Tired of people's stupid questions? I'm tired of everyone else's stupid questions too, but I still answer them. No, this is not what I do on the sabbats. Image by Jean Louis Mazieres on Flickr "It's not my job to educate white people!" Man, it's tough to be a 'woke' black antiracist today. If a twelve-generation legacy of slavery, 100ish years of Jim Crow and Herschel Walker aren't enough of a cross to bear, you still have to keep answering Stupid White People Questions: "Why do you get mad when I say I’m colorblind?" “Do you really get followed around in stores?” “Don’t you know there’s black privilege too?” Nobody knows the troubles you’ve seen. “Is there really any such thing as ‘microaggressions?” “If education is so important, why do black kids accuse others who do well in school of ‘acting white’?” “But what about Ibram Kendi’s racism?” A little personal Googling would avoid the annoyance you feel at having to answer the same seriously dumb questions. Then there are the ones that push internal buttons because—well, erm, maybe they have a point? Some ‘dumb questions’ persist because antiracists would rather not answer them. They fall into two buckets: Truly Stupid White People Questions, and Uncomfortable White People Questions. Or male questions. Or religious questions. Or gender/sex questions. I understand both sides, the frustration of being asked the same questions about something over and over, especially when you want to scream, or maybe you actually do, “WHY DON’T YOU DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH? WHY IS IT MY JOB TO EDUCATE YOU?” For me, substitute ‘Paganism’ for ‘race’. Monotheistic folk, we Pagans are really, really tired of your dumb questions too. It’s not our job, either, to update or educate you on how modern Paganism has changed since the practices of Baal. FYI: No, we don’t sacrifice children anymore. I don’t care what QAnon told you. “Google, ignorati? Ever heard of it?” I don’t say that. I answer the questions, however truly stupid, and say, “Google Paganism and Wicca, it’s fascinating stuff. We’re sooo not like the pagans of yore. We’re all about human equality, spiritual power for women, protecting the Earth, the great circle of life and the web of human interconnectedness. Hey, it’s the 21st century, amirite?” Friendly chuckle! Pxfuel If you don’t want to ‘educate’ others, you’re right, it’s not your job, but ask yourself this question, regardless of whose dumb questions you get ad nauseum : “Would I like to be part of the solution, or the problem?” I can offer two reasons, as an exasperated Pagan, why you might consider the former. You’re changing the world one mind at a time Not everyone who asks questions is evil, stupid, or making fun of you. Often, there’s genuine inquiry behind it. I’ve chosen to be the solution. When you get angry and tell people off, you’re the problem. The first two questions I usually got when people found out I’m Pagan were THE most annoying, the ones that made me want to rip heads off. But I didn’t. “Do you worship Satan?” “Do you do naked rituals?” I politely tell them no, Pagans don’t worship Satan, and I add a little historical perspective: Satan is a Christian deity, not a Pagan one. He was invented by the early Church, and debuted in the New Testament. “Christians will argue Satan isn’t a deity,” I respond, “but I argue he is, especially among the fundamentalists, who ascribe almost the same power to Satan as they do to God.” It gives them food for thought. As to the always-salacious question about nudity in rituals… “Some do, I don’t. Geez, we live in Canada, and before that, I lived in Connecticut. Do you know how COLD it gets in both places? Ha ha ha! Then there are the summer bugs. Who wants to get bit there by skeeters?” Can I blame them for thinking we all get nekkid and shag each other in the circle? Whenever the mass media drags us out of the shadows (at Halloween) they often focus on the nekkid rituals some groups do that others don’t. Anything that appeals to the penis gets top billing. Not to mention all those Hollywood movies featuring gorgeous naked or nearly-naked witchyboos. Sometimes I’ve added—honestly— “Look, do you know what REAL witches look like? Geez, we don’t want to see ourselves naked, much less each other!" People are interested in alternative religions whether they’re spiritual seekers or curiosity whores. I can get mad and put them off, make them walk away and think Pagans are real bitches, or I can feed their curiosity and perhaps incline them to do their own research. Those who contend daily with racism, sexism, gender identity and other issues might consider how many minds they might change, or plant the seeds, when they answer ‘dumb’ questions. When you offload education efforts to Google, they could go down all the wrong rabbit holes If I told my ‘dumb questioners’ to just Google Wicca and Paganism, they might pull up fundamentalist propaganda along with legitimate websites and videos. Google is working to ensure their algorithms provide more reliable sources in their search results than in the past. Today, the first page or two of Paganism/Wicca search results look mostly respectable. A few years ago, before political pressure to reduce higher ranking of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and downright fake news-driven results driven solely by popularity, Google’s coveted first page offered a mixed bag of reliability and factualism. I hoped that, after talking about Paganism in a positive manner with a thumbnail sketch of what we commonly believe, that people would discount fundamentalist nonsense. Now you have to dig deeper into Google to find the crap. When I Googled, Are Wiccans Satanists? I found only one Christian-written article critical of Wicca by the conservative Focus on the Family. It provides a less hysterical Christian critique than I used to get years ago, and I’m not much nicked it’s on the first page. It’s targeted at parents whose teen girls may be showing interest in Wicca and brings up a good point about how it may appeal as a ‘mix ‘n’ match’ religion for a generation that eschews absolutes. Young unformed minds might not be ready for something like Wicca, not without responsible adult guidance. I disagree with some of the article’s contentions, and reject its argument that Wicca is wrong because the Bible is against witchcraft, but I can’t call it propaganda. Encouraging Google use offers you the opportunity to educate on the basics of responsible research. Social and political divisions encourage us to remain within our insular ‘bubbles’ of belief and only consult sources that substantiate our already-formed opinions rather than challenge us to consider others. You can’t trust mass media as much anymore. Researching growing sexual predation in the trans movement is Exhibit A in attempting to untangle fact from narrative, or outright fiction, from two warring sides with their own diametrically opposed agendas. Not only the right has a reliability and credibility problem. When I Google about transwomen raping or sexually assaulting others, it takes a little effort to locate the truth, starting with ‘truthiness’. The right-wing media is far more willing to report issues of men in dresses intimidating women with their genitalia, but twisted to their own narrative and sometimes outright false. Worse, the journey often starts with far-right sources. The Blaze? Intercept? Breitbart? The UK’s Daily Mail? I’ve run a lot of sources through Media Bias Fact Check over the years and these sources are all huge factualism fails, but that’s where you often start for the first clue about the trans movement’s uncomfortable problem. Left-biased sites mostly ignore these stories, so I’ll take the alleged offender’s name from the right-biased media, Google it, perhaps with quotes around his name along with ‘trans’ and maybe other key words, to see if there’s mention in more reliable sources. Which you can find, if it’s a real story, with braver websites willing to risk social media condemnation for ‘transphobia’, like The Guardian or the UK’s Unherd. Still, you can’t always trust these sources either. A fair chunk of them still bounce up and down in the MBFC ratings. I’ve seen Fox News ranked as high as Mostly Factual although they otherwise remain fairly stable at Mixed. The Guardian was ranked higher a few months ago, today it’s Mixed. CNN is the same, stabilizing at Mostly Factual far more than Fox News, but not enough to make them a reliably reliable source. Overall, the farther one travels down the bias spectrum, the lower the factualism rating, but even sources on both ends can get something just enough right to hint whether there’s a real story or grain of truth. MBFC offers brief summaries of fact checks the source may have failed or notes they have so far not failed a fact check. How many people, really, know how to properly research and pay attention to information sources, particularly who’s funding them? If MBFC doesn’t list their source, I encourage them to Google it, perhaps with quotes, and add ‘is it reliable’, or ‘who’s funding X’. I also encourage them to click the About link on the website to see who’s behind it and possibly funding it, which might influence its point of view. We all think we’re better at critical thinking than we are. But some are really lousy at it and won’t know The Intercept from the Associated Press (The AP is one of the least biased, most factual sources). We should try to guide people away from the Internet’s uglier rabbit holes. Now let’s ask you, the non-educator, an important question. Are some of those ‘dumb questions’ those you’d rather not think too much about? Some ‘dumb questions’ get asked repeatedly because they deserve answers they’re not getting. I intentionally ask ‘dumb questions’ of certain feminists still stuck in the ‘80s when women had less financial, economic and political power than we’ve got today. I ask because there’s real inquiry behind them and I’ll keep asking them until feminists stop hissing and spitting like angry kittens and answer them. Like, “Why does she let him treat her like that?” I don’t assume an abused woman will be automatically hunted down and murdered like some feminists think. I know abusive relationships usually happen gradually, with equivalent compliance from the victim. Not all abusers are physically violent, and not all violent ones are Stephen-King-character-over-the-top-psycho violent. Every decision a woman makes to stay with that guy is consensual (unless she’s trafficked), and sometimes she doesn’t understand she has a choice. But not all. Many domestic violence victims are educated, competent women, many go into it warned , making excuses along the way until they’re wondering how they got to the point where they could star in their own Lifetime Channel movie. I’ll keep asking my ‘dumb question’ until victimhood-identifying feminists acknowledge how much female choice and power plays a role in abusive relationships. After which, I hope, we can better educate girls and women on how to avoid toxic partners entirely. Other questions that make feminists squirm are, “How many rapists get off scot free when victims refuse to report and take them to trial? And, doesn’t that give the men permission to rape again, since they got away with it before, making the earlier victims partially complicit in future rapes?” I understand all the reasons why women wouldn’t want to put themselves through the ordeal of a rape trial, but they forget for whom it’s also quite an ordeal: The accused . Putting more rapists on trial will give them plenty to squirm about for several months, most importantly contemplating this uncomfortable thought: How pretty am I? Shit, maybe I shouldn’t have worked on my glutes so much at the gym! He might be acquitted, but he’ll be forever changed. His world will never be as safe, either. Feminists hate these ‘dumb’ questions. I keep asking them because they’re not. They’re questions that put others on the defensive because this ain’t The Battered Wife or The Burning Bed forty years ago. It’s today, and not all women can claim ignorance or lack of financial and personal power. There are logical, moral, and ethical problems with deniers’ stated positions. Every social justice activist will encounter squirmy questions. Truly dumb questions require patience, so you can educate others and not create animosity. I can’t believe we Pagans are still defending ourselves against Satanism but instead of getting mad, I put the responsibility for belief in Satan squarely in the lap of the early Christian church, where it belongs. Not-so-dumb questions demand answers. Antiracists tired of answering questions about ‘acting white’ or the still-high rate of fatherless black American families need to come up with better answers than “Educate yourself!” which sounds like they should start with themselves. People who claim transwomen are the real victims (and some are) need to answer for the blatant misogyny, entitlement, and traditional male aggression many trans activists - invariably transwomen - exhibit. If feminists want to end rape and sexual assault, they’ve got to think about why they aren’t willing to take difficult but realistic steps to end it. Related: The Woman Who Abetted Sex Trafficking Men who are tired of being blamed for everything wrong with the world must debate why they’re responsible for the lion’s share of violence against others. Some dumb questions are really dumb, but let’s answer them anyway. It’s not our job to educate others? If you choose social justice you signed up to be an educator. You quickly learn who to educate and who just wants to fight. I choose to be part of the solution, rather than the problem. Which do you choose? He's educating himself. PxFuel 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!

