it to him. We talked, we agreed to meet at a coffee house. We spent about a half hour there, although talking wouldn’t be the way to put it. We made some small conversation but he didn’t seem to have much to talk about. He was from Italy, and I would be visiting in a few weeks. So we talked a bit about Italy and then there was nothing much more. He was cute, but boring. “C’mon, let’s go take a ride together,” he said. No, I said, I think I’m just going to go home. I’ll drive you home, he said. I can walk in less than five minutes, I said. He pushed, c’mon, just for a few minutes, so I did, even though I didn’t feel comfortable about it. We drove around for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, and when I asked him to take me home, he did. Customarily a drop-off happens at the entrance of my apartment building. But he drove down into the dark parking garage. “Hey, not here,” I said. He parked the car. Photo by Chris Cagle on Unsplash He started kissing me, and I obliged him a bit. He was much bigger than me, and I felt nervous, so I opened the car door a little. He didn’t object. Then he lunged for my breasts and I jumped out of the car. “Gotta go,” I said. I was rattled when I jumped out, but in the three minutes it took me to get to my apartment, I was really pissed. When he texted me he wanted to see me again I told him no and why. And he texted back, ‘But I want 2 see u again,” and I didn’t respond. He knew where I lived. I can’t remember if I’d told him my full name, but I was cautious for a few days after in case I ran into him again. I still blame myself, because I did Dumb Shit There was NO excuse for his behaviour. But…I did dumb shit. I put myself in danger. Well into middle age. I didn’t have the excuse of being a clueless ingenue. I was old enough to know better. That was actually the third time I’d gotten into a car with a stranger. The second time was several years prior after I’d moved to Canada and no longer had a car. I was waiting at the bus stop, some guy offered me a ride. I said no, I can wait for the bus. He asked where I was going, I said the mall up the street. Come on, I’ll take you there, it’s on my way, he said. So I got in, and he took me there, and he bugged me for a date. Fortunately it was only for a few minutes. I got out, thanked him for the ride, and that was that. But I noted to myself: No strange man offers to give you a ride who doesn’t want something. I put myself in danger three times. I made the same goddamn mistake. I Did Dumb Shit. I didn’t listen to my mother, and I’m pretty damn lucky things didn’t turn out way worse in any of those scenarios. I DO NOT now get into cars with strange men, or men I barely know anymore. Ever. Men are responsible for their own behaviour, and must never be excused from harassing, abusing, or attacking a woman. Feminists are right to keep hammering this lesson home because some of these thick-as-a-brick dimbulbs just don’t get it. Or, they do but their dick takes over and makes them do dumb shit. Aziz Ansari’s dick made him do dumb shit but at least he stopped when ‘Grace’ asked him to, who also did dumb shit by going to his apartment. Doesn’t matter if he was a celebrity. I think it’s a bad idea in the age of #MeToo ESPECIALLY if he’s a celebrity. Fox on Sex: It’s A Fact, Sex Makes Us Dumb I considered myself a pretty smart cookie back in the day, and still do today, although I find, ironically, the older I get and the farther past the rape demographic I get, the more cautious I am about strange men. I offer my dumb shit stories because there’s a pervasive trend in feminism in the last twenty years or so that holds that women are never responsible for getting sexually assaulted. Which is true to an extent — there’s simply no excuse for sexual assault, boys . But. Women still have to take charge of their own safety. We may never completely eliminate the possibility of getting raped or otherwise sexually assaulted but we can reduce — perhaps greatly — the likelihood. All it takes is one lapse of judgement. I got very, very, lucky with three of them. If I could do dumb shit like getting in a car with a man with all my years of experience, the temptation will be even greater for younger women with less experience and feminine wisdom, with their own overblown opinion of their own good judgement. “I can handle myself!” Maybe you can. Maybe you can’t. But do your very, very level best to not do dumb shit. Because bad judgement can happen at any age. And ruin your life. This first appeared on Medium in June 2019. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Porn created by women *for* women had to be light-years better than male-created porn, right? Right? Photo by Arianna Jadé from Pexels Feminist porn? WTF? Porn created by women for women? I jumped at the chance to attend Toronto’s Feminist Porn Awards several years ago. I knew women were making female-centered porn which I assumed, I hoped , meant it would suck less than male porn. My friend Janessa, far more a connoisseuse of sex, kink, non-cishet sex, and big dicks than I, headed eagerly to the Bloor Cinema to watch porn we expected wouldn’t involve a lot of tedious pounding of female orifices and ejaculations on faces, which has always struck me as disrespectful at best and degrading at worst. The music was far better with none of that mow-wow-wow crap and the camera work with an iPhone! —  an iPhone! —  was light-years better than I would have expected. The acting was clearly consensual , the actresses quite proud of their work, and, as one might expect from women who don’t have a male porn-manufactured objectified view of what’s attractive, they represented different body types. No cookie-cutter plastic-boobed underfed Barbie Dolls tiresomely found in male porn. No conveyor belt of gorgeous ready-to-go-don’t-need-no-stinkin’-foreplay women served up for the pleasure of guys who got the role because genetics favored their manly parts. Porn Is Intrinsically Toxic For Men (And Women Too) We watched foreplay, diversity, the female perspective and real orgasms, and a few told an actual story. This fulfilled my greatest fantasy for female porn — a plotline! Too bad it was even more boring, overall, than male porn. The WTF-ness of ‘feminist’ porn I’ve never been a porn aficionado, for all the usual reasons many women have. What’s in it for me? I saw some when I was in college. Sometimes it was hot, but usually, after ten minutes it got boring. I mostly laughed at the notoriously bad acting and the ridiculous Superfly-’70s-era music soundtrack. Git down ’n’ funkeeeeeeehhhhhh!!! The women were always raring to go, even with vintage porn’s famously ugly guys catering to male fantasies: The ugly guy always nailed the hot chick. I’d read about a female porn industry but never investigated it. Given how boring I found mainstream porn, it was hard to get arsed even about this. But I wondered: What does it look like? What would I consider exciting, erotic porn? For Janessa and me, the Feminist Porn Awards were even more disappointing than sex with Donald Trump must have been for Stormy Daniels. An hour of our lives we’re never getting back. While we agreed we didn’t find any of it erotic, we