The left and right share much in common, including compassion only for the 'right' people "F'n snowflake." "F'n MAGA." Photo by form PxHere "Where's your compassion?" she screamed at me in a comment on another blogging platform. "Where's your brain?" I asked. We argued whether transwomen's rights were more important than actual women's rights. She hewed to the 'woke' narrative, I spoke for the Reality Community. I've pondered compassion a lot in the year since that argument (I got kicked off the famously far-left platform shortly after and wonder if she had something to do with it) and today I'd ask a different question. "Where's YOUR compassion? For women, Ms. So-Called Feminist?" Her heart was in the right place--after all, most of us can agree people have the right to live how they want without hassle or violence--but not her brain. She accepted uncritically the 'woke' metanarrative that how you identify is what you are, when clearly that's not true. Or no one would question Donald Trump's identity as the rightful, lawful President of the United States. Since women have been an underclass for forever and men only when they chose to don dresses and wigs and post endless narcissistic Instagram photos, my compassion for them is more limited than it is for, say, female prisoners - emphasis on the word connoting powerlessness - who don't want people imprisoned for sexual offenses sharing a jail cell with them. But still. Ms. So-Called Feminist had a tangential point. I'm low-TERF; just as one's right to swing your fist stops at my face, your right to parade your dick around stops at the same place. But I knew who I was heartless and uncompassionate about. Trumpers. MAGAs. White nationalists. Misogynist men. Did I just trigger you? How much do we have in common with 'those people'? I'll be honest; I can't stand fundamentalist Christians. I grew up in the United States and remember the modern day movement's birth. It started not with famously fundamentalist Ronald Reagan but during conservative Christian Jimmy Carter's reign, in 1976 with a mysterious slogan. Bible-thumping had left the revival tent and was about to be discovered with an annoying believer near all of us. The ignorati asked, "Found what?" which was their invitation to tell us about Jesus. I grew up in a nice mainstream, progressive Lutheran church and family, and we didn't like those 'Bible thumpers' much. I argued with them in college, left Christianity and later wrote many articles criticizing them in a local alternative newspaper which today I would regard as a bit extreme (my articles, not the newspaper). I still can't stand 'fundies', considering them Trump-loving fake Christians along with their fellow MAGAs, white nationalists, and toxic masculine males and fangirls. But I've begun to ask myself, "Why are they the way they are?" I excuse my lack of compassion, reasoning they chose who they are, their values, their toxic ideologies. They may have been born into a certain religion or culture, but they can escape it if they choose, along with their politics, values, and assumptions. But were they truly as free to leave as I thought? After all, everyone has a story, and negative beliefs imply it's never a pretty one. Sometimes life is like a difficult video game you can't shut down and walk away from when you get frustrated. Maybe you've tried to find a way out and you can't; you wander around forever trying doors that are locked because you haven't found the mystery device or life decision to liberate you. Learned helplessness teaches you God wants you here, this is your lot in life, you're not good enough and there's nothing much you can do but shoot meth and let Tucker Carlson or QAnon assure you it's everyone's fault but yours. Fundamentalist ministers encourage you to vote for the masters who prefer you in your place and persuade you to stay there, and God will reward you in death. We don't know the other side's stories, and we make ill-informed judgements about them. Why does that woman hate men so much? Because she's one of those hateful, misandrist feminists! But why? Why did she go down that path and not another? There may well be a tale, or several, of trauma and abuse involving males. Or maybe she was raised to hate men by her angry, resentful mother. Maybe men abused the hate into her. A cousin or uncle who molested her. Maybe she doesn't know another way, because she believes her own mental bullshit. Why does that asshole insist on living in a trailer park? Doesn't he know he should lay off the heroin and get his goddamn GED? Others have worked their way out of poverty; look at J.D. Vance! That MAGA isn't J.D. Vance and didn't grow up the same way he did and maybe he just gave up trying for various reasons, good or bad. It's easy to feel compassion for those we can relate to, with whom we've shared their struggles; less so for the ones with whom we have little in common. I don't understand why fundamentalist Christians hew to a clearly unscientific, historically flawed history to explain why humanity sucks - is it 'sin', or our complex, flawed brains? - but I try to understand why they choose that path. Maybe they prefer simplistic answers, or they prefer the deeper ties with a community of like-minded individuals. Maybe they're afraid of the responsibility a more worldly view entails. Maybe they see how screwed-up the rest of us are and think, "Not for me. I only need Jesus." It's an 'insular bubble', but so too are our own, wrapped up in our own little religions - 'woke', liberal/conservative politics, fan culture, 'furries', #MeToo. Traditional liberal thought is rooted in compassion for others and accommodating and debating other points of view. It's what drove blindly privileged white people to support the early civil rights movement, and heterosexuals to embrace gay rights. To ask the questions, "Why should a black skin matter when applying for a job?" and "What skin is it off my nose who they love?" The left's conceit is that we're more compassionate than Those Other People. Liberals, like conservatives, are imperfect humans too, less inclined to show compassion for those they don't think of as 'downtrodden' or in today's parlance, 'marginalized'. The left has fallen into the rigid trap the right fell into long ago. Give me that old-time Woke religion The seventies marked the fundamentalizing of the Religious right, and the late eighties the 'fundamentalizing' of liberalism. Today's highly illiberal extreme left is a 'woke' religion indistinguishable from fundamentalist Christianity save for its only difference - one God. Like their Christian brethren, they're more unforgiving of Those Others. When TV evangelist Jim Bakker fell from grace after a sexual affair with a woman in the '80s, Christians forgave him. When Jimmy Swaggart publicly confessed with tears and shaking voice to hiring prostitutes to perform weird sexual stuff, Christians forgave him. And then again when he did it again. They forgave Christian politicians for diddling other men - repeatedly - "Hate the sin, not the sinner" - and today have so abandoned Christian moral standards they voted for Donald Trump, arguably the biggest sinner the Republican party has ever rallied behind. Their 'pro-life' claims now lie in shambles with their support for Herschel Walker, a man of Trump-level stupidity with multiple baby mamas, who's paid for at least two abortions. Christian fundamentalists demonstrate what Buddhists call 'idiot compassion' for the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Idiot compassion is what Ms. So-Called Feminist exhibited when she asked where my compassion was for transwomen. I asked where her brain was because she should see transwomen aren't the same as born women mostly from the vehement misogyny coming from many. Putting on a dress and wig and calling yourself Mary Anne doesn't negate traditional predatory male sexual behavior. The 'woke', like Christian fundies, will forgive anyone who shares their own insular bubble. One wonders how the compassion game will politically unfold after a mass shooter targeted an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado last week by a male-born suspect identifying as 'non-binary'. Guess what? He hails from a right-wing, conservative Mormon family. Oh, the cognitive dissonance for both sides! Will the left condemn 'one of their own', if the accused turns out to be another right-wing extremist? Will the right excuse him for 'mental illness' as they always do with their own mass shooters, or will they fold in embarrassment that a crazy gender identity nut came from a conservative Christian family? The fundamentalism police Another commonality both extremes share is turning on each other for insufficient devotion to The Cause. Wokeists, like Christian fundamentalists, police each other like the Gestapo. The holy rollers keep an eagle eye out for sin, especially anything sexual, while wokeists patrol social media, looking for anyone who's not woke enough. If they find someone they don't like, and can't find a good reason, they'll dig back practically to the point of their target's birth to find something untoward that person said or did. Because, you know, the Holy Wokers themselves are sinless. Putting aside our own biases Ms. So-Called Feminist's question is worthy of all our consideration. I don't worry about my acceptance of transwomen. My TERFiness extends no farther than keeping men out of women's-only spaces until they can handle the responsibility, which I believe won't be for at least a few generations. Maybe a century or more. You don't erase thousands of years of patriarchal entitlement and objectification in just a few. I focus my attention on my far more visceral response for MAGAs and Bible Trumpers. I've read books about the chronically poor to gain some insight into why they're so uneducated, why they don't understand white privilege, and why they're so inclined to bigotry. I can never understand their lives as I grew up middle class. But I can try to understand what it must be like to go into debt over a rundown home, barely-functioning car or a health problem, and living a daily, endless struggle over paying the rent, the mortgage, their child's medication, and how they're going to keep their family eating. They don't have time to do anything but struggle - stress, anxiety and depression their constant companions from dawn to dusk. I can't understand the wokeists either, who, despite their fancy college educations, come across as hateful, dogmatic, and as ignorant as those for whom they have zero compassion. Fundamentalist Christians get one thing right: We can hate the sin but not the sinner, or bigot. Christians may imperfectly apply that themselves (which is why there's a runoff between the highly flawed Herschel Walker and a Democratic Christian minister in Georgia), so there's something the left has in common with 'Bible-thumpers': They strive, and often fail, to be more like Jesus and on the left, we strive, and fail, to be better people too. But not always. If we can see the error of our ways we can change, and many have. Obama got elected partly because Republicans fed up with George Bush's party extremism voted for him (like my father, who told me Obama was the first and only Democrat he voted for before his death). Some have left both the 'woke' because they're fed up with the lies, the hypocrisy, the misogyny, the racism, the anti-science, and the anti-intellectualism. They see identity politics are as hateful, dogmatic and loathsome whether the bigot flies a Confederate or trans-activist flag. CC0 2.0 image by thaths on Flickr CC0 4.0 image by Ted Eytan They look at the history of enforced left-wing politics (Communism), recount the human catastrophes that resulted in China, the Soviet Union and North Korea, and realize that living under Kim Jong-un is no better than living under Hitler. Compassion is good, and sorely lacking. Idiot compassion, unfortunately, is a pandemic. We'd do well, when we accuse the uncompassionate, to start with ourselves. So I ask: Who do YOU despise? 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!

If Jesus or Santa are too lenient, you can still punish the year’s sins with stupid costumes and a big-ass church Christmas pageant Every kid in church playing every star in the Milky Way. Photo by Ralph on Flickr Christmas is fraught with peril when you’re a Christian kid. If you’re not in one of those Santa-averse denominations you’ve got a lot to preoccupy you this time of year. Like how you’re going to be good for a whole damn month when you’ve had zero practice for the previous eleven. (Let’s just hope Santa missed last summer's allegations re the infamous Poconos Swimming Pool Incident.) Fortunately, Santa has beaucoup kids to keep track of and no sophisticated system to deal with it, like some super-network of clustered servers with AI-driven bleeding-edge advanced analytics fueled by an Apache Hadoop behavioral data-crunching ecosystem to extract who really is naughty and nice. If he did, he could save money only giving killer gifts to the exceptionally nice kids instead of all the ones who were ‘good enough’, as far as he knows, because he lacked the proper evidence to pin several suspicious incidents on them. Then again, maybe the robots really *are* coming for everyone’s jobs. The Hudson’s Bay Centre window on Bay Street in Toronto a few years ago. More than anything else, the most perilous peril you must survive to see how good you really are — the journey that truly tests your mettle as a kid deserving of the Toy Du Saison this year — is the dreaded Church Christmas Pageant. One of my starkest Christmas memories was being dolled up, my hair combed to perfection, and getting schlepped to church by my parents for that most holy rite all Christian children are required to endure: Saccharine-sweet parent-sanctioned-and-approved Christmas pageant performance humiliation. It was kind of a requirement at our Orlando church, I guess, to be part of the Christmas Pageant. I don’t know why, maybe to impress upon our young impressionable minds a lesson of the similar trials and tribulations Christian kids have been forced to endure through the centuries before we became holy crusaders, sadistic inquisitors and imperialist oppressors. You were doomed to this fate because parents love any opportunity to watch their hapless, helpless offspring dress up in silly pseudo-adult costumes and look ridiculous the way our parents were forced to do when they were kids. Probably in damp, chilly Roman catacombs. Today, with video recorders and this thing called The Internet, the Angel Gabriel with swords sticking out of his shoulders and the Virgin Mary in shorts ensure that Christmas pageant kids will live forever in infamy, globally. When I was one of the ‘little kids’, under ten or so, we got the same damn stupid thing to do every year: We’d be forced, under penalty of eternal damnation, to put on these dorky-looking white Puritan collars manufactured by sadistic church ladies, and even dorkier-looking large red ribbons which made everyone look like toddlers. Naturally, everyone thought we were hopelessly adorable which meant we’d probably be forced to wear them someday when we joined the senior choir. After forcing us to put on this outlandish gear, we stood in a row in front of the church, each of us holding a large construction-paper letter, so that we spelled out “Merry Christmas,” and then held up our letter in turn, the big dorky-looking collars and ribbons half-obscuring our cherubic little red faces, as we recited a line we’d been required to memorize. My mother took this solemn obligation so seriously — I was one of the ‘R’s — which was, “R is for Ringing of bells loud and clear!” that for three weeks beforehand she asked me to repeat it on an average of, oh, about every 10.2 nanoseconds, to the point where I could never forget this @#$% line even if I tried, and I still wake up in the middle of the night screaming, “R is for Ringing of bells loud and clear!” That’s (the future) Mary, Mother of Jesus standing next to me. The kid with the S was the minister’s son, who I guess used his influence to get out of wearing the goofy white collar, at least. That year my brother joined us at the tender age of two and a half as we were short one kid to hold the final ‘S’. Except he was too young to memorize the process of how to use the toilet, much less anything as complicated as an actual line of dialogue. Another kid said his line, but I liked to tease Brett years later that they wouldn’t let him say it because he had the intelligence of a tree frog. My mother told me to stop teasing my brother, that it wasn’t very Christian and that I lacked Christmas spirit. Like I cared. I was one of those older sisters who believed I’d been granted the privilege, nay, the God-given divine right, to pick on, abuse, and otherwise torture my younger sibling. Undoubtedly he will break down in front of a grand jury one day, confess to a five-state killing spree, and scream from the primeval depths of his baby-brother soul, “I couldn’t help it, she was always PICKING on me, she told about how we used to play Barbie dolls and dress up in Mom’s clothing before I could even talk, in front of all of my high school friends!” Finally I got promoted from the dreaded Big Bow Brigade to Chief Narrator for this Southern-town yuletide extravaganza, but it still irked the heck out of me because by this time, budding thespian that I was, I longed for the starring role, Mary, Mother of Jesus. But that part always went to my lucky friend Tina, which I always thought was because her adorable, angelic, blue-eyed Germanic face lent itself perfectly to the part of the Virgin Mother. Every year she brought all her Teutonic glory to the Eastern Mary’s part. She ALWAYS got to kneel in front of the church with that really cute boy I liked, What’s-His-Name, and stare down beatifically at the infant Jesus, played with much dramatic impact by a naked plastic Di-Dee doll wrapped in a spit-up stained baby blanket. My mother explained that my part was much better, because although Tina was a very nice little girl, she had all the reading skills of a weiner schnitzel, which is why all she could handle was to look beatific while I got a speaking role. But she still got to wear the Mary costume and sit in the spotlight with a cute guy who hated being Joseph because it looked like he was married to a GIRL, and the guys might think he LIKED Tina, who had GIRL COOTIES and would probably poison our budding little misogynist for life and tar him forever as Unclean. Meanwhile, I sat behind the podium with two other narrators waiting to read Luke 2:8–14, six lousy Bible verses to showcase the sum total of my aspiring acting talents, and there were never any scouts from Hollywood in the pews looking for the next Jody Foster Child Star of the 1970s. On the other hand, at least I didn’t have to wear that atrocious collar-and-bow monstrosity anymore! It’s no wonder, years later, I became a Pagan. Mom’s lucky I didn’t become a Satanist. We grew up. Tina eventually learned to read, then got married which ruined her for any future Mother of Jesus roles, and I graduated from my career as a narrator to a much less Christian incarnation as a Pagan belly dancer and computer sales dork. My baby brother, though, surpassed us all by learning how to speak coherent sentences. And how to use the potty. Used with permission by my brother. Brylcreemed hair courtesy of my mother, without permission, who made him sit still for 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!

Few recognized the evil of slavery for 400 years. Today's social justice warriors ignore our current greatest human rights moral failure. Photo from Rawpixel Slavery abolitionists weren't popular in pre-Civil War days. When there were cotton and other crops to be picked and money to be made, you couldn't find a more efficient business model than slave labor. The canny plantation owner calculated exactly the minimum cost for keeping his property alive and healthy (enough) and his biggest challenge was preventing slave rebellions or underhanded schemes like harming or hurting his family. Slavery ended when enough white, especially Christian, mavericks questioned the prevailing status quo and came to see slaves as less inferior than advertised (but still inferior), yet still not born to serve others in appalling conditions, but as human beings with the right to live their own lives as free (theoretically) as others. Needless to say, this didn't go down well with plantation owners who complained about 'lazy n***ers who didn't want to work' and wondered why they'd have to make less money when these n-words should have been grateful for being 'civilized' with Christianity and their basic needs taken care of (barely). The prevailing Christian narrative was that God intended Africans to be slaves and for centuries, no one thought to question the status quo because everyone dehumanized Africans and only an idiot would question the prevailing wisdumb. What never factored into the cost/benefits analysis was whether slaves might work harder and be less inclined to murder white people if they were no longer subject to hideous abuses and were paid fair wages. It's easy to judge previous generations and wonder, What the hell were they thinking? How did they not see the evil in what they were doing? Not like me It's extremely difficult to justify brutal, heinous practices if the targets are 'like me'. One must remove their humanity and see them as 'less than' to excuse otherwise intolerable atrocities. Once others become one's inferiors, one can justify their horrible treatment, or, if they're a modern-day social justice warrior, simply ignore it. It's more socially acceptable to champion black rights after George Floyd or child sex trafficking after Jeffrey Epstein, and damn our ancestors for slave culture because we're so much better than that now. But are we? What about the people we torture and abuse today, every day, and justify it by telling ourselves They're just animals. They've proven they're filthy animals. No, they're lower than animals. Animals don't do the horrible things they've done. They deserve their fate. They asked for it! [Trigger warning: Unpleasant self-violence and descriptions ahead] We deny their torture because the very worst aren't daily subjected to whippings, lynchings, 'the hogshead' (an older medieval torture adapted for recalcitrant slaves) or cooking them over a fire. What will be our own everlasting shame for future generations? Our equivalent, complicit 'slavery shame' 150 years from now? Soul death, soul murder Henry Hodges cut off his own penis in October of this year. The Tennessee death row inmate had been subjected to solitary confinement for thirty years and according to fellow inmate Jon Hall, “He’s suffered the most adverse unecessary (sic) & wanton neglect, deprivals, & mistreatment I’ve seen on death row. It’s a miracle he’s not committed suicide.” Hall complained about Hodges's treatment in the lawsuit he filed for himself for his own endless six years of solitary confinement. What had Hodges done to merit thirty years alone in a cell, with no windows, nothing to read, see, listen to, or do, allowed out only an hour a day for air and exercise, to stew in his own pre-existing mental illnesses, exacerbated by one of the cruelest punishments imaginable? He was no angel, for sure. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1992 for murdering a telephone repairman, and has been in solitary the entire time. Why? It's not clear. Solitary is where they put the worst of the worst, like Canada's serial killer Paul Bernardo, who raped, tortured and murdered two teenagers with the help of his wife in the 1990s. Prison officials put inmates into solitary on mere whims, or as 'punishment' for various infractions of the rules. Sometimes they're isolated to keep them safe from other prisoners, or vice versa. It can last for days or decades, with few willing to champion their right to be treated like human beings. Amnesty International, among many others including psychologists, call out solitary confinement as 'designed to dehumanize', not to mention torture. Where there is dehumanization, there is justification for any atrocity. Very few know what truly goes on inside prisons. When we think of 'torture' our thoughts drift to physical punishment like the hideous chambers of medieval Europe, where, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker notes, professional torturers raised the craftsmanship of inflicted human suffering to a high art form, led by subject matter experts who understood human anatomy and the science of maximum prolonged inflicted agony. Like the horrible things the most sadistic serial killers do to their victims before finally killing them (like Bernardo and now ex-wife Karla Homolka, the details of which have never been released to the public - nor the videotapes they made of the torture, sexual abuse, and murders). Like the vicious punishments, tortures, and endless cruelties inflicted on slaves in the antebellum South. But there's one torture literally worse, literally more painful than physical torture. Prison psychologist James Gilligan, author of multiple books on violence, violent men and how the prison system increases their suffering by hundreds of times, says 'soul death' is the very, very worst torture there is. It's what Henry Hodges suffered after thirty years of solitary confinement, along with thousands of others incarcerated. Gilligan worked with countless prisoners in his career, with a special focus on 'the worst of the worst': Those who had committed far worse crimes, and perhaps more extensive, than Henry Hodges. Men who had committed horrifying acts of mutilation, torture, sexual sadism. Serial killers. Serial rapists. Psychopaths. The crux, the core of what drove them, all these suffering men was "...the family of painful feelings called shame and humiliation, which, when they become overwhelming because a person has no basis for self-respect, can be intolerable, and so devastating as to bring about the collapse of self-esteem and thus the death of the self." He describes men whose souls have been literally murdered, something we can never understand because our own painful feelings can't teach us what it feels like to be "...so deeply shamed as to undergo the death of the self." When one is overwhelmed by shame and humiliation, he experiences "the destruction of self-esteem, the self collapses and the soul dies." When people can't protect or defend themselves against the unloving acts and violence committed on their bodies, including non-violent assault, "something gets killed" within them, their souls are murdered. When prisoners inflict deliberate physical injury on themselves like Hodges, Gilligan states they're as vicious to themselves as they were to their victims. Gilligan says, "...it is worse to feel 'nothing' than it is to feel 'something', even pain, which they don't feel while they self-mutilate, reassuring themselves that they'll feel pain later when they heal, which proves they're not a 'robot'. So great is their psychic pain that they long for death, but many expressed to Gilligan their desire to do it "in a blaze of glory" after killing as many people as they can. When that's impossible, suicide is a common option. A 2020 report on suicide and solitary confinement in New York state prisons found that "The rate of suicides from 2015 to 2019 is over five times higher in solitary confinement than in the rest of the prison system, and is likely much higher because of a lack of data on suicides in 'keeplock' and other forms of solitary." It would be hard to read the list of crimes any had committed and feel much remorse for them. But that's only if you don't know their backstories. And they all have them, extremely ugly ones, in which, from the moment of birth, they were subjected to horrifying abuse, neglect, bullying, shaming and sexual assault. Their sole 'crime' being born into the wrong families and circumstances. Gilligan, in his classic treatise Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic , says the ultra-violent criminals he's worked with over the decades feel dead inside, describing themselves as 'robots', 'vampires' or 'zombies'. And that's before their incarceration. The U.S. prison system, considered the most brutal in the industrialized world, magnifies it a thousand times. If you're still having a hard time mustering sympathy for 'the worst of the worst', and believe whatever's happening behind concrete walls can't possibly be worse than burning a slave alive as an example to others, consider this: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics 5-7 year data collection report on adult correctional facilities, it found there were more than 75,000 people in solitary confinement and that both black men and black women were 'over-represented in solitary confinement even more than in the prison population in general'. (A 2019 New York Times article argues, Slavery gave America a fear of black people and a taste for violent punishment. Both still define our criminal-justice system." ) Out of sight, out of mind. No one to witness the hideous infliction of pain on other 'inferior' human beings the way people once enjoyed public executions, whippings, and slave punishments. We don't know what physical torture happens behind feet-thick prison walls since the system famously doesn't allow journalists and other documenters in, although a few, like the one Amnesty International visited, did. While we might be inclined to think, 'I can't give a rat's patoot about what they do to a filthy serial pedophile in prison, and if solitary is the worst they can do to him, have at it!', we'd better think about how this might one day hit closer to home. Who's next? The nihilistic despair and hopelessness we witness in the U.S. prison system has begun to take root outside prison walls, boosted by a two-year on-and-off lockdown that sundered ties to family, friends and work colleagues. We think we had it bad when we resorted to Zoom to see anyone outside our immediate biological bubble, when one prisoner in solitary visited by Amnesty International hadn't been visited by another human being in twenty-two years. We're social animals and need human connection, even the filthiest of criminals. Even psychopaths. Reams of digital verbiage have been published over the pandemic detailing the further social breakdown already in place for decades. Suicide is up, along with substance abuse, domestic violence, and mass murder. It's a bit like the famously violent 1960s, but with better technology in place for mass slaughter and smash 'n' grabs and home invasions if you don't have the temperament for freeform violence. The next person who may know someone in prison, or might land in prison, is anyone who thinks That would never happen to me. Don't be so sure. None of us know what will drive us over the brink to madness, and I've had my own flirtation with it, about twenty years ago, when I felt so frustrated, powerless and shamed that I called a friend one night and said, "Help me, I'm about to consciously turn my life over to evil." My intention was literal. Long story, and the ugliest part is I wasn't even being abused, I suffered more from entitlement than anything else. But I never forgot that night and it's why I've become interested in why people become evil. Not the 'monsters', the serial killers, Josef Mengele or Communist dictators (Stalin/Lenin/Putin/Mao/Jong-il & -un). The rank and file. The common man. The 'good little Germans', and the people who enjoyed a helluva lynching on a Saturday night and went to church the next day listing a bunch of silly-ass sins during confession. This is all of us today, pointing to the prison system. We are not unlike the crowd in the photograph. The complicit. The collaborators. The prison system is the shame we do not know, and don't care to examine, just as white Southerners turned a blind Christian eye from the horrors and evils of slavery. It's hard to acknowledge evil when everyone also looks away, and especially when everyone outside benefits. Sure, we've got to get violent criminals off the streets, and some can never be rehabilitated and released. But they may not be beyond redemption, either, and those who are unaware of or ignore Gilligan's body of work on the root causes of violence, and especially American violence, will be on the wrong side of history once our nation civilizes itself enough to realize the current prison system is as much a moral stain on our historical legacy as slavery is to antebellum America (including the North). Gilligan speaks of stumbling upon the discovery that some of these horrific human beings were capable of helping their fellow inmates by raising their literacy. They taught others how to read and write so they could navigate records and legal content. Others learned how to cook and made meals for other prisoners. They developed a purpose in life, and self-esteem, and contributed some good to the world. Finally. Let's remember, it wasn't their fault entirely either. Childhood abuse has been consistently, definitively fingered as a primary root cause of violence in adults and no one alive today can claim they don't know that. We choose to ignore it. We don't report it. We are complicit. We collaborate in creating the future monsters of America. Each of us may be the future monster of America. I doubt Twitter will be around in a hundred years, not because I think Elon will destroy it before Christmas but because it will be a 21st-century buggy whip. I also don't know whether we'll choose civilization or descend into chaos, madness, and failed-state status by then. But I do believe this: One day we will arise again as a people, look back on a past no one alive by then remembers, and damn the twentieth and twenty-first century America for its clear and horrific shame. The U.S. prison system, in a more civilized America, will have undergone reform and prisoners rehabilitated, reintegrated into the outside world when viable, and finding reasons to live rather than self-mutilate if they're not. We will have stopped torturing them the way we once tortured witches, heretics, and slaves. We will civilize ourselves. Photo from Pexels 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!

If you could step through a portal back to 1st-century Bethlehem on Christmas Eve... Image by Gerd Altmann on Pixabay, altered by author "Imagine there's a portal going back to first-century Bethlehem on Christmas Eve. What gift will you bring the Baby Jesus?" Suspend your disbelief for a moment if you don't believe Jesus ever existed. It's the question I posed for my friend's weekly Virtual Cocktail Hour, held every Friday at 7pm since the beginning of pandemic lockdown. After we moved beyond historical criticism ("There's NO evidence to prove Jesus ever existed!" Archer reminded us in that stern manner of your third grade teacher who was quite quite quite tired of reminding you that silly story about George Washington and the cherry tree never happened ) we began talking about what we might bring and what the ramifications might be. We had a week to think about it. The night we answered the question Archer, our hostess, felt compelled to remind us in case we'd forgotten what she'd said the previous week, "...the gospels are not a good record of Jesus's life AND how they portray someone who wasn't all sweetness and light." This ignited some discussion on whether the Gospels portrayed him accurately at all, since not a single scrap of any Gospel was an original, none of the writers knew Jesus and everything was written after Jesus's death. The history of Bible translation is one of countless errors, relentlessly piled one on top of the other over the centuries by monk after overtired monk, everyone working from copies of copies of copies. Maybe the originals are lying around in a cave somewhere, a la the Dead Sea Scrolls, waiting to be discovered by some shepherd boy looking for his lost goat. Skeptical Archer's gift to Baby Jesus was lots of writing materials so Jesus could explain his goals in his own words. She'd give him lots and lots of paper and a whole whack of ballpoint pens. No trusting to a bunch of later religious fanatics to get Jesus's words right. Let him tell us in his own words, and preferably lots of them. Especially those lost years between twelve and thirty! While Archer is the inveterate skeptic, I'm the pain in the ass critic who finds the flaw in every plan. How long would ballpoint pen text last in the desert, I asked, even if it was preserved in jars in a cave? Also, who can translate it all from the original Aramaic? Janie wanted to give Jesus a camera so we'd know what he looked like, prompting her partner Cameron to joke that he could borrow it and take it around Bethlehem getting girls to do nude selfies and telling them, "Don't worry, only Jesus will ever see it!" Public domain photo from kevinwgarrett on Flickr If the camera was an iPhone, would some brainiac, like maybe Plotinus or Hypatia of Alexandria, find it later and accidentally engineer something malevolent like someone did with the Terminator's damaged arm to one day turn into the malevolent Skynet? I wondered as well how long an iPhone would last in the desert. Would the iOS's NANO RAM chips preserve the photos of Jesus or would they degrade over the millennia? Especially if the lost goat peed on it. Buzzfeed publishes the first-ever photo of Jesus. Chaos ensues. Let's just hope Jesus remembers to delete all the photos of those hot Gallilean chicks before he throws it away or they're sure to wind up on the slut-shaming Internet 2,000 years later. Heck, no one ever even thought their embarrassing photos from the 1980s would one day come back to haunt them worldwide. But there they are. I myself considered Jesus's safety. His unspeakable end wasn't necessary, as far as I was concerned, and if I could save him from one of the worst tortures ever, I would. To be perfectly frank, I think Jesus was a good man and a wise teacher in many ways, but he needed to watch his mouth. Let me tell you, when they 'cancelled' people back in first-century Palestine for shit that pissed them off, they didn't mess around. I said I would bring some teachings from the Buddha on 'right speech' and mindful words, which would have been historically doable for Jesus as Buddha lived a few centuries prior. But if others are going to bear an iPhone and Bic pens, now that I think about it, Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends & Influence People would be a much better choice for dealing with those Pharisees. Sometimes, Jesus, it's not what you say, it's how you say it. And hopefully he'll be able to speak more diplomatically, if I can find someone who can translate the book before Christmas. But if I was trying to help Jesus save his own tuchis , Archer's husband Dan schemed to give Jesus something to do besides wandering around as an impoverished teacher shooting off his mouth. If nothing else, Jesus would love him forever as the guy who gave him probably his best gift ever. Dan planned to give him a full set of carpentry tools. "Great gift, Daniel of Toronto! My heart is filled with great joy!" "Glad you like it, Jesus. Whatcha gonna build first?" I think I'll invent 'the bathtub''!" CC0 2.0 image by James Shepard on Flickr (Even as a child I wondered why the Three Kings didn't bring the Saviour practical gifts, like toys!) C'mon, this is totally a better gift than frankincense. "Go long down the marketplace, Peter! I'm throwing for the touchdown!" Cameron clearly had porn on his mind that evening as he wanted to give Jesus a Playboy and a camel, since every growing boy needs inspiration and wheels! I'm quite certain that magazine would have gotten Jesus into a lot of trouble when his mother found it, and she would have. Mothers have a sixth sense about these things. If there's a porno mag anywhere within eight furlongs of the kid she will hunt it down, roll it up and whack him upside the head with it. It's hard enough to hide stuff from your mom in 2022, where exactly would Jesus put it? He couldn't stuff it under the mattress, he probably slept on the ground. There was no basement to stash it somewhere, and his father would have found it when he was down there building cabinets or something. Jesus might have gotten a helluva whuppin' for that. He might have been so upset he jumped on his camel and went riding off to visit Mary Magdalene, who was known to 'comfort' unhappy boys from time to time. To be found in a cave in 1947, slightly damaged with a yellow stain. Image by Mark Mathosian on Flickr Other suggestions were a nice casserole to support Mary (but make it vegetarian as meat and cheese must not be mixed in accordance with Jewish law) and maybe a nice box of Pampers. Although Mary will really miss them when they're gone and she's washing out cloth diapers again in the River Jordan. So what would you bring the Baby Jesus? And why? Tell me in the comments section! 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!