understood the movies’ appeal to others, given the contenders had been chosen to display the wide variety of female sexual fantasies and desires utterly lacking in mainstream porn. Still, some of it was so un-erotic we’d turn to each other and go, “What the fuck was that all about?” The first movie is best referred to as Trucker Chick, and ranked as the most unerotic porn flick I’d ever seen, at least until we got to the next one. Trucker Chick spoke to her lover — I’m unclear as to whether said lover was male or female — about how she’d wait on the highway for them to swing by and maybe take her somewhere for what sounded like dom-sub sex. LoverCritter didn’t show up and Our Heroine got gang-molested (not raped; this was the most sexless porn ever) by truckers emerging from the shadows. Um, ewwwww. What made me uncomfortable was how this came less than six months after a horrific gang rape and murder on a bus in India . However, the movie was too lame to be offensive. There was no sex or hot men. Just a lot of quick-cut artsy-fartsy scenes and images, interspersed with a seemingly unrelated subplot, if you can call it that, of some other chick being tied up in a pretty damn uncomfortable position from the ceiling. Not the last we’d see of that in the next hour. The next was so lame neither Janessa nor I could figure out who the hell would find it erotic. A woman in a white satin shift, in a dark, dirty-looking warehouse, hands tied behind her, jumped a rope twirled by various men who looked to be the brothers, boyfriends, and maybe husbands of the production crew rather than from a cattle call on Mandy , standing outside the spotlight. Creepily, I thought, they encircled her, watching her sweat her ass off jumping rope and bizarrely, drinking whiskey on the rocks and smacking their lips. Again I say, and Janessa was with me on this one, WTF?!?! Is there some bizarre female jump rope fetish we don’t know about? Every woman is different and many of our fantasies might be utterly mystifying to others, and I can understand one about enjoying the male gaze — I am, after all, an ex-belly dancer — but not dorky-looking guys drinking and watching me jump rope semi-bound. Chacun à son goût, as my mother likes to say. To each her own. Number Three featured full-frontal nudity and actual sex in the form of masturbation. Once again set in a dirty old building. Tight budgets, I guess. It didn’t do much for me but it was straightforward, and it wasn’t all artsy-fartsy WTF like the first two. The next was the closest any of them came to the sort of porn I might want to watch, even though it left me filled with hot raging — ennui. Its imaginative storyline appealed to my sci-fi side but still failed to fulfill my cis-heteronormative tastes. A married couple watch porn while having sex. The wife, with a click of the remote, brings the man in the video into their bedroom, where he joins them on the bed. A threesome, right? I hoped for something I hadn’t seen yet — intercourse between a man and a woman, but at no time during this hour did we see any woman’s vagina penetrated by dick. Maybe I’m too cis-het ‘vanilla’ for feminist porn. The biggest problem was the unconvincing actor playing the husband, who was clearly gay from the moment he stepped on screen. He tried to play a man attracted to his wife but it was akin to watching Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory allegedly fall slowly for Amy. Jim Parsons was too gay to convincingly pull off an asexual-turned-heterosexual geek. Not coincidentally it was a gay man who directed this entry. Big freakin’ surprise. While the wife’s vagina never came anywhere near either dick, we got to see some big body builder’s manmeat pounding the little husband in the ass — which by the way took it so easily I concluded the actor who played the husband was likely a veteran of gay porn. Is this what lesbians do for fun? The next was another masturbation piece bringing new dimension to the word ‘lame’. A gal in a latex suit lubed herself up and took a swim in a nearby pool. Oh yeah. Oh baby. It’s so hot. Another featured tying a woman into an uncomfortable position and hanging her from the ceiling. No nudity, no actual sex, just one chick doing her best to suspend my disbelief. I leaned over to Janessa and asked, “Is this what lesbians do for fun?” She’d know better than I, the little bisexual hedonist who’s done shit that would make Traci Lords turn blue. She didn’t get it either. The only film making any sense to us as eroticism was one about a physically disabled woman (Actual Porn Star name: MIA GIMP) who uses a special walking crutch that clacks down the street. She fantasizes about running and masturbating with the crutch. I guess this is what the selection committee meant when they said they chose diverse entries. We figured okay, if this is what folks with disabilities want to see, clack on, my friends! The last was the most comprehensible Not Our Sort Of Porn but it met our expectations of true porn — it had nudity, sex, and made sense rather than leaving us with the chronic WTF? feeling. The new boyfriend walks into the bedroom where his attractive girlfriend waits. They have a discussion about his family whom she’s about to meet. She confesses there’s something she hasn’t told him and starts removing her clothing. The gal is a natal man in transition. I failed to notice the penis in the underwear as it was undersized, due I assume to hormone treatments. Her body was otherwise fairly female, although she still looked a little male around the torso. The boyfriend is clearly vexed but he doesn’t say anything, he helps her finish undressing, thinks about it a bit and finally does her in the ass. We understood how this was a transgender fantasy, being accepted by the new boyfriend when he found out. Porn with a plot for boring-ass cis-het chicks ‘Feminist’ sounds like a bit of a misnomer for what I saw at the ‘Feminist’ Porn Awards. What we watched wasn’t political or ideological, just more inclusive. It lacked what I dig most: My boring-ass vanilla taste for cis-het man-penetrating-the-woman. Also, it still mostly lacked anything resembling a plotline. My experience with porn is limited; I probably haven’t seen anything produced after 1985. The few I’ve seen include the end of some sci-fi thing with a guy in a black outfit and a Woolworth’s C3PO mask getting blown by a woman who had trouble getting him to cum on her face. I haven’t seen Sylvester Stallone’s porno from like 1971, and what you see of it in this three-minute trailer shows zero nudity or ‘mature themes’, and he looks kind of silly and weird, but it’s STILL more erotic than anything I saw at the Feminist Porn Awards. Ladies, we can do better…! Taboo II from the series explored how the family that lays together stays together. My ex once brought home The Erotic Adventures of Alice in Wonderland which wasn’t too bad. Alice was an uptight virgin who embarked on a kind of cute journey of sexual discovery. One I liked, and watched again recently on YouTube, was Young Lady Chatterley II. Among its many charms included Adam West as a dorky repressed professor who finally gets laid. It wasn’t Oscar-winning storyline