Seriously, police partners are as big a risk for women as are biker gang hubbies CC0 4.0 original image by Ted Eytan A Newark, New Jersey police officer was found guilty in early October of murdering his estranged wife in 2019 along with the attempted murder of her boyfriend. He leaves two now-motherless children and a shameful father in jail. John Formisano didn't deny shooting them but claims he 'blacked out' from a 'mental defect' that made him incapable of wanting to shoot the wife he was divorcing. But it didn't stop him. There was something faintly OJ-ish about the crime, like he borrowed the idea of returning forgotten glasses to his wife a la Ron Goldman, late at night. Prosecutors alleged it was a pretext to get her to come downstairs. He parked on a different street and loitered outside her bedroom window before entering the house. It was hard for Formisano to argue it wasn't premeditated as he fired at both parties a total of fifteen times. Blue silence Look, I get it: There's something deeply attractive about a big, strong man in a blue uniform. A few years ago I stood on the sidewalk against a building watching the Toronto Pride Parade. Standing next to me was a burly helmeted cop in sunglasses doing his policeman thing in a large crowd: Looking powerfully badass in case anyone's thinking of pulling some shit. It's a pretty effective established practice for a parade begun in 1981. Our Pride Parade has never suffered a single death, although there are the usual pre-parade threats. The cop next to me was sexy, no doubt about it. I let myself imagine what it must feel like to be protected by someone that strong, if I was his domestic partner. Then I wondered if he beat the crap out of his wife with impunity. Big strong masculine he-men are a giant red flag. Especially those in violent professions. Cops have a 40% higher domestic violence rate than other professions. They often blame stress for their violent actions, but it ain't stress. The domestic violence rate is considerably lower for other high-stress professions like doctors and paramedics. It's, rather, a desire to control others, a critical skill for cops, which attracts the sort of man who already believes he possesses the right to control others--primarily women. While we debate whether men with domestic violence histories should be allowed to buy and own guns, maybe now's a good time to address another class of Men Who Are Too Violent To Have Guns: A fair number of policemen. Not all cops, of course. Only the ones with a domestic violence record. Which is rather a lot of them. This naturally begs the question: Why are these guys allowed to be cops? Black Lives Matter has been asking the question for years, since police have a long and documented history of using violence against black people, often without provocation. Training surely has something to do with it, but plenty are already violent, and it may not be immediately obvious during the job application process. He might be an abuser but without a record; and once he's a cop, any domestic violence complaints will be utterly ignored at best. If you think the justice system is unresponsive and unsympathetic to women abused by their partners, just look at what doesn't happen when the abuser wears a blue uniform. Or harasses a fellow female officer , which is fairly common in big-city police departments. A cop will sooner lose his job smoking dope than he will beating the snot out of his wife or raping a fellow police officer. In California blue abusers plead down to violent misdemeanors which allow them to keep their guns. In a seventeen-year period in Chicago, 5,280 domestic violence complaints were filed against Chicago police --that's 310 per year!--and resulted in 'no real discipline at all'. Police in Australia don't give a crap if any of their own are terrorizing their wives; and Canada, along with other countries, may be arguably 'in the Stone Age' when it comes to confronting the police domestic violence problem--in Montreal and Halifax, less than one percent of blue abusers may face a criminal charge, versus 6% in the U.S. Women who report domestic violence by one of those entrusted with keeping the populace safe from harm encounter the infamous 'blue wall of silence' whereby the police protect their abusers with the loyalty of the Vatican to its own abusers. A Canadian journalist came to explore the problem of blue abusers when a friend working with domestic violence survivors told her the majority of her clients came from women married to policemen, and biker gang members . Let's be 100% clear on this: Falling in love with a cop greatly increases one's risk of becoming a victim of horrendous domestic violence, and it's unofficially perfectly acceptable to the rest of the police force. Good cop/bad cop We, as women, need to think about and challenge more the appeal of the 'bad boy', i.e., the violent male. In popular media, he's portrayed, if the producer hopes to attract a female audience, as a violent, protective, 'traditional' male but who never whacks around his wife, girlfriend, or burgeoning love interest. Contrast this with movies that regularly portrayed abuse of women as normal, especially in a romantic setting, decades ago. Brigitte Bardot got smacked around a lot by hot guys back in the '60s. Movie partner abuse by bad boys became less common later, perpetuating the mythology, tailored for women's fantasies: He's violent with everyone except her. I recently re-watched Sylvester Stallone's Marion Cobretti ride off into the sunrise with Brigid Nielsen clinging to him on his motorcycle as the end credits roll in the 1986 movie Cobra and I wonder, what happens after that? He's the most violent cop on the force, famous for 'catching bad guys' as his partner tells Nielsen's character, a beautiful supermodel pursued by a vaguely evil cult after having witnessed one of their murders. After Cobra commits ridiculous amounts of city property damage with his car (a vintage 1950 Ford Mercury, at that), his lady fair watches him take the law into his own hands by catching the bad guy, impossibly hanging him on a hook through his back and then pulleying him into a furnace. The next morning Bridgey rides off with her new boyfriend and, what, they live happily ever after? He never hits her or threatens her or shoots her entire family? She never wonders what he might do if he ever became displeased with her? Like if he began to suspect she was screwing other men, however wrongly? Where I differ from other women is wishing I could meet a guy like Cobra, even if I could get past the horrifying and 100% illegal bad guy execution. I know Cobra is a fantasy . Men similar to that character, cops or not, rarely confine their violence to 'bad guys'. They take it out on their families. They especially take it out on women, who can't fight back. If I saw a guy like Stallone in a bar I'd watch and lust from afar--and keep it that way. I wouldn't want to talk to him. Just looking at someone like that in real life makes me want to run for the ladies' room if he turns his gaze toward me. Reform, not defund After the 2020 George Floyd protests swept America, the harsh spotlight on the cops revealed a widespread tolerance of violence against blacks. Even if the number of white cops killing unarmed black men turned out to be far less than realized, the stats showed they did target blacks for higher levels of non-fatal violence. It's not just a requirement, it's a job perk! Ridiculous calls to 'defund the police' come from those quarters privileged enough not to have to deal with crime on a daily basis, and roundly rejected by those who do, i.e., poor, primarily black communities. Cooler heads call for reforming the police. The debate needs to include a frank discussion of the tolerance of domestic violence in the blue line. Reform won't happen quickly, and not quickly enough for those wives and children tethered to abusive husbands and fathers against whom there will be near-zero recourse to protect against his abuse, or his desire to kill any of them. Police brutality discussions center almost exclusively around violence against people of color, which is only a percentage of police violence. For every famously violent encounter between black men and white cops that ends badly for the former, there is a near-equivalent story of a white man who fared as poorly. It's not a game of Who Is The Most Abused, but tallying how much we all need to deal with one of the most violent professions, whose threat extends far beyond people who may be committing criminal acts, or people arrested, abused, and murdered for existing while black. Not just black men. Or black women. Cop violence affects everyone. The best way to persuade people to join your social cause is to show them What's in it for me? As selfish as that sounds, it's universally human. We're more likely to fight injustice if it is for, or includes, our own group. You won't get black people to jump on board by talking about how unarmed white men are killed more often by cops than black men, and they are, but by defining What's in it for me? Which is why I want women to be aware of cops' high domestic violence rate, before they fall for Mr. Big Strong & Manly. It's on us as women to take responsibility for making good partner choices. Not all cops are abusers but how does one tell until after you're married to him or have moved in with him? Hollywood sells us the fantasies we want to believe in, which is why Disney princesses and Harry Potter are so popular with children, locked in seemingly dull middle-class families dreaming of finding out they're actually special little princesses or wizards. After little girls grow up, we're sold the fantasy of desperately sexy hypermasculine men, but we're not told the full truth - that as violent as he is, he often doesn't hold back for the weaker sex. It's incumbent on us to stop believing the lie, and to warn others. As we debate how to reduce the unnecessary use of force in police work, for everybody aggressed against by police who may or may not be doing their job, we women need to analyze the hypermasculine fantasy when we confront the hypermasculine reality. Because in the real world, the beautiful supermodel might find herself on the business end of a lethal weapon when her ex- or soon-to-be-ex-husband Cobra shows up seeking vengeance for her audacity in leaving him because she's not sure she'll survive another beating. Not that her ex-husband needs to be a cop for that. But it sure increases the odds. 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!

But the trans movement sure has become a gynophobic, homophobic word salad. It's time to reclaim our words and meanings. Public domain photo by petcor80 on Flickr The wheels are beginning to fall off the transgender bus. Maybe it's because of new management at Twitter, now run by a 'free speech absolutist' except when he's not. He doesn't seem much interested in refereeing trans battles even though he's got a trans kid. And he's probably too preoccupied at the moment crying into his MyPillow about his lost $200B . Gender identity critics are getting bolder, and women are directly challenging angry men who watch too many Kardashian and makeup how-to videos who arrogantly continue to tell women who is and isn't a woman, and to lecture lesbians to get over their vaginal 'genital fetish' and suck some (lady)dick already. It's finally turning into a long-awaited 'Emperor's New Clothes' awareness except people are pointing and saying, "The Empress has a dick." In case you haven't gotten the latest news from TransWorld, gender dysphoria is no longer a prerequisite to being 'trans'. Tweet saying you don't have to be gender dysphoric to be trans, you can just be gender congruent. What's 'gender incongruence', you ask? I didn't know either. It means pretty much the same thing as 'gender dysphoria', except it doesn't have 'dysphoria' in the label, so if you're feeling, you know, more 'incongruent' than 'dysphoric' you can still be trans and drive your family crazy with 'another goddamn label' when you come over for dinner. The increased language fuzziness points to continuing efforts to groom those of us who aren't 'trans' into accepting broader and broader (ar ar) definitions of 'female' and 'male' (but mostly female) as well as what's considered 'gay' and lesbian', leading to a joint complaint from natal women and gay people of both genders that the trans set is trying to 'erase' us all and tell us who we 'should' sleep with. Them. Men. As always, it's mostly 'trans women' with their original equipment complaining. Interestingly, the gender identity set has 'identified' 68+ labels for various gender identities and expressions, which may now require a handbook to keep up at your next LGBTQ2+2=5XYZPDQ Pride Parade and TERF punching riot. Gender-benders are a distributed processing random label generator. If you need a new label, they'll pull one out somewhere. Image by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels. The push to 'deconstruct' language has been a function of the social justice Left for years and is rooted in post-modern French philosophers like Jacques Derrida who introduced language 'deconstruction' in 1967. He declared a veritable war on words and rejected the notion that words contained commonly-understood meanings and that they should mean what they do. According to Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity (2020), Derrida believed "...words refer only to other words and to the ways in which they differ from one another, thus forming chains of 'signifiers', which can go off in all directions with no anchor," and that meaning is 'relational and deferred, and can never be reached and exists only in relation to the discourse in which it is embedded." Perfectly clear now, right? Okay, let's summarize this academic jargonbabble: It's clear the self-appointed 'masters' are the brand new management, same as the old: Men who decide. 1950s vintage ad for swishing household cleaner up one's hoochy-koo. Apparently, men in pre-feminist America were obsessed with the 'cleanliness' of women's genitals and couldn't abide any odors, on penalty of getting divorced or something. CC0 2.0 image by Erica Firment on Flickr Trans oral sex with an orange 'Lesbian' transwomen have been encouraging, pushing and pressuring vadge-loving lesbians to 'get over' their 'genital fetishism' and 'accept' that 'some lesbians have penises'. Lesbians, I Know That 'Cotton Ceiling' Guy Who Called You Transphobic It's funny how 'lesbian transwomen' never seem nearly as interested in expanding their own boundaries and moving beyond their own 'genital fetishism'. If they're really women, shouldn't they want to partake of one of the most womanly experiences available to them, the he-man penis? I mean, wouldn't you bet there's no better blowjob available than one offered by a transwoman who will know exactly what feels good for a penis, since she's got one herself? Let's not forget her all-important mangina. Men have been penetrating women for millions of years and no self-respecting genital-de-fetishizing evangelist would deny himself this supremely female experience. They're not just dick-tating to women, both straight and lesbian, they're lecturing gay men that 'some men have pussies' and that they too should get over their 'genital fetishism' and learn how to go down on--um, an orange. YouTube's Mr. Menno is a self-described 'Satarist [sic], Songwriter, Performer, Woo Woo Buster' who takes strong exception to the advice of two porn actors, one of whom is a somewhat passable transman, that gay men should learn how to 'eat pussy'. The transman, with a masculine voice, no breasts, and a sort of pretty masculine face, demonstrates for gay men how to apply the appropriate tongue action to an orange, which will be quite useful if a gay man ever dates a citrus basket, but trust me, that's not even close to being what a woman's vagina looks like. Her male (non-trans) actor buddy looks like he's probably getting a mighty banana watching her. Not so Mr. Menno, who looks like he wants to hurl. I guess he just doesn't like oranges! Mr. Menno calls out the homophobia, offensive language and old-fashioned 'gay conversion' mindfuckery of the video. "Words like 'cis' and 'trans' are woo-woo words used to pull the wool over our eyes so that in our minds we start disconnecting men and women from actually being male or female. To cut through that, simply replace 'cis' with the word 'actual' and when you see the words 'trans guy' or 'trans man', simply replace it with 'girl or boy with identity issues'. Just like a so-called 'transwoman' is a guy or a man with identity issues." Dusting off the oldies It's time we reclaim our language, and the real meanings of real words associated with real types of people, from those who need to sort out their confusion with each other and leave those of us happy to be male or female, gay or straight or bisexual, out of it. Assigning labels is no longer just for the gender-mindfuckers anymore. I'm resurrecting the old labels we used before gender nuts (ar ar, pun intended) archly informed us said labels are 'transphobic' and 'offensive' because they delineated exactly how close to being a woman one actually was. All I'm asking is for everyone to acknowledge the different types of 'women' which used to be recognized back when the left still had two brain cells to rub together. Let's start with the most common woman found on our Big Blue Marble. ADULT HUMAN FEMALE - This defines someone who was born female, and ergo will die female, regardless of how she identifies. If you have a vagina you are vulnerable to pregnancy and you will have to guard against messy underpants once a month for about forty years. But if you have your breasts surgically removed you'll no longer be at risk for breast cancer. TRANSSEXUAL - Anyone who's dead serious about becoming whatever they're currently not goes 100% transitional and their penis is now a vagina or vice versa. In the olden days of twenty years ago, most transsexuals were gay men and straight men who were autogynephilic - they derived sexual pleasure from imagining themselves as, dressing as, acting as, or in the most extreme cases being a woman. Ain't nothing wrong with that and it might make the debate over whether transwomen belong in female-only spaces a little less heated. Not saying it'll go away, but a transsexual woman be less of a physical threat to Adult Human Females without her penis. TRANSVESTITE - This traditionally means a man who likes to dress as a woman but doesn't go so far as to fully transition. They identify as men and often but not always prefer sex with women, and they like to dress up as women. 