material, for sure, but it beat My son has a big thick cock, I think I’ll fuck him. Do you know what I’d like to see for feminine porn? Women’s romance novels, brought to the silver screen in all their throbbing-manmeat-penetrates-her-quivering-moist-love-flower glory. If nothing else it will eliminate all the tedious tortured descriptions of sex and genitalia necessitating the author’s ever-more-desperate search for descriptive euphemisms, a big challenge when every other scene is down ’n’ dirty and she had to search for ever-more-obscure euphemisms she hadn’t used yet. I’ve never been a fan of bodice-ripper romance novels, mostly because the heroines are too wussy for my taste (once again, I haven’t read anything written since probably 1985) but with a little modernizing to make them stronger heroines, it would work better. Or rework real movies as porn has always done. Chris Hemsworth starring as The Gunslinger in The Good, The Bad and The Underlaid! Ryan Gosling as The Lifeguard in Beach Blanket Bang-o! Salvatore Esposito in Under The Tuscan Buns! Justin Bieber in A Hardon Day’s Night! Marie Clare has listed 75 Porn Movies With Great Plots And Better Sex. I’m up for a few extra suggestions. Good, feminine, cis-het porn where the woman gets penetrated at least occasionally by guys. It’s out there somewhere, to quote The X-Rated Files. CC0 public domain at Pxhere Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Have you got the labia to challenge your friends’ choices? Photo by Philipp Wüthrich on Unsplash She was so damned cute, reddish-brown hair and big brown eyes. And she had no idea. Why would she tolerate the emotional abuse from her ex? She could get a way better guy. Without even trying. He’d dumped her for reasons I no longer remember, but kept calling her, stringing her along, making her hope he’d come back to her. He tortured her with stories of his new women, and she listened. She listened. She accepted his phone calls. And cried. She gave him permission to abuse her emotionally. That’s called ‘blaming the victim’ in modern feminist parlance, but my mother called it ‘being a doormat.’ “Why the hell are you even talking to him?” I said. “He has no respect for you. And he’s cruel, bragging to you about his other alleged women, knowing how you feel about him. Why don’t you find yourself a real man, one who knows how to treat you properly? Never take a phone call from this asshole again!” You know why she allowed it. It’s the Achilles heel of female psychology. “It’s because I luuuuuuuuuuvvvvv him.” I don’t know if that girl, who I met only once at a party, took anything from that exchange, but I knew a lot of women back in my twenties who tolerated all kinds of abuse from men. There are women who are willing to take it, and women who aren’t. I’m the latter. I have never been physically abused by a man and I never will be. I would never allow it . Girlfriends don’t let girlfriends make excuses Feminists are too nice when it comes to stopping male partner abuse. They’re willing to politically challenge abusive men but are much less willing to challenge the choices women make that lead them, however unwittingly, down the path to partner abuse. The first choice a woman makes is in deciding who to allow into her life. The next choice is how she will allow him to treat her. And for how long. If she grew up in a family or culture or religion where women have less power, where misogyny is institutionalized and she’s indoctrinated to believe it’s her place to be submissive to men, she may have low self-esteem, not that that’s a unique problem for anyone, including her abusive partners. Welcome to the entire human race. The reasons why women permit abuse are multifaceted and complicated, so my interest is in how we can identify and challenge our friends’ choices earlier rather than waiting until she’s in the shelter and you’re thinking, I know he owns guns. Here’s something else to think about: Now your life may be in danger too. He might come after her friends. You knew he was bad news. You didn’t like him the first time you met him. You didn’t like how he looked at her, how he treated her, how he casually dismissed anything she said, how he subtly put her down and told her what to do. And she did it. You were appalled, but you said nothing. Later, she complained he was controlling and threatening. Why do you put up with this? you asked and she gave some bullshit excuse. Then she changed the subject and you let it drop. Why didn’t you challenge her? Maybe you were afraid of hurting her feelings. Or of pushing her closer to him. Or you thought it was none of your business. It’s time for us to challenge ourselves, to challenge our friends more, when they make choices you know are going to lead to a bad end. We can’t just let her walk down that path to abuse. And we have to find our own inner strength to do it. Have you got the labia? Stop Male Abuse When It’s Happening…Maybe? It’s hard. You don’t want to lose a friend. But you might not. What if she listened to you? It might take awhile, but what if she knew you didn’t approve of her partner and you made it very clear whenever she complained about him that you would never allow a man to treat you like that, and that she was far too good for him, that he didn’t deserve her. And to point out that the longer she waits, the harder it will be to leave him. To get out now while it’s still relatively safe. You’ll help her. So will your friends. You’ve got her back! How many of us have the labia to do that? Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels How can we nip abusive partnerships in the bud? In what passes for much of today’s ‘feminism’, the woman is never wrong. She’s never to blame, never a contributing party to any dispute that ends poorly for her. In a noble desire to correct legal and justice abuses of the past in blaming the victim, whether it was rape or domestic abuse, feminists have jumped the shark. Yes, in the past attention focused on the woman—What was she wearing? What did she say to make him so mad? — rather than the man with anger issues and zero impulse control and who actually broke the law. Regardless of what she said or did, it’s no excuse to beat her up. If she’s violent with him first, he needs to get to safety and call the police, not smash a decorative geode against her skull. Feminism today has sacralized ‘don’t blame the victim’ and turned women into eternally weak, helpless girl-children. By the time feminists turn out to help an abuse victim she’s endured far more trauma than was necessary. How can we nip abusive partnerships early before they escalate into far less manageable and dangerous problems? We need to stop tolerating abuse. Not just in our own lives but with those friends and loved ones who do tolerate it, who make bad choices , and even more critically, don’t learn from their mistakes. We especially need to gently but firmly challenge women who keep cycling back to abusive partnerships. Something in them is broken, some synapse fails to fire, and they need help bridging the judgement gap. Not yelling, not remonstrating, not asking judgmentally Why don’t you just leave him, but to ask more helpful questions like, Why