'Walkin' Round In Women's Underwear' I suspect a lot of so-called 'transgender' women are actually plain, simple transvestites, or 'cross-dressers' as they were called growing up. Cross-dressing bad movie producer Ed Wood was a transvestite. CC0 3.0 image from Uncyclopedia LESBIAN - This is a Human Female who falls in love with and prefers sex with other Human Females. It's pretty simple. There's no such thing as a 'lesbian with a penis'. A human male in women's clothing who likes sex with human females is not a 'lesbian', he's a 'heterosexual male' (like Ed Wood). Human Lesbians' male counterparts are 'gay men' or 'homosexuals'. They're only attracted to other Human Males which absolutely requires a penis. That's pretty much it. Women aren't as complicated as you think, unless you're swiping through OKCupid or Tinder. Then, well, sorry buddy or lady, you're on your own. Even I don't understand women and I am one. A real one. Lifelong committed natal human female. There is a very small fraction of people who are 'intersex', born with both male and female sex characteristics and who are arguably the true 'gender dysphorics' among us. They often need help figuring out how they identify and in less educated times, which wasn't that long ago, they were arbitrarily assigned a sex by the medical profession at birth and surgically altered to be either male or female after consultation with the parents. It was believed that the infant was too young to know the difference and would be fine however they were raised. But later many of these newborn transition patients felt 'trapped in the wrong body' and deeply miserable until it could be rectified, even if just by living and dressing as their 'right' sex with or without medical intervention and surgery. Unfortunately, many unhappy souls committed suicide, and many doctors today discourage or are reluctant to transition intersex babies anymore. Parents are encouraged to wait and see what the child prefers, and then raise him or her that way. Which makes for a pretty good argument that sex isn't just nurture, but also includes nature, at birth. The trans movement, like much of the left, clings to the 'blank slate' theory of the newborn infant brain, which has fallen out of favor with medical science. The trans movement, which for all its faults contains some really interesting ideas about gender identity fluidity, has unfortunately gone off the rails and is trying to legitimize and 'normalize' new definitions of 'male' and 'female' which simply don't work for the majority of dimorphic human beings. The fact is, most of us are happy with the bodies we were born with, whether that body lights up for the opposite sex or their own. Transactivists haven't persuaded most of us, and mandating gender fluidity won't, either. Blame it on evolution and Mother Nature, that transphobic bitch. 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!

Will we allow awful people to take whatever they like and ruin it? Or is it too soon? Public domain photo (Update: I've left this up because I wrote it several months before 10/7 and the hideous global outbreak of antisemitism. I still stand by what I say as the swastika's history is mostly holy. I'm not going to cater to right - and left-wing antisemites) Some Asians think it's time to reclaim their holy symbol, the swastika. Or, more to the point, the 'svastika', which is the Sanskrit spelling of the word, since the ancient language has no 'w'. It dates back several thousand years, a universal sacred symbol that appears to have developed in disparate parts of the world . Hindus, Buddhists and Jains lay claim to it. Swastikas were found in the 4,000-year-old city of Troy unearthed by archaeologist Hermann Schliemann in the 19th century. North American Indigenous tribes and bands displayed them, as did the Teutonic Knights, a Catholic German medieval military order. A mosaic swastika was discovered in a Byzantine Church excavated in Israel. Its many meanings include a solar symbol, good luck, good fortune, and in ancient Sanskrit it meant “It is!” “Life is good!” “There is value!” “There is meaning!” The earliest examples of a sort of vaguely swastika shape come from a 12,000-year-old bracelet carved from mammoth bone, found in a Ukrainian cave. Another Ukrainian find dated to 15,000 years ago is a bird figure with very elongated, stylized swastikas that I myself can't see, and which might arguably be nothing more than an artistic interpretation of feathers, with no assigned special or sacred meaning. We can never know what artifacts from preliterate epochs truly meant, or didn't, and archaeologists are mad for assigning religious meaning to all of them, as though our cave ancestors were as obsessed with religion as their descendants are with the Netflix craze du saison . Those who would reclaim the symbol for their ancient cultures might well reclaim the original spelling of svastika , to differentiate it from what some asshole ninety years ago culturally misappropriated it for. Spot the swastika! When I visited Toronto before I moved here, I stayed with my fellow Pagan friend Diana. We visited the Royal Ontario Museum and found ourselves playing a game of Spot The Swastika! It began with a large Buddha statue near the entrance. "Hey, look!" I pointed out. "The Buddha's got a swastika on his chest!" Diana had visited the ROM many times over the years and she'd never noticed it before. We began playing Spot The Swastika. We found them in Asian, Greek, and Roman exhibits, snickering like mischievous children pointing out naughty bits in a National Geographic. They were on pottery and weapons. They were on statues and bowls. 8th century BC Greek pottery. Original image by Zde on Wikimedia Commons, CC0 4.0 When I moved to Toronto I landed in nearby Mississauga, home to many Indian immigrants. I began to see 'live' swastikas, rather than those collecting dust in a museum. I found them on silver Buddhist bowls in Toronto's Chinatown. I saw swastika necklaces and jewelry on Indians and Asians working in the mall, and I'm pretty sure they weren't white supremacists. Last year a friend and I found an Indian-looking shirt covered with swastikas at a thrift store. It looked like it was probably used for some celebratory event. Too soon? Probably fifteen years ago I floated the idea to my fellow Pagans that maybe the swastika should be rehabilitated, since it doesn't deserve its ugly reputation, and Hitler had engaged in pagan religion abuse. The suggestion was met with acknowledgement that the swastika didn't deserve its reputation but no one wanted to hurt Jews, especially Jewish Pagans. Pagans lean toward supporting minority, marginalized religions, but no one wanted any part of this, even though everyone knew Hitler's regime was an opportunistic toxic salad of Christianity, Norse Paganism and appropriated occult beliefs. Whatever worked! He created a personality cult to serve himself and his ugly obsession with Jews. He misappropriated the swastika, along with several other Norse pagan symbols, which annoys the crap out of many modern Norse Pagans. Hitler's thousand-year Reich disintegrated in twelve years when Germany was forced to surrender to the Allies in 1945. As the unthinkable evidence of the Final Solution unfolded in the years after the war, the swastika became cemented as the ultimate symbol of evil. It didn't deserve it. Poor Pepe Pepe the Frog is a more modern, if less universal example of how the right misappropriated a non-political creation for evil. Pepe was a harmless cartoon frog begun in a 2005 comic by cartoonist Matt Furie. Pepe turned into a meme with mood variations and 'You will never...' Public domain Ten years later, the alt-right appropriated the symbol to Furie's intense dismay, as Pepe was never intended to be a political character, and certainly not the poster cartoon for hate. Furie has sued organizations for misusing it in this manner, but it persists. Once it's on the Internet, it's forever. It's not fair to Pepe, and it's certainly not fair to his creator. The most obvious critics of the swastika reclamation project are Jews, especially those who remember or are descended from Holocaust survivors who they argue will be re-traumatized by seeing the swastika again. The camps were liberated in 1945 so there can't be many survivors left. But still. It was less than a century ago. In the grand scheme of history, Hitler's swastika regime is a blip of a very, very bad reputation hit on an otherwise entirely noble timeline. Most Pagans I know wouldn't adopt the swastika if it became acceptable even though there's precedence in ancient Celtic and Druidic history, from which many modern Pagans draw inspiration, re-enacting the practices and resurrecting the symbols of their ancestors. I've never seen one utilize it. Speaking as one who could adopt it myself, since my own Pagan practice is based on Greek and Roman paganism and mythology, I wouldn't, mostly because I have no emotional attachment to the symbol. Nazi association aside, I have neutral feelings about it. But several traditions have a pretty airtight historical argument for utilizing the swastika again freely, regardless of Hitler. Ancient rock carving of Sindh, Pakistan, Believed to be Neolithic or prehistoric. Original image by Aziz Kandrani on Wikimedia Commons, CC0 4.0 As for the Jewish people struggling with a too-recent memory of genocidal hell, now is a good time to simply open a discussion as to when it should be released from its more recent association, and let others reclaim their honorable symbol. Because the Nazis never had any right to it, and no group has the right to dictate how others may practice their religion. It would be one thing if the Nazis invented the symbol; it's quite another that many others did thousands of years before Hitler's birth. Nazi claims to the symbol require as much mental gymnastics as the once-fashionable Christian justification for enslaving Africans. Slavery-sympathetic theologians hundreds of years ago couldn't find a damn thing in the Bible to support what they wanted, which was God's blessing for enslaving darker-skinned people, so they created a ludicrous link out of a randomly-chosen story about the sin of Ham, seeing his father naked and telling his two brothers, resulting in a 'curse'. What this has to do with black people is a mystery, but it's just as stupid as the Nazi justification for appropriating the swastika. German nationalist scholars, smash 'n' grabbing anything that seemed to or could be made to support a German nationalist myth , chose the Sanskrit word 'arya', meaning 'pure' or 'noble', and turned an adjective into Aryans, a new race identity, and it wasn't long before it then turned into a 'master race' of Europeans, with guess who at the summit. German nationalists cadged the swastika from Herman Schliemann's Trojan swastika-fest, with Schliemann too dead to protest. Whose sacred symbol is next? What bothers me about allowing the swastika's Nazi association to persist is it sends a subtle message giving hate and evil purveyors carte blanche to take what they like from the rest of us, like shoplifters in a supermarket. The 'okay' symbol we all know has been modified slightly and added to the Anti-Defamation League's ever-expanding database of 'hate' symbols. Supposedly, it's now a 'white power' gesture when flashed upside down, since the 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand mass shooter flashed it during a court appearance. Its origin as a 'white power' gesture is actually a hoax started by the trolling website 4chan, and was adopted by some white supremacists. The haters have won when your friend mouths to you across a noisy, crowded room, "How are you?" and you respond with a gesture others think means, "Thank God I'm white! Power to the pale! Down with Israelites!" Anything can be appropriated now. Like the way the Christian cross is misused by the KKK. What if the alt-right or other hate groups appropriate the trans flag, the peace symbol, or the Black Lives Matter raised fist? What if the Jewish Star of David was turned into a hate symbol? Oh wait, it already was, by Twitter , at least under the Old Regime. Know your swastika Ten years ago, 120 tattoo parlors around the world sponsored a one-day ' Learn To Love The Swastika ' event. Artists offered free swastika tattoos but made people sign a waiver stating they weren't getting it as a neo-Nazi symbol, relying, one supposes, on the neo-Nazis' honesty to not lie on the waiver. I wondered if it wouldn't have been better to stipulate the tattoo must include the words "Love" or "Peace For All" or "Good fortune to all." Or maybe with a flower in the center. What neo-Nazi wants to go around with a girly-looking swastika? Perhaps the swastika could be reclaimed, slowly, over a few generations, with a few 'best practices'. Like, cocked at a 45-degree angle, on a white circle, with a red background, is right out. Traditional Hindu swastikas fit neatly into a square, with the arms pointing to the right, clockwise (or as modern Pagans would say, 'Deosil'). Buddhist swastikas face the other way ('Widdershins' in Wiccaspeak) . Original work by MennasDosbin on Wikipedia. Creative Commons CC0 4.0. For some reason, the upper right one sort of reminds me of both Colin Kaepernick and Tim Tebow taking a knee at a football game. Avoiding the characteristic 'Nazi' angle would be a good practice. Perhaps a swastika on a neutral background, along with some words you would never find on a Nazi flag. Like भवतः सौभाग्यम्, which is Sanskrit for 'Good fortune to you!' Or better yet, in English, so no one thinks it's secret Sanskrit for 'Springtime for Hitler and Germany'. Associating the swastika with positive imagery and original sentiments might help in reducing its Nazi-induced poison, and make it clear this isn't a bad swastika, it's a good svastika. Yes, Dorothy, there is a difference. With input from members of cultures and religions where svastikas belong, and of course Jewish voices, perhaps there could be svastikas incorporated with peace signs, doves, olive branches, hands clasped in peace, or hearts. These are suggestions for discussion, because the Pagan in me never wants to tell anyone else how to practice or present their religion. But, it wasn't my people who were subjected to hellish torture and genocide under the swastika either. I'm not the one living with the legacy of the Nazi symbol. But, neither do I hail from a culture for whom the svastika has had a long and honorable tradition, which was hideously misappropriated without permission. These are a few thoughts. 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!