do you let him treat you this way? Why do you let him control you? How far are you going to let this go? You weren’t like this in high school, what changed? Questions that emphasize her own personal power. She has it, she just doesn’t know it. She needs to be reminded, especially if she’s fallen prey to the popular cult of feminist victimhood addiction which infantilizes women far more effectively than any ‘ patriarchy ’. The feminist word for the day: Prevention. Like it or not, abusive partnerships start and proceed with the choices women make and continue to make. As we all know, the longer one stays in an abusive partnership with a man, the harder and more dangerous it becomes to leave. We all know the statistics on the heightened risk for a woman when she leaves an abusive partnership. This is why it’s absolutely critical that we address how to help each other avoid these partnerships before they begin. In many feminists’ perfect world, men stop abusing women when all of them finally get the message. In my perfect world, and I think more realistic fantasy, abusive men can’t laid because no woman will put up with their shit. Change, or die incel. What If Women Refused To Have Sex With Abusive Men? It’s easier to fall into an abusive partnership when a woman is young, less experienced and so desperate for boys or young men to fancy her. Especially in junior/high school when there’s so much pressure to have a boyfriend. When it’s wired into women’s brains to please others, augmented by socialization that reinforces it, and addled by raging hormones that reduce their ability to think straight when they’re around Captain Superhot, young women will do just about anything for his attention, including overlooking his misogynist comments or inappropriate remarks about her body parts he finds most pleasing (or doesn’t). I remember what it was like. I used to put up with that shit too. Plenty of young women can challenge their friends when they recognize what their hormonal friend can’t see: That Captain Superhot is really kind of a dick. We have to have the labia to stand up to abuse not just when men perpetuate it but when women tolerate and make excuses for it. We aren’t living in the Third World. We have agency, power over our lives, good jobs, and we’re educated. Even if we haven’t gone to college, we can still self-educate. We don’t have the excuses that our less-empowered sisters elsewhere have. We can make choices. And we do, every single day. The challenge: Show some labia! (Figuratively…) Sometimes those choices are poor, or downright awful. We need to kindly but firmly make it clear that abusive men, whether their abuse is physical or not, should never be tolerated. We need to help her figure out why she settles for low-quality men when there are so many great ones out there who aren’t abusive dicks, who know how to treat a woman, and who are getting overlooked because they’re not ‘bad boys’ or hypermasculine (both of which are big red flying Bad News freak flags). The #1 Red Flag Of The Abusive Man After all, you as the friend have skin in the game too. Her bad choices might lead to you being stalked, harassed and threatened too. She has no right to put your life in danger like that. She has a responsibility to her friends and family when she makes partner choices. REAL friends don’t want her to get hurt, or die. And a quick note for men Ditto. Don’t tolerate abusive, toxic women. You’re too good for her. Don’t let her physically abuse you. The moment she starts hitting, get out of her vicinity, call the police, and later, you can tell her she either gets therapy for her anger management and impulse control issues or you’re out of there. That’s what REAL equality looks like. You don’t have to put up with her shit, either. This first appeared on Medium in September 2019. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

And here’s why it never happened again Photo by ramzi hashisho from FreeImages (cropped) “Ugly dog!” I heard that a lot my last two years of high school. Mostly from Dan. We were in the same vocational class which meant three or four consecutive periods of togetherness. He also liked to call me Wolfwoman, and he called a suspiciously gay friend of mine Tinkerbell or Tink for short. Dan had some serious masculinity issues of his own. He was crazy about wrestling and his idol was Sergeant Slaughter . He was forever trying to get the other guys in headlocks. Make of that what you will. He loved to walk around the classroom intoning, “He a MAN!” Especially if one of the other guys did something he thought was unmanly. He was always pointing to his dick as though someone should give him a blowjob. As though he’d ever known what female lips felt like down there. He almost got fired from his grocery store job when he made homophobic comments at my suspiciously gay friend while he was shopping with a neighbor. The neighbor insisted on reporting Dan to his boss who forced him to apologize and warned if it ever happened again he'd be fired. Dan was my worst bully in high school. I was angry at him for years after. For all his declarations that I was supremely hideous and no man would ever want me, I never knew Dan to have a girlfriend in high school. One day Dan hit me. Our lockers were next to each other and that was always a prime opportunity for verbal abuse. I forget what our altercation was about, but he whacked me upside the head, and then skittered away, just like a five-year-old boy. Yeah, right, he a MAN!!! I was really pissed, but I let it go. What was I going to do, chase him down the hall? What a wuss, to hit a girl and then run like one. But, I already knew the school principal wouldn’t do anything about him and neither would the teacher. Back then, no one worried about bullied teens bringing guns to school. Good thing, because Dan remains the only person to this day I ever felt like I could have murdered if I’d known I’d get away with it. That was kind of a scary thought at sixteen, thinking that if I was alone in a room with a knife and Dan and no one knew we were there, that I might kill him and do the world a favor by ridding it of one useless and (in my mind) irredeemable bully. I was too young to realize he’d eventually outgrow it. It took him awhile, longer than the rest of us, but he’d finally become something resembling a man by our five-year reunion. When he called me Ugly Dog or Wolfwoman I’d call him Yellow Belly and ask if he was still fighting girls. One day, he hit me again. I knew he would. This time I was prepared for his hit-and-run. We’d been outside the school working on a class project together, Dan and I and maybe one or two other classmates. He’d been his usual abusive self, and in the hallway he didn’t like that I wasn’t moving fast enough with something and he whacked me upside the head like the last time. And of course he ran away — he was taller than I — laughing. Nicole and Dan prepare to meet on the field of battle. Ugly dog photo by Faithnow22 on Flickr and Yellow-Bellied Marmot by Alan Vernon (CC0) I went back into the classroom. He came in a few minutes later, lugging something heavy and laughing. “Hey Nicole, is your ear ringing?” WHAM! “Is YOUR ear ringing, Dan?” He dropped his heavy load and came at me. This time he wasn’t going to run away. He also wasn’t going to get away with hitting girls without the entire school knowing about it. I’d planned for this moment for nearly a year. I went for his face with my fingernails. When he realized what I was going to do he turned around and kept his face away, so I clung to his back and scratched viciously at his neck. By the time our other classmates pulled us apart, Dan had ugly red streaks on both sides of his neck. I kind of regret not taking the opportunity to take one last swipe at his face after the fight ended. If you’re wondering where the teacher was, he was in his back office smoking up a storm as usual. By the time he came out it was all over. Now Dan would have to explain to everyone the next day how he’d gotten those scratch marks on his neck, and admit to fighting with a girl. I’ve always wondered what he told his father that night. Was Daddy-o sympathetic, or was he ashamed of his son for being a big wuss? I mean, who was teaching Dan to be such a pseudo-masculine wanker? Although it’s possible that Dan was just a dick. He never hit me again though. I knew he wouldn’t. We got along better, too, with only the occasional insult tossed at each other. Now I had a new one. “Hey Dan, are you still fighting GIRLS?” I guess it was the only way he was ever going to touch one unless he grew up. Until then he had to settle for touching guys under the pretense of pulling wrestling moves. I often wondered over the years, and occasionally discussed with my gay friend, whether Dan was actually a closet homosexual. He was more homophobic than most teenage boys, many of whom outgrow it. Although he refused to call me Ugly Dog at the reunion, he hadn’t outgrown the homophobia. I accepted his Facebook friend request many years later because I was dying to know if he’d finally come out of the closet. His profile indicated he was married, with a photo of his son. Congrats, Dan, you finally got laid! Once, anyway. No man has ever hit me since then. I would never allow it. Obviously, you don’t always know it’s coming. And you can’t always fight back like I did with Dan. But you don’t have to tolerate it either. You especially don’t have to go back for more. My mother taught me never to tolerate abuse from a man, and that’s how I grew up thinking about it. That getting hit sometimes happened, but that you always had a choice as to whether it would happen again. Maybe not always, in some cases. Like if the abuser is in your family. Or you to go to a school where they’ll never address bullying until some kid blows away the ninth grade. There are other ways to fight back than physically. Like leaving the guy after the first incident, when it’s far less dangerous than after getting whacked around several more times. Or filing a police report. The reasons why women don’t do this are complex, but we need to talk more about the importance of getting out early and not returning and giving tacit permission to do it again. Because it is permission. That’s not a popular idea with some who think we should keep the focus on telling men not to hit women. I say that’s a feminist pipe dream and in the real world, women have to protect themselves. Because we have the power to decide how we’ll be treated. Not all women understand that, and unfortunately, they’re not always going to learn that from feminists. I want them to know they do have the power. I want young girls like myself back in the Jurassic days to know this, very early. They’re not all going to grow up with a mother like mine, who taught me to never, ever, be a victim. So we have to teach them NEVER to accept abuse. The challenge starts with ourselves, and our friends. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Life is hard for men too. Deal with it. Image from Claudio_Scott on Pixabay North American women do love to complain. It’s a privilege of living in one of the two most advanced, modern cultures in the world, where they’ve got it immeasurably easier compared to women in days of yore, including the world I was born into. “It’s so haaaaaaaaard to be a woman today! It’s just exhausting!” I think the worst, the very worst part of being a woman in North America is having to listen to educated women of all types whine like little girls about how haaaaaaarrrd it is to be a woman. Oh please. Shelly Fabares had it right in Bye Bye Birdie. If it’s that hard to be a woman in 2022, you’re doing it wrong. When there was still a patriarchy thing Okay, I’m a lot more experienced at being a woman than most. I’ve been at it a lot longer. When I was born in the Mad Men era, women couldn’t own credit cards without a co-signer, had a harder time getting an apartment of their own (because she might Have Sex), couldn’t get a legal abortion in most places nor could she get birth control (See: Punishment. Having Sex. Nice Girls Don’t.) She also couldn’t attend certain exclusive schools. When people asked me that dumbass question they love to ask six-year-olds, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I said I wanted to be a nurse. I didn’t see a lot of career options. Like, also, mommy, secretary, teacher. “You could be a doctor,” my feminist-in-denial mother said. (She hated ‘those damn women’s libbers!’) “I can’t be a doctor!” I protested. “I’m not a boy!” “Girls can be doctors,” Mom said. “No one’s stopping them.” “Whoever heard of a woman doctor?” I asked, drawing on my vast experience with the only doctor I’d ever known. “There are women doctors,” Mom told me. “They’re just not very common.” Who knew there weren’t laws against this sort of thing? Victory for women? Move along, nothing to see here! When I entered university the Computer Revolution was underway. It was a little chickie-boo who liberated the (male) masses by smashing the patriarchy (literally) Feminism had a harder edge now, and young women like myself took it for granted we could be whatever we wanted. We had big-ass shoulder pads to prove it, too. Somewhere along the way, though, everything went — if you’ll pardon the expression — tits up. Women lost their edge, sort of pretended to be empowered, but their message became just — weak. They talked about this patriarchy thing as though it was the source of all evil. Patriarchy exists in regressive, retro parts of the world, but here in North America it’s more of a geriatric Fox News-addled old crank. Hey, great news! Harvey Weinstein just got sentenced to 23 years in prison for being a mass rapist! Not long after Bill Cosby got sentenced! Time to celebrate, right? Well, at least women didn’t *vote* for Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby… Dude’s 67. He’s going to die before he serves his sentence. What did she want, the Braveheart treatment? Let’s note: For once, the white rapist got a longer prison sentence than the black rapist. I mean c’mon, Weinstein’s been getting away with this for years. And Cosby even longer. Almost as long as I’ve been alive, when Sunni Welles became his first alleged drug rape victim . Honest question: Do women not report sexual assault more because they won’t be believed, or because feminists keep telling them they won’t