What if truly progressive men tossed up a new, better masculinity salad, taking the best of the old school but replacing misogyny with *productive* power? Real men eat whatever they damn well please. Image from Wallpaperflare Researching Andrew Tate for my last article sent me down a few rabbit holes in the past few weeks - like learning more about Andrew Tate than I needed to know for the article, and then wondering what it is about women that makes certain men obsessively hate on half the human race. I’ve been trying to understand the roots of misogyny for many years, and by this I mean the real stuff - not the everyday inconsiderations, and especially not victim feminists’ hypersensitive ‘patriarchy’ obsession. What was it, I wondered, that turns guys like Andrew Tate into world-class, intentional, career woman-haters? What is going on with hyper-aggressive men and what is it about women they find so threatening? I mean yeah, I know, ‘Power and control’. With all thanks to Spanky’s and Alfalfa’s Our Gang. The question is, why? Why cling to such an outdated, clearly toxic ideology that harms others and makes its acolytes more, not less miserable? The two types of misogyny While the Andrew Tates of the world blather on about 'escaping the Matrix’ (i.e., a more equal, adult world) they never wonder whether perhaps they, themselves, have chosen ‘the Matrix’. After all, if The Matrix is something you’re born into and can’t see, but has existed seemingly forever, then 12,000 years of patriarchy is the very definition of. A pack of feminist Trinitys trying to cajole you to take the ‘red pill’ and open your eyes to the outside-the-manbox reality you’ve never questioned must be pretty threatening to men who would, in fact, prefer the blue pill, which allows the taker to return to the existence of familiar, comforting ignorance and neither grow nor find real happiness as a genuinely autonomous human being. Psychologists distinguish between two types of sexism, hostile and beneficent. Hostile sexism is the aggressive, often-violent, degrading, humiliating, expressed hatred and treatment of women. Andrew Tate is an extreme example but his brethren may be found in those politicians, religious leaders and talk show pundits who fearlessly make nasty statements about women and their place. Benevolent sexism is less violent and often more attractive to women, with men who are more caring and gentle, but nevertheless see women as somehow ‘less-than’. Fragile and vulnerable, the ladies can get male protection as long as the Li’l Missus sticks with traditional gender roles, especially the man as the head of the family, rather than as a co-parent and equal. Male protection shouldn’t come at the expense of female freedom. Benevolent sexism is still sexism. Is there a Masculinity 2.0 lesson in a 1997 movie? Studies show that men exhibiting hostile sexism in heterosexual relationships were directly associated with perceived (by themselves) lower levels of power, a view that wasn’t often shared by their partners. Although feeling powerless is at the heart of hostile sexism, even powerful men can be hostile sexists, and the authors theorized their sense of powerlessness stems from a self-perceived lack of power in their personal relationships. One author notes, “Men who hold sexist attitudes appear to be enacting aggression in an attempt to restore a [perceived] lack of power.” Social psychologist Susan Fiske commented that men who hold hostile sexist beliefs also hew to ‘zero sum’ thinking about power in the relationship: That it’s a finite resource and that if the woman is ‘competing’ by having a job she loves or something important to her that’s not him, that he suffers, consequently, a reduction in power. Being bigger and badder is the only way he feels he can re-assert his own power. It is, of course, at the root of domestic violence as well. Hostile sexist men become so sensitive to what they perceive to be power imbalances that they underestimate the power they actually have. In their minds, power is finite, like rare metals or something. Masculinity has taken a real beating in the last forty years, not just from feminists who think everything masculine and muscular must be bad, but from cardboard cowboys and a perpetually sexually frustrated manosphere, in which the very worst of traditional masculinity displays the perpetual us-against-them mentality. It’s us against the bitches . Zero-sum thinking. If she has more power, I have less power. I keep thinking of the military battalions in the 1997 movie Starship Troopers , based on a Robert Heinlein novel. Some critics called both the movie and the 1960 book it was based on pro-fascist, but director Paul Verhoeven said he was satirizing fascism based on his experiences growing up during the War in the Netherlands. Starship Troopers , like many of Verhoeven’s movies, are breathtakingly violent but what stuck with me after seeing the movie twenty-six years ago is how sex discrimination appeared non-existent in the 23rd century. Particularly noteworthy was the co-ed shower scene. (Update: I'd linked it here removed it when I found YouTube had removed it due to copyright violations.) Men and women worked together in a military institution as equals, without the harassment and misogyny of today’s military. A co-worker commented at the time there’s no way that could ever happen, because it was simply within men’s DNA to protect women, even fellow soldiers, which would be detrimental when your focus must be solely on the enemy. It struck me as a fairly infantilized image of men, unable to grow or move beyond ‘the way things have always been’. Why couldn’t men and women learn to work together as equals, even to take a shower together without a lot of staring, butt-grabbing and juvenile snickering? No worries from the women of sexual assault, no worries from the men they’re seeing other men’s junk and wondering if others think they’re gay. It didn’t seem beyond the ken to me. Okay, it wasn’t happening in 1997, and it still hasn’t happened in 2023, but Starship Troopers takes place in the 23rd century, so sure—maybe in two hundred years? Maybe earlier, if we start working together instead of against each other. The Masculinity 2.0 salad bar Just as not all feminism is toxic, neither is all masculinity. Naomi Wolf distinguishes between two types of feminism. Victim feminism identifies with victimhood and female vulnerability. Narratives include: All men are rapists, ‘patriarchy’ and ‘misogyny’ are everywhere, and if we wield personal power, others might not like us (something men seeking power never worry about). Power feminism, on the other hand, seeks personal power, using one’s financial, economic, or social power to promote the greater good, which sometimes means limiting others’ power (like reducing or ending rape). Power feminism is mostly about taking control of one’s life, safety, and personal responsibility. This aligns with what the feminist Pagan author Starhawk expressed in her books The Spiral Dance and Dreaming The Dark . Let men be men, let them be as wild and strong and powerful as they want, but direct the power toward themselves and using it to help, not harm others. Let them especially do what they’re biologically suited to do, protect women and children who are physically weaker than they. Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels I was quite grateful a few years ago when a stranger intervened when a street guy threatened me. I thanked him for standing up for a woman, and said I appreciated him helping out a stranger. Always thank The Patriarchy when it does something powerfully helpful. They might do it again. Men help women today, bringing more diversity to networks and institutions that have been historically male. When President Biden appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court, he was accused of affirmative action and choosing a candidate for biology rather than merit. But I argued Supreme Court picks were biologically-based for over 175 years , the requirements being white and male. It changed in 1967 with Thurgood Marshall, the first black Justice, and then again in 1981 with the first female Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor. The Supreme Court needs more diversity, especially of partisan politics. The he-man grands chefs of Masculinity 2.0 can salad-bar pick which elements of masculinity work for the greater good of all, and which elements are the bacon bits, creamy dressing and grated cheese of misogyny - best left behind because they’re not good for your (mental) health. How do we start eliminating misogyny? I see two elements of toxic masculinity I’d define as being the primary culprits in humanity’s chronic misogyny problem: The domination paradigm and the not-female paradigm. The modern male’s preoccupation with holding power stems from a historical perogative to conquer and dominate. It’s not a model we can entirely abandon as, on a planet with eight billion people, not all will be on board with getting in touch with their inner good citizen. Vladimir Putin has demonstrated toxic masculinity ain’t goin’ nowhere soon, and we have to maintain a military, regimented approach to fight hyper-masculinists like the Russian government and Islamist terrorists. What we can do in our own culture is to redefine where the need to dominate and conquer belongs, and where it doesn’t (i.e., personal relationships, whether romantic, professional, or friends). That’s a broader conversation best left for another day, but I think it’s where we need to start. The other culprit, the self-definition of ‘not-woman’, starts from a very early age, as little boys develop their sense of masculinity by distinguishing themselves from girls. Yet girls don’t define themselves as ‘not-boy’ growing up, unless they’re noting how not to act like a butthead. I’ve never understood why boys, and later men, defined themselves as not-female, but psychologists link it to the relationship to the mother, who is more often than not the primary caregiver. Little boys are vulnerable and dependent on the mother, and fear being abandoned by her (as some are, psychologically, emotionally or physically). They identify vulnerability with reliance on women. Ergo, don’t rely on women and you’ll be safe. Little girls, meanwhile, internalize their misogyny, and identify with their mother (the ‘enemy’ for boys). Homophobia stems directly from the misogyny of not-woman. Nothing is more masculine than ‘dominating’ a woman by penetrating her sexually, perhaps literally if she resists. So a man who allows himself to be penetrated by another man permits himself to be treated like a woman, accepting the weaker and submissive position. The misogynist perceives the act of being penetrated with weakness. No one wants to be weak, or perceived as weak. Penetration doesn’t have to mean domination. That’s a truly toxic masculine narrative we need to throw away. It’s the high-caloric, carbs-laden, trans-fats salad dressing of yore. It’s ridiculously bad for everyone. ‘Weakness’ is all around us, and it’s not bad . A truly strong person (not just men) defends those which cannot defend themselves - other human beings (including smaller, more vulnerable men), children, animals, and the environment. The male and female Starship Troopers worked together against a common enemy, the ‘bugs’. It’s about the only sex-positive element of a movie that otherwise depicted a ridiculously toxic masculine society with demonstrably wrong ideas by today’s standards. But hey, we can at least take women as genuine equals for our non-misogynist salad bowl. What do you think about Masculinity 2.0? What would it look like to you? The Insecurity That Drives Misogynists (Psychology Today) Men Hating Women: A look into the psychology of misogyny (British GQ) How Toxic Is Masculinity? A crop of new books reconsiders feminism’s stance toward men (New Yorker) Why Men Oppress Women: The psychology of male domination (Psychology Today Why Are Men Afraid Of Being Controlled By Women? (Psychology Today) 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!