be believed? Instead of celebrating a second big win, women downplay it and claim there’s no justice for women. Because Trump, or something. Victim feminists have a major phobia against ever admitting women are making progress every damn day. Naomi Wolf wrote a whole book about it. Mama Didn’t Raise No Victim Feminist No matter how good things get, no matter how much better women have it, no matter how privileged we all are, no matter how much justice we do see, no matter how much the rape rate has gone down (63%) since the early ’90s, (and maybe a few extra percentage points since Weinstein got arrested) all too many feminists can do is complain about niggling details instead of tackling real problems facing women, like how we can make it safer and less stigmatizing to report sexual abuse immediately. Some see a victim of patriarchal exploitation that only values women for their sexual release value; others see an empowered woman unafraid of her own sexuality or what others think. What do *you* see? Creative Commons Zero — CC0 on Pxfuel Men have it hard too Of all the stupid mental junk food modern feminists gorge on, the most ridiculous is the notion that men have it so much easier. You’d think life was just a cakewalk in the park for men compared to how haaaaard women have it in 2022. To be sure, men still possess an unequal amount of power, and let’s stop colorizing it, because in many parts of the world where women live with genuine patriarchy, their oppressors often aren’t white. ‘White privilege’ didn’t protect dozens of women from Bill Cosby, either. Men find existence pretty damn difficult too, and they’re dealing with a lot of the same problems women have. What’s the Hardest Part About Being a Man? I’m a Doctor and I Struggle to Help Men With Depression It’s no picnic being a man, either. I read a lot of articles about all the things women claim they aren’t ‘allowed’ to do. I’m not sure where that comes from. I see an awful lot of the very same messages to men , too, of all the things they’re not ‘allowed’ to do. Those forbidden things may be different from what women aren’t ‘permitted’, but men still receive numerous negative messages about how they’re supposed to be and act. They can’t have feelings, they can’t cry, they have to define themselves by work, they have to be strong and stoic at all times, real men don’t ask for help. They can’t complain if they get beaten by a woman. Or raped. Yes, it happens, and not always by another man, either. It’s difficult to ‘be a man’ when you have to be on constant guard against the Homo Police. Sociologist Michael Kimmel writes about it in Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. “Homophobia — the fear that people might misperceive you as gay — is the animating fear of American guys’ masculinity.” Teenage boys in particular police each other for signs of ‘gayness. It sounds exhausting. “It’s not like I want to stay in that box,” says Jeff, a college student. “But as soon as you step outside it, even for a second, all the other guys are like, ‘what are you, dude, a fag?’ It’s not very safe out there on your own….But now, in my fraternity, on this campus, man, I’d lose everything.” Men buy into society’s toxic lessons, as do women. Just type “women aren’t allowed to” in the Medium search bar, look at the articles it retrieves, and ask just who’s holding all these women back. Is The Patriarchy holding guns to their heads, or are they blaming men for their own lack of labia? It’s time for all of us to examine toxic social messages and ask, “Do I have to mentally consume this garbage?” Life is hard. For everyone. One thing that hasn’t changed for humanity since we first crawled out of the ocean 400 million years ago is that life is pretty damn difficult no matter who you are. Although we live longer and richer lives, we still torture people for fun like they did in the Middle Ages, although now it takes the form of bullying and abuse — gay-shaming for boys, slut-shaming for girls, fat-shaming for everyone. We are still tribal. The worst punishment is social ostracism, and we always find ways to push others to the outside. It’s universal. Life is hard no matter what historical time period you live in. It’s hard for everyone; all colors, all genders, all preferences, all religions, all cultures. While there are countless competitors in the Victimhood Olympics, I’m not sure there are any clear winners. How much one ultimately suffers is correlated to their degree of mental health, and how much they’re willing to torture themselves. How to make it easier to be a woman What makes our suffering worse is when our egos feed us narratives that make it all about ourselves. This is why I roll my eyes at feminitwits who are always droning on about how ‘misogyny’ and ‘patriarchy’ are everywhere. They invented much of it. Seriously, these obsessions are piling misery on Western women in an already miserable world. These ideas have their place, but mostly in textbooks, not between one’s ears. It’s painful to watch women mentally stab themselves over and over again with toxic interpretations positioning themselves, or women in general, as victims. Girls just want to have fun, but perma-victims live to suffer. 11 Instances of Everyday Sexism lists a few, to my eyes, miniscule misogynies women have to live with: ‘Shaming’ for having our period. Um, maybe in cultures where it’s still taboo, but in North America? What, because feminine hygiene products are still taxed in some places? Because trans women had to put up with the indignity of the Venus symbol on their sanitary napkins? (Is it just me, or do trans women activists seem even more entitled than born women?) Being told to smile. Maybe there’s only so much resting-bitch-face people can put up with on the train in the morning. Men should smile more too. Congenial faces might help to reduce some of the misogyny and misandry in the world. Can someone send Greta Thunberg a memo? Getting ignored by co-workers. Yeah, because that never happens to men. Missing out on networking opportunities. What, does LinkedIn have a virtual ‘pink office’ somewhere? ‘Mom shaming’ for not being a good enough mother. Do men have anything to do with this??? Has there ever been a mom-shaming on social media that didn’t involve a gaggle of self-righteous, supermommier-than-thou stroller tank jockeys? Being expected to have orgasms from intercourse. Okay, no one needs that kind of sexual pressure but I’d like to point out: When I was born, feminists themselves could barely find the clitoris, much less men. Be glad he even knows what a female orgasm is! Can You Find All 15 Signs Of The Patriarchy In This Picture Of A Tugboat? (Warning: Satire!) I want to scream, “Stop telling yourself such nasty stories! They’re not true! You’re poisoning yourself, and women!” People have it hard in a toxic society that grows ever more toxic every day. Suicides are at record rates , up 33% for Americans since 1999. Stress is up too. Teens rival adults . Racism is linked to faster aging in blacks , but white men still kill themselves at far higher rates than black men. So much for how hard it is to be a woman. It sucks for all of us, kids. It’s not a competition. Deal with it. Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!