It'll take longer to change our stupid evolutionary sexual crap than Paul Verhoeven and I thought Cosplay group Starship Trooper German Division. Image free for use by copyright owner Stw 001 on Wikimedia Commons Well. I stand corrected. Apparently it will take more than a few generations to flush the reckless sluttiness and hypergamy out of men and women. A few weeks ago I referenced the 1997 movie Starship Troopers based on the Robert Heinlein sci-fi novel about a futuristic, highly militaristic world in which men and women fought as equals against the ‘bugs’, an alien race. Male and female troops working together, even showering together, and treating each other as equals and adults, working for a greater common cause. But seriously, didn’t the guys ever want to grab Denise Richards’s bouncy wet round jugs? Could they possibly control their dicks that much? In just two centuries? Then I read an article about the ‘Effective Altruism’ movement demonstrating that evolutionary psychology abideth if not forever, for a helluva long time. It turns out Paul Verhoeven, the director for Starship Troopers (set in the 23rd century) and I hoped for a far too ambitious timeline for mutually accepted sexual equality. It ain’t just socialization, kids. It’s our monkey brains. What makes the sexes different is not just our physical bodies but our brains. We resist the notion of ‘pink brains and blue brains’ but we do in fact have notable, evolutionary psychological brain differences that account for how we act, treat each other differently, and how you don’t change evolution overnight. Of course, the diversity of humans means we come in eight billion shades of pink, blue, and mostly a lot of crossover violet. It seems for the time being, we’ll be engaged in an ongoing battle - with ourselves as much as each other - over evolutionarily ingrained proclivities within us - male horniness and sexual harassment on the one hairy hand, and female desire to mate with more powerful, successful, high-status males on the Jergens-smoothed other one. The EA movement, for the moment, is Exhibit A. A February Time magazine article highlights what’s happening within EA, experiencing its own come-to-Jesus spotlight moment with the fall of its most famous proponent, cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried last fall. It catalogs, tiresomely again, what happens when monied men with power run the show and women don’t fight back enough, mostly because they still haven’t figured out how to band together like bonobos . Spoiler alert: Culty sexual harassment and manipulation ensues. La plus ça change. Effective Altruism and the spectrum The EA movement originated in the 2000s and according to one of its founders, Scottish philosopher and author William MacAskill and early friend of Sam Bankman-Fried, it’s founded on “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis". That doesn’t sound much different from the blueprint of almost every other normal project you can think of, especially when it comes to do-gooding others and defeating problems facing humanity. If nothing else, the biggest obstacle to accomplishing any altruistic goal is making sure the money is used to most effectively help its targets, rather than line the pockets of its administrators. The EA movement encourages people to become filthy rich, and then allocate money to various helpful and often long-term, futuristic projects. What stands out in bas-relief about the movement is how overwhelmingly male it is. There’s good to learn from its male approach (we’ll get to that later), but also much to guard against. The EA movement fetishizes, in true male intellectual style, reason and rationality over emotion. There’s an almost Spockian quality about it, the kind that cuts coolly through the emotional considerations associated with women and scorned by Vulcans. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one," said Star Trek ’s Mr. Spock. In other words, enter the radioactive chamber to fix the Enterprises’s drive in order to save the entire crew. But unlike real humans, the star is almost certain to survive the suicide mission [See: John Cusack, climax, 2012 ], so no one really suffers or dies, like real people do when logic ignores emotion in real-world decision-making. That strongly utilitarian sense of completely ignoring emotional feeling in favor of cold logic harkens retroactively to the suspiciously autistic 18th-century British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham, the founder of modern ‘utilitarianism’. Bentham ticked off the autism checklist starting with his prowess as a world-class systematizer, with a near-mania for organizing human actions into behavioral nomenclature, a man with few friendships, who never married, and who one person said regarded the people around him as little better than ‘the flies of summer’. Bentham’s principle of utility attempted to reduce happiness and well-being to simple arithmetic, mathematizing pleasures versus pains and offered a ‘felicific calculus’ algorithm to determine a moral response for any person, action or country. Scientists today speculate Bentham was a chunk farther down the spectrum than us ‘neurotypicals’, and they tried testing some of his DNA (he left his body to science) several years ago. Couldn’t find how that worked out. Researcher Simon Baron-Cohen shows that ‘autism’ is merely a human spectrum comprised of two dimensions, empathizing (able to share understanding and imagine the feelings of humans and other sentient creatures) and systematizing (organizing things, objects, ideas). Where they cross in any given human determines where they are on the spectrum. Being particularly good at one or the other doesn’t make you problematic, but being too good at one at the expense of the other is where people tend to create problems. Somewhat stereotypically - but these are our cave brains - men tend to be better at systematizing and women at empathizing. And yeah yeah, #NotAllWhatever. Shades of violet, folks! There may be a possible, although as yet unconfirmed, connection between those farther down the spectrum and EA. What the 19th-century Bentham couldn’t have known is how emotions factor as much into truly effective decision-making as logic and rationalism. The work of MIT’s computer scientist and engineer Dr. Rosalind Picard supports this. Her contribution to AI stemmed from her research into the limbic system, the oldest and most primitive part of the brain, the seat of memory, attention and emotion. She realized that the already long-standing, ongoing attempt by scientists to build a human-like AI was doomed to fail until it took into account the critical input of emotion. But of course, the highly rational-minded, reason-worshipping male science culture wrote off her work as frivolous and unserious until her book about affective computing in 1997 founded a whole new field of AI that is taken more seriously today, even by male scientists. The monkey brain The Time magazine article explored a San Francisco Bay EA communal household that exemplified the male/female, intellectualizing/empathizing disconnect we find too often with high-functioning highly intelligent males who would rather approach emotional problems like sexual harassment with cold calculus rather than dealing with how sexual pressure or assault makes someone else feel. It detailed a somewhat less altruistic or rational goal of what appears to be a larger problem in the EA movement overall: Getting laid, with your housemates or work colleagues. Lofty intellectuals pretentiously call it ‘polyamory’ when it more closely resembles sexual predation. An Unherd website article analyzed what Time didn’t : The ‘monkey’ in our primate brains that drives us to act in certain classic gender-stereotypical ways, traits we humans exhibit that closely parallel behavior observed in our primate jungle cousins. It’s difficult to change, for both men and women. Not impossible, but 23rd century non-horny co-ed showers may be an overly-optimistic, but not ultimately impossible, goal for all of us. We’ll still likely be monkeys in the 23rd century. Creative Commons license by Prompart on Pixexid Polyamory, hypergamy and EA The 70% male EA culture pushes polyamory, or the way of the ‘ ethical slut ’ as one how-to manual describes it. When conducted and guided by openness, communication, and most importantly, rules , which participants, couples and groups have to decide for themselves, it can work fairly well. But there absolutely have to be rules, so everyone has a good time, feelings are managed and no one is made to feel uncomfortable. Genuine, committed polyamorists get this. They understand the need especially for women to be protected from unscrupulous or rules-forgetful males. Most importantly, there should be no pressure on anyone to do anything they don’t want to. Fake ‘polyamorists’ don’t like rules, because they interfere with sexual pleasure. Where sex is involved, women’s safety must be paramount. And where male power and money is concentrated, women’s safety is at risk. This is where Starship Troopers and I got it wrong. We can’t just rationalize and debate our way out of sexual preferences and practices after only a few hundred years of feminism. It’s not impossible to overcome our evolutionary proclivities, many of which remain with us thousands of years after they no longer make rational sense, but getting human males to curb their sexual desires to make human females more comfortable may take far more time than Paul Verhoeven and I realized. It’s not just men who are slaves to their monkey brain. The Unherd article briefly examined, along with the evolutionary underpinnings of quite traditional horny male behavior toward young, highly fertile women, where and how women collude evolutionarily too, driven by their own monkey agenda. Hypergamy is being attracted to and mating with high-status, powerful males, especially those with wealth, whether that’s farm animals on the Anatolian steppes or fat crypto accounts in, well, the cloud. Time detailed how uncomfortable it was for women living in the EA household run by two organizers, a non-romantically involved man and woman. The man was accused of sexual misconduct against both an ex-girlfriend and the female co-organizer, and the predictable reactions to allegations of male sexual misbehavior ensued. The other housemates supported the man who claimed innocence; an external female ‘mediator’ who had supposedly handled other sexual harassment situations, prioritized not ruining the man’s career over allegations he’d sexually victimized others; and the mostly male forum discussing the problem, attempted to intellectualize it, carefully corralling emotions and the alleged victims’ feelings, Bentham-izing questions like how much you should trust someone you live with who you believe is ‘X% likely’ to have done something horrible. Instead of, say, prioritizing harmed individuals and making sure this didn’t happen again. It was ever-so-typical male running and hiding from having to consider the feelings of others, particularly when penises are implicated. Other women Time spoke with mentioned problems with EA sexual harassment in other states and overseas. They described how preyed upon they felt by a culture that promoted so-called ‘polyamory’ and pressured women who didn’t go along with it as ‘unevolved’. To my much older woman’s eyes, it looked less like true polyamory (I’ve got friends in the culture) and more like all the typical male manipulation techniques I’ve long since grown wise to, but with which most young women don’t have much experience, especially flimsily dressed up as ‘more evolved than monogamy’. Creative Commons CC0 2.0 image by Luca Venturi on Flickr Horny cults et al I don’t believe Paul Verhoeven’s and my assessment of the ability of males and females to work against the evolutionary grain is impossible, and some change can happen fairly quickly. Twentieth-century Second Wave feminism has propelled women into far less restricted roles than they had back when secretaries got fired for not screwing the boss. We’ve witnessed the evolution of both males and females moving beyond older historical mores, and challenging us to challenge ourselves further. I do it too with my ‘grow some labia’ encouragement that women need to step up, challenge, assert themselves, educate themselves, and develop themselves more. There’s only so much the more progressive corners of ‘the patriarchy’ can do for us. At some point we have to look in the mirror and ask ourselves, How am I holding myself back? The Unherd article compares the EA movement with the traditionally patriarchal history of cults, religious and otherwise. It mentions fundamentalist Mormon leader Warren Jeffs and his 81 wives for implementing the traditional male desire to cultivate harems of very young, fertile women, while failing to note that’s the basis of the Mormon religion originally, which chose to give up polygamy so Utah could become a state. It cites Reverend Moon ‘consummating’ early converts’ marriages by sleeping with the woman before her husband ( droit du seigneur in medieval Europe) and the more recent female-corralling NXIVM cult. I would also add whacko Waco David Koresh’s teenage harem. High-minded moral and spiritual philosophers may share a propensity for haremizing women or they may simply fall into that evolutionary groove when they gain enough power. (And women let them do it because, monkey girl brains.) Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God details the earliest examples of spiritual sexual abuse. Certain Eskimo religious shamans thousands of years ago demanded errant women who’d committed some misdemeanor to have sexual intercourse with them to ‘counteract’ the effects of her sinning. ‘Rationalism’, religion and high-minded goals can all be recruited to disguise what are plain old traditional poon quests. Unherd recognizes the hypergamy that drives women still to seek out high-status, high-performing, and wealthy males to mate with. Time noted that many women in the EA movement were happily polyamorous, but one non-polyamorist felt ‘groomed’ by a much older man who extolled to her the virtues of a much older ‘mentor’ who argued “that ‘paedophilic relationships’ were both perfectly natural and highly educational,” playing on many women’s desire to be with an older, wiser, paternal, and often wealthier man. It didn’t work on her, but I know many women for whom it would have. Hypergamy is something I’ve never understood myself, but I’ve seen it play out over and over again amongst many. I didn’t understand women in the ‘80s, when I was young, expressing the desire to ‘find a rich man to marry’. These were educated women with bright futures ahead of them, if they didn’t mess it up by marrying someone who might well control or abuse them, since men with money and power often act that way because, well, they can. Because they know hypergamous women will tolerate it. One hypergamist I knew was a beautiful 32-year-old blonde with huge grey eyes who was the smartest and most successful of the otherwise all-male sales team in our early ‘90s uber-Yuppie office. Her brains weren’t her only leg up over her male colleagues. She had a knock-down rockin’ bod and when the guys sniped behind her back that she closed more deals because she dated her clients it wasn’t misogyny; it was the truth. She bragged about it. She was a female monkey using sex to get what she wanted, and when she bragged about how a man had to make at least six figures for her attention, it struck me as almost prostitution, a practice well-established with chimpanzees who offer females food for sex. Her expressed desire was to snag a rich man. I’d look at her and think if I had her confidence, smarts, and sales ability I sure as hell wouldn’t be looking to marry Mr. Rich; I’d conquer the world as a sales rockstar, make my own fortune and never, ever, be controlled or abused. I guess I’d be the wierdo in the jungle, too, if I was a chimp. What men, including EA men, do better than women What I find impressive about ‘the patriarchy’ is that, for all its faults, men get shit done. It’s how EA leaders got filthy rich. They don’t worry about being liked, or not offending their office mates, and they don’t care if you dislike their style. If their goal is to increase this year’s revenue by 5% then dadgum it, they’re going to accomplish that come hell or high water. If that means getting rid of ‘dead wood’, cutting back on perks and entitlements to free up more cash and remove free snacks and ‘Beer Fridays’ in service to greater operational efficiencies, and the rest of the company hates it, fuck ‘em. Male leaders make it happen. The thirty percent of women in the EA movement, relying on business partnerships, relationships, jobs and financial help from horny young men, get preyed upon. These guys got where they were by doing shit, making money, and not relying on women. They may have the money and power but that doesn’t mean women can’t go off and form their own, however more modest EA movement, relying on each other and their own networks rather than giving their power to highly sexed men. With one caveat. They still need the benefit of male expertise and advice. Why? Because men are still much better than women at getting shit done and not caring who calls them an asshole. Selected, trusted male advisors could help women develop that ‘can-do’ attitude and learn how to turn critics on their heads: Make being called a ‘pushy bitch’ or a ‘ball buster’ something to crow and strut about, much like the guys in one office I worked in who had a cheezy gold belt the reigning foosball champion got to wear until someone else claimed it. Getting called nasty names by misogynists is a huge sign you’re getting shit done, or they’re afraid you will. Men’s counsel can help women navigate misogyny, discrimination and harassment by sharing their own professional struggles. Conflict is conflict. Like standing up to a bad, incompetent boss instead of a bad horny one. Many men already mentor women and some share similar biological discrimination (darker skin rather than a vagina). Relying too much on women only, for the time being, may hold back female professional progress. One reason I gave up ‘women only’ networking groups is the lack of energy and focus. Too much schmoozing, too much empathizing , not enough real talk. I joined a different, mixed group a year or so before the pandemic and there was much more energy and ‘can-do’ attitude, particularly with the female business leaders who were more dynamic and more inclined to hold their own with men, none of whom struck me as toxic masculine. It was a great place to meet, network, exchange ideas, and make business connections. Some women may need a place to not be interrupted, mansplained or lectured to, or subtly put down, but to get real shit done, we’ve got to learn to handle and negotiate with the other half of the human race. Old evolutionary habits die hard, and while men are responsible for their actions and behavior, women have to hold them to account, as well as themselves, and they can’t do that when they’re within male control or hiding in women’s-only ‘safe spaces’. Just as a hypergamous wife gives her husband the power to control her when he controls the finances, giving male business partners power and control over one’s career opens women up to potential sexual abuse. It’s not fair, but we’ve got our own monkey to contend with. Just as men are driven (but not compelled ) to seek sex with fertile young chicks, women too are driven, but not compelled, to give men their power for financial freedom and the ability to fund their own projects. It’s not just men we have to push to change. It’s ourselves, too. And it’s always easier to bitch about the other side than it is to acknowledge one’s own complicity. We are so much more like them than we know. Photo by Acharaporn Kamornboonyarush on Pexels 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!