Systemic discrimination isn’t just to your disadvantage. It’s to mine too. CC0 2.0 photo by InvestmentZen on Flickr I’ll admit: I don’t have all the answers. I have a lot of diagnoses, and I do occasionally offer some answers, but they tend to piss off anyone resistant to the notion they have personal agency and might share some role in where they’re at. What I do know is this: United We Stand, Divided We Fall ain’t just a cheesy-sounding motivational poster phrase. It’s for reals. We’re proving it right now. Tribalism divides us equally — what’s called ‘identitarianism’ on the right, a dog whistle for ‘racism and other assorted bigotries’ — and ‘identity politics’ on the left, a dog whistle for ‘woke identitarianism and other assorted bigotries’. I’m tired of all tribalism. Tribes are drawing lines and saying You have to do this to make our lives better. You owe us this. You have harmed us. Keep your hands off our cultural shit, because, you know, it's ours , not yours . The antiracism movement is famous for this. Many want 'slave reparations' to compensate people who have never been enslaved from people who've never owned slaves. While I recognize the United States was founded on mind-bogglingly brutal systemic discrimination and injustice based on owning other people — dividing ourselves up with ever more precise labels (I’m a pansexual tripartite half-black one-quarter Native American Libertarian Satanic Scientologist who identifies as a Japanese otaku) and fighting for only our own tribe (of like two or three?) makes no sense. It sounds cheesy to say We’re all in this together, because we don’t believe it, but we really are, especially with the most non-racist enemy ever closing in on us all: Climate change. We’re going to be together a lot more closely in the coming decades as we began congregating in the islands of North America and elsewhere where climate change will be somewhat less traumatizing than wherever you live now. Midwestern Red States with an influx of California liberals moving east: I hope I’m still alive to see that! It may sound cheesy and ’60s and all kum-bye-ya to say it, but I’m done with tribalist thinking. I reject your tribe, including my own. If you can’t play nicely with others, you are not of my new tribe: Us. Not U.S. Us. Screw your tribes, and mine too Why am I fed up with you and your tribalism? I read Kurt Andersen’s book Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History. It’s a forty-year revisitation describing how conservative masterminds remade America with subtle, behind-the-scenes political and economic changes, benefiting those with money and privilege and creating the yawning chasm of inequality we experience today (and if you’re still well-off, Matt Taibbi’s ‘vampire squid’ siphon is coming for you too). It’s a depressing slog through How The 1% Did It. I won’t get into the details — if you haven’t read it, buy it or borrow it. It’s an eye-opening read, especially if you’re old enough to have been an adult through all this mishegoss. You’ll find yourself nodding and thinking, “I remember that! So THAT’S how they did it! Holy crap, I had no idea at the time.” I had a news junkie friend who had a bit of a nose for prophetic news a while back. Fifteen years ago he regularly forwarded articles he thought interesting. One, from the mid-2000s, warned of the danger ARMs — Adjustable Rate Mortgages — posed to the global economy which came to pass just a few years later. A couple of years later, they came to pass in The Great Financial Apocalypse of 2008. Another article warned of the dangers of growing economic inequality, and how the poor had been siphoned dry, and the working class almost there, and how they were coming for the middle class next. This is exactly what happened, for many new members of The Class Formerly Known As Middle after the GFA2008. Trillions in investments were lost by people who weren’t super-rich, and those trillions went somewhere. Hmmm? ‘Middle’, of course, meant ‘mostly white people’. (Off-topic question: How much money does a black person have to make before they become a Republican? Discuss. Debate. Explain.) The article also warned the money will continue to flow upward, which meant the higher classes will come next, except for those able to scramble higher. But — now our ‘slightly betters’ can’t find people to work for them, since they’re unaccustomed to paying living wages to those losers, which puts their businesses and livelihoods in jeopardy. The 20% ‘haves’ will become 10% and then the 5% and then the 1%. Then, it will move to .5%. Unless something changes. Now. My bud’s articles didn’t speak much about climate change (though he sent articles about that too), and virtually nothing about pandemics driving many to commit suicide by conspiracy theory, which may change or delay the prophesies but the pattern is clear: We’ll get there eventually if we permit it. We can’t fight it with tribalism. Group-rights protests are critical for change but they can only accomplish so much when your message is You have to change a system that benefits only my people, not your people. How can social justice movements get everyone on board? What’s in it for me? The system doesn’t work anymore even for us privileged white folk. Some people just haven’t gotten the message yet, and that’s a whack load of white people and male people. You know, the ones at the top of the power hierarchy. I’ve begun to imagine what it might take to equalize the system for all of us. I’ve assembled some random thoughts on this to get others thinking. I have no hard answers, and even if I did we couldn’t implement them any time soon, perhaps even for generations after the Trump Epochalypse. But we have to think differently. Tribalism ain’t working for America and it never has. Not white supremacy and not identity politics — two sides of the same corroded coin. It only worked — and works — for some, and you can recognize an inequality system by its volume of civil unrest. CC0 2.0 photo by Chad Davis on Flickr The system ain’t working, period. Creative Commons CC0 2.0 photo by GoToVan on Flickr Here’s what I randomly muse when I’m out walking. Not all white people are created equal White skin isn’t the magic ticket to everything you ever wanted and a hassle-free, stress-free life the way I suspect some people of color imagine. Their 'Kyles' and 'Karens' are the Critical Race Theory antiracism set's stereotypes of the incels' 'Chads' and "Stacys'. If melanin deficiency was a fix-all, there’d be no such thing as Trump rallies because we’d all be sitting around in our hot tubs sipping Dom Perignon and checking our investments. We wouldn’t worry he might actually return in 2024. Republicans have juiced white fears of loss of privilege and power-sharing because they know how to manipulate their white inferiors. How all white people live, as envisioned by the CRT-addled. CC0 2.0 image by Christopher Porter on Flickr Trump supporters are what the Soviet Union's Communist Party called ‘useful idiots’, or people too ignorant and uninformed to fully understand the goals of the ruling party seeking to undermine them. Including