Who are the oppressors? Who are the oppressed? The right caters to the reality-challenged MAGAs as the left does to the 'woke' CC0 2.0 image by James Vaughan on Flickr The final scene of George Orwell’s Animal Farm depicts the pigs, who have led the revolution against the oppressor farmers, sitting at a dinner table breaking bread with them. The farmers have arrived to form a new alliance with the former rebels. As the rest of the animals watch through the window, they note how much the pigs and humans have come to resemble each other. Fox News is in serious legal trouble and the left is crowing with the sheer schadenfreude of its ‘day of reckoning’ for a ‘news’ channel that clearly possessed a differing idea of journalistic integrity from the moment it went on the air. Watching the unfolding news detail how Fox fucked up by telling its audience a truth on Election Night, and got punished and ‘cancelled’ as the left would put it by aggravating them and Donald Trump, looks rather a lot like what happens on the left when they hear something that doesn’t fit their own reality resistance. The ‘woke’ and the ‘MAGAs’ share much in common, including a penchant for censorship, rigid dogmatism, excessive fidelity, ‘purity tests’, cancellation, and a fondness for misinformation when it suits their ideological purposes. It’s getting so I can’t tell the fascists apart. Faux News: We Report, You Divide Back in 1996, when we watched this mystifying new competitor to the ‘Big Four’ (NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN) debut, Fox News’s primary objective clearly wasn’t to function as the ‘watchdog of the government’, as I’d learned in college. It served up much biased slant, despite its pretensions of ‘We report, you decide,’ along with Bill O’Reilly’s delusional claim to be the ‘no-spin zone’. You could almost throw up from the dizziness. But it might have looked like they were doing traditional journalism a little since they were highly critical of President Clinton. Then George Bush took over and Fox News adored him with Nancy Reagan goo-goo eyes. By Series: Reagan White House Photographs, White House Photographic Collection For the last twenty-six years, to the left’s great annoyance, Fox News has disseminated untruth, misinformation, disinformation, and, most recently, given a free mouthpiece to the most dangerously incompetent, scientifically illiterate and inarticulate President the U.S. has ever known, and the unfolding soap opera connects to an unsuccessful coup attempt. Those bastards! CC0 2.0 image by Donato Accogli on Flickr Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, both of whom played a role in the integrity of the 2020 US federal election, are suing Fox News and other Trump sycophants for defamation over baseless claims their machines stole the election for Joe Biden. Fox News boosted Donald Trump’s insane claims of a stolen election for months and now we know they absolutely knew Biden had won fair and square. Ironically, it all started when they began with an uncharacteristically honest and particularly ballsy move - telling the truth, being the first to correctly call Arizona, a key swing state, for Biden. The phone lines and social media lit up. Hell hath no fury like a MAGA fact-checked. Trump went ballistic, encouraging his audience to abandon Fox and move to their more Trump-submissive rivals. Now it was Fox News’s turn to go ballistic, as the audience evaporated like the Colorado River. Texts, emails, phone calls, and words flew as the stock price dropped. Tucker Carlson called for the firing of a Fox news reporter who dared to twice fact-check Trump on Twitter. He demanded the channel go back to supporting Trump. The trail of documentation leads right up to Fox owner Rupert Murdoch, the guy who claimed he had ‘no idea’ several years ago of the phone hacking scandal through one of his other companies that cost him a over billion dollars. He’s got no claim of cluelessness now. Murdoch’s testimony in court documents demonstrate his blessing over the willful misreporting and outright lies about the systems validating the elections, and the fact that he knew, approved, and directed all of it makes for an ugly twist for Fox’s lawyers. Sure glad we on the left aren’t like those idiot authoritarians and their guileless audience on the far right, right? Meanwhile, on Twitter… Transactivist factophobia A few weeks ago multi-partisan tweeters who loathe censorship the way Fox News loathes fact-checking tweeted their outrage about Vimeo, who’d taken down a documentary, up a little over a month, called Affirmation Generation in response to demands by angry transactivists. The documentary focuses on ‘detransitioners’, young people who undergo medical treatment to change gender and then change their minds, as they are wont to do 80% of the time when they experience gender dysphoria in adolescence. In other words, they outgrow it. But until recently, they did so with their genitals, breasts, fertility, and future health intact. Left-wing transactivists have long attempted to shut down attention for detransitioners. Famously allergic to facts that don’t fit their narrative, they successfully pressured Vimeo to remove the documentary, but pressure from anti-censorship and early medical-transitioning critics successfully pressured them to restore it. Kinda reminds me of the time Trump threatened to shut down social media, supported by his faithful lackeys, because Twitter fact-checked a few of his tweets. From Twitter Anti-racists come for the black ‘anti-anti-blackness’ ‘racist’ professor Oh the irony. Vincent Lloyd is an associate professor, speaker, and author at Villanova University who led a special seminar last summer for high school students through the Telluride Association, a ‘transformative education’ non-profit. Lloyd, a fairly woke-friendly black antiracist who leads the Africana program at Villanova, found himself accused of promoting ‘anti-black racism’ when hostile students turned against him , led by a know-it-all snowflake he calls Keisha who attacked him throughout the seminar with claims of harm, ‘microaggressions’, and racism, drawing the others to her cause, resulting in an educational food fight which Lloyd ended two weeks early. His race crime against his own? Not focusing enough on ‘ anti-blackness ’ as the source of all evil for the mouthy, opinionated narcissist. No one could learn anything with a hyper-work antiracism-cult-leader-in-training interrupting, demanding her own viewpoints be discussed ad nauseum , and yelling insults like a spoiled child. [See: Marjorie Taylor Greene.] The others meekly followed Keisha’s lead at the time, although several wrote to Lloyd later saying they wanted to finish the seminar with him online since they were genuinely interested in the original material. They hadn’t understood everything they’d read and discussed before Keisha made it all about her. Tragically, Lloyd himself had submitted to her too until he’d finally had enough. Who says censorship and shutting down free speech is only by the right? [See: Jordan Peterson, Milos Yiannopoulos] What frightened me most about this story is a) Lloyd’s meekness in deferring constantly to Keisha—who was the grownup here? b) How easily Keisha subdued and dominated her fellow students, ‘oppressing’ free thought c) What this bodes for America as the Keishas are more likely to become the future ‘leaders’ of social justice movements which are all beginning to look fairly culty. Personal destruction: A multipartisan effort The right loves to slam the left for ‘cancellation’, destroying someone’s life, reputation and career over some perceived slight or harm, however overstated. It’s censorship, they protest, the delicate little snowflakes can’t handle an alternative [read: Conservative-approved] opinion. Anyone who knows the history of the American right recognizes its own version of cancellation: The boycott. "It is finally time for Republicans and Conservatives to fight back — we have more people than they do — by far! Boycott Major League Baseball, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, JPMorgan Chase, ViacomCBS, Citigroup, Cisco, UPS, and Merck. Don't go back to their products until they relent. We can play the game better than them," said Donald Trump, in response to companies who refused to support a new Georgia voting law in 2021. He offered this response on his alternative Twitter-for-nazis social media platform, since he’d been kicked off the real one the year before. (Along with many feminists and gender ideology-critical women for ‘misgendering’ or pointing out a man in a dress who ‘identifies’ as a woman is still a man in a dress.) Damn, I would love to have seen Trump’s response if KFC, McDonald’s, and Taco Bell had publicly refused to his fave law! Christian fundamentalists, longtime supporters of the Republican Party, have famously boycotted groups and individuals who run afoul of their own ideologies. Like Walt Disney’s ‘Gay Days’, not an official park event but one they don’t discourage, as the alphabet-soup set annually converges on the park the first Saturday in June. The Southern Baptist Convention boycotted it for eight years straight. ‘Gay Days’ started in 1997 and now attracts 150,000 people every year which should give you some idea of how effective the SBC has been. Boycotts don’t always work, so that’s where guns and rape/death threats come in handy. We see the right’s ‘cancellation’ crazies - armed with weapons rather than Twitter accounts - whenever a Democratic president sits in the Oval Office. Barack Obama’s election birthed the Tea Party, the place for those who eschewed the Republicans for being too damn liberal. Armed right-wing militants began showing up in 2009 to intimidate town hall meetings and shouted down liberal speakers and opponents, exactly like ‘woke snowflakes’ do today on college campuses. Now that a Democrat sits in the Oval Office, right-wing crazies are back, attacking town hall meetings with guns, and some plotted to kidnap Michigan’s governor. A right-wing nutbag broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home last year and beat her octogenarian husband severely. Mass shooters lean largely right and far-right, citing neo-Nazi, racist ‘heroes’. But it may soon no longer be a one-party violence-pa-looza. An armed lefty went gunning for Brett Kavanaugh last year but lost his will to kill him. While some point to this as evidence the left isn’t as violent, it might also offer evidence it’s becoming emboldened, taking a cue from the right and embracing gun violence as political expression. Our side just isn’t very good at it. Yet. The left destroys with social media. The right destroys, literally. Maybe soon, both. J.K. Rowling has been a victim of heretic witch hunts from both sides, having received bomb, rape and death threats and harassment from Christian fundamentalists early in her career who thought Harry Potter indoctrinated children into witchcraft. Today she’s targeted for a similar ‘monstering’ campaign by transactivists, many of whom are trans-identified women, which should give you some idea of who, biologically, is under the veil trying, as always, to shut down female speech. Not to mention their own good little handmaids, just like the right has. The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling (podcast series) The Flynts vs the Falwells If you’re old enough to remember the ‘80s, you might remember the famous First Amendment Supreme Court battle between Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt and evangelical TV preacher Jerry Falwell. Or maybe you saw the 1996 movie starring Woody Harrelson and Courtney Love. Watching the wokes and the MAGAs battle for popular supremacy, whether it’s in the classroom, the family, social media or in politics, reminds me of the Falwell vs. Flynt trial. Which side stinks very slightly less? Each side will want their own side to win, of course. Because evil opponents. Who will you vote for in 2024? I may not vote Democrat next year. As a feminist, I feel censored for the first time in my life, and not by the right. Feminists get banned on Twitter for calling out the myths, lies and misogyny of the trans lobby. I don’t like how racist anti-racism has become, and I’m tired of political whackos from both sides pushing their toxic agendas into the schools. I don’t want either side to win. I don’t care if I fail to cancel a Republican vote, whether it’s Trump or DeSantis. I don’t care if that pushes America even more to the far right - I won’t help push it to the far left, either. I will not vote against my own interests. The misogyny, racism, anti-intellectualism, censorship, anti-science, personal destruction, and growing extremism is what has pushed me from the left closer to the centre, where each side thinks I’m on the other because anyone who’s not fur ‘em is agin’ ‘em. I won’t be party to my own destruction. Had you offered me rule by either Hitler or Stalin, I would have opted for the bullet. 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!

Not only can you do fuck all to improve anyone's lives, but you can inadvertantly campaign to re-elect Trump or maybe 'anti-woke warrior' Ron DeSantis …Except when it’s a bunch of black cops who kill a black guy. Then Black Lives Matter bristles at the notion the cops’ race is important. Public domain photo on Pexels Remember James Damore, the Google employee who sent a lengthy, well-considered memo to his work colleagues on why there aren’t more women in STEM? He got fired and became a darling of the right. He’d received thanks privately from fellow colleagues who weren’t brave enough to express what Damore had said in his response to requested feedback from a diversity seminar they’d attended. His memo wasn’t a right-wing rip on women having little place at Google, it was researched, well-considered, and referenced the work of respected British clinical psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, offering ideas for how to accommodate men’s and women’s different ways of thinking (and they are different) rather than resorting to the diversity ‘discrimination’ of mandating biology-based job placement. Related: What Would A Truly Merit-Based Supreme Court Nominee Look Like? However much one agrees or not with Damore, his rich content was worthy of discussion and debate, not firing. Since he likely couldn’t practice his craft again for Da Man (who would hire someone that social media-explosive?), he hit the talking-head circuit, eagerly embraced by righty superstars like Jordan Peterson, Stefan Molyneux, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, and Milo Y. It was disappointing to watch him get sucked into that toxic orbit, but it wasn’t like the left was showing him any love. They ‘cancelled’ him and pushed what seemed like a fairly reasonable, just not far-left young man into the arms of the far-right. Damore struck me as someone who had been willing to look at different sides of an issue, rather than succumbing to brainless partisanship. But the hostile left preferred to push him toward extremists. When you’re an extremist yourself, a moderate looks like t’other side. Instead of acknowledging there may be reasons besides discrimination and ‘patriarchy’ to explain women’s lower representation in STEM, the left condemned him for pointing out what they’d rather not acknowledge. Men and women are different. Think differently. And have different values and objectives. The left’s resistance to sex differences, particularly psychological, stems from the justifiable fear the right will use it to validate discrimination, supported by the right’s long history of doing exactly that . But hiding from the truth serves neither side. The left could conceivably have pulled the new influencer into its orbit where perhaps he could have done some real good in the world, but instead it chose to fake-social justice and ‘cancel’ him, while doing fuck-all to promote more diversity in STEM. Public domain image by Fwaaldijk on Wikimedia Commons ‘Economic’ vs ‘social’ radicalism A recent Atlantic article detailed (called out?) the fake reforms of window-dressing ‘woke’ capitalism . It provides the best explanation I’ve seen so far for why corporations and their boards are such spineless wusses at standing up to social media woke bullies. Preserving power at the top is what’s important. ‘Social radicalism’ is the window-dressing and branding exercises companies exert, like marching in the Pride Parade with fashionable rainbow banners, versus ‘economic radicalism’ which is doing something that truly changes the system. Wal-Mart raising the minimum wage for their employees without being forced by law is economic radicalism, since they were the wage trend-setters. Other businesses had to follow suit to compete for hiring, and in the process raised a few more boats. But it demands less to virtue-signal with blithe declarations that Black Lives Matter at the top of one’s website, or acknowledge your organization sits on land once settled by Indigenous groups than it is to, say, hire qualified black job applicants for the better-paying jobs customarily held by whites, or pay actual rent to the descendants of the formerly occupying Indigenous groups pushed out so many years ago. And of course, when the ‘woke’ on social media identify someone who committed some minor infraction, either now or in years past, and demand their head on a platter, those at the top are relieved to offer a cheap sacrifice so the mob moves on and no inconvenience need be suffered in the C-suite. The outsized power of Twitter I will never understand the power accorded this social media platform which is mostly populated by largely anonymous accounts driven by the suspiciously young and unemployed, and a fair chunk of whom seem mental health-challenged. Companies that take months to hire a job candidate, terrified they’ll make a less-than-perfect choice, will run the shortlist through numerous, lengthy job interviews, personality and skills tests, and then fire that person in a heartbeat because a bunch of anonymous strangers on Twitter didn’t like something they said, did, wrote or posted about immigrants. Not only is someone needlessly cut off from their source of income by vindictive tyrants, but how inclined are they to favour liberal political candidates in the next election? Whether Donald Trump runs for president next year or not, Ron DeSantis is who the GOP is rallying around, as he establishes his political brand as a warrior against the ‘woke’. Love him or hate him, it’s a winning message. Every person successfully cancelled is a vote that may well go Republican. DeSantis has a good shot at this. Trump is a loser and the Republicans are getting very tired of losing. The left will certainly help fund his campaign with its own morally brainless causes, but every time the left ‘cancels’ someone for sins kilometers down the road from Weinstein’s or Cosby’s, they will push away less-partisan, ‘undecided’ voters toward the guy who, however repugnant his political views are, at least doesn’t think people should lose their jobs over unpopular tweets. That’s where every last one of us has skin in the game. The left and right have both gotten so crazy they can’t fathom that their own so-called ‘social justice’ causes may promote values - from whichever side - that are toxic to society, not to mention themselves and their families. Worse, both sides think that if t’other side doesn’t like something, their side should support it. Which is why many far-righters rail against the danger of climate change on a planet they have live on too, and left-wingers can’t see how seriously screwed-up drag shows for children are. Republicans don’t like them, so they must be good social justice! Therefore don’t question the distinct creepiness that differs greatly from otherwise appropriate shows for adults. Shall we start letting children into strip clubs? Teach little girls pole dancing? Because hey, these little girls down below are already being introduced to dancing sexy for money, perhaps grooming them for a future career as strippers or porn queens. The left already has some fucked-up ideas about how ‘empowering’ ‘sex work’ (i.e., prostitution) is, because, you know, who wouldn’t want to suck dick for easy money? Porn work? Oh, they’re getting paid to have sex, isn’t that a great career? (One almost never hears women say this.) Let’s also ignore how much the slave labor of sex trafficking powers the porn industry . The left’s unwillingness to set boundaries will also contribute to the Republican effort to re-elect Trump - if not the man himself, his younger, smarter 2.0 version in H.R. Pufnstuf’s go-go boots . What we need to