some of the better-off ones who think the money siphon will pass them by. The system doesn’t serve many Trump supporters much better than it does POC, although MAGAs may arguably get away with shoplifting more unless they look like heroin addicts. Green privilege trumps white privilege Money is privilege, and its brother is celebrity privilege. The latter is icing on the cake for those who want to break any law imaginable. It blows my mind to think how long Bill Cosby got away with raping mostly white women when you consider how many black men swung from trees or worse for the alleged crime of raping white women. Was there ever a guilty black man lynched? I’d bet not in pre-civil rights America. A black-on-white rape would be the equivalent of a Slut Walk protest in Afghanistan today. Cosby is accused of having committed his first rape back in the mid-1960s. A black man genuinely raping white women, and he got away with it! His victims knew damn well his green privilege (and possibly his male and celebrity privilege) outranked their white privilege. Even in the 1960s. My mind boggles, because back then, had it come out, I’m not sure what would have happened to Cosby. It’s conceivable he himself might have been murdered, especially if he ventured below the Mason-Dixon. He might today be A Civil Rights Martyr, rather than a convicted rapist recently released after serving less than three years in jail. Just like a white man. O.J. Simpson got away with murdering a white woman and her white male friend. He could afford the hugely expensive legal ‘Dream Team’ most black men can’t. Also, O.J.!!! Heisman Trophy winner! Record holder! First-time 2,000 yards in a season rusher! Movie actor! Hertz airport-jumping guy! “If [the gloves] don’t fit, you must acquit!” said Johnnie Cochran even as someone said they heard O.J. confess to former footballer-turned-minister Rosey Grier. Green privilege trumps white privilege far more than we acknowledge. Some of us have more green privilege than others and there’s where you encounter fifty shades of white privilege. Plenty of white people are now left behind with the ones who were always behind. Plenty more of us will be joining them soon if we don’t all start fighting our common enemy. The 1% is everyone’s problem. I’m okay with a world where we share wealth and power with people who don’t look like me because… I actually believe that United Negro College Fund shit I appreciated the value of education and learning growing up even if I wasn’t so fond of school, where I was bullied, but also because I was the same young dipshit most American kids are, more preoccupied with the opposite sex and TV shows than lessons I found pointless at the time. I learned to value education more in university, and I agree with the United Negro College Fund commercial from the '70s. A mind really is a terrible thing to waste. I often wonder what the world would look like today if women and POC had been granted educational opportunities sooner, or never been denied them at all. I wonder how many great brains, how many amazing innovations and brilliant insights we’ve missed out on because we rely so heavily on white male thought leadership? Sure, white people have innovated and invented many positive contributions to Western culture, but always built upon the innovations of people who didn’t look at all like us. Thank the early Muslim world as just one example, bringing us pioneering surgical techniques, hospitals, medical knowledge encyclopedias, algebra, trigonometry, geometry, pharmacology, and numerous other progressive innovations, before it descended into ignorant fundamentalism about four hundred years ago like the U.S. is doing today. What would a genuine meritocracy look like? What if we made HR’s ATSes (Automatic Trash Systems — er, I mean Application Tracking Systems) work for all of us, rather than overqualified young people willing to work ‘entry level’ jobs requiring multiple degrees for less money than a Starbucks barista? What if employers were forced to run applications stripped of identifying information into the system and evaluated on genuine merit? If you didn’t know the age, race, gender, or economic class of the applicant? And those systems were regularly audited by third-party impartial firms to ensure employer impartiality? And hiring decisions were made based on true impartiality? Sounds impossible but how rock-solid airtight our most contentious recent federal election was is why I think this is imaginable and workable. How equalizing would a UBI be? We’ve begun revisiting nascent UBIs (Universal Basic Income) in the U.S. and Canada, where mini-experiments in a guaranteed ‘mincome’ have been conducted for decades. Read about Canada’s most successful one , which debunked a lot of conservative myths about lazy humans and was, unsurprisingly, shut down by a Conservative government (although it was begun by an earlier one). In 2020, CERB (Canadian Emergency Response Benefit) kept many of us from sinking into economic oblivion by offering $2,000 a month to those who qualified. (In the U.S., taxpayers received three different stimulus checks.) My employment insurance payments had just ended and I still had no job thanks to purple squirrel-seeking ATSs and a heavy dollop of age discrimination, so CERB saved my bacon, along with millions of other pandemic-shocked Canadians. Today Americans receive additional stipends that cause employers to complain people would ‘rather sit on their asses than work’, an utterly ludicrous claim in a society that worships ‘free market capitalism’. As Biden sarcastically whispered, “Pay them more!” Believe me, when I finally got a job with a freelance sales agency that paid more than CERB, I happily departed, and I would much rather continue working for them than go back on (less) government benefits. Also, I don't feel like a parasitic loser. The cost of living is shooting up everywhere. Time for wages to shoot up too. If you can’t afford to pay people more you may not be bright enough to run your own business. Hey, Mr. & Ms. Former Business Owners, I hear Starbucks, Wal-Mart and Dollarama are hiring! G’wan, they’re dying for people not too lazy to work! How do *you* imagine a more equitable world? I’ve focused on ideas that will mostly outrage conservatives, but I don’t want to leave progressives out of the fun. Dealing with a voracious 1% for whom too much is never enough is our biggest crisis (or maybe climate change; or maybe the next killer pandemic). The left at least pays more attention to social justice for which I can grant them that, but it takes too many cues from Christian fundamentalism and identitarian politics. And while the right destroys lives with policies and mass shootings, the left destroys them with social media’s ‘cancel culture’. As Dave Chappelle said in his controversial Netflix special The Closer , “When you destroy a man’s livelihood it’s the same as killing him.” Nice work, ‘Progressives’! This first appeared on Medium in October 2021.Did you like this post? Would you like to see more? I lean left of center, but not so far over my brains fall out. Subscribe to my Substack newsletter Grow Some Labia so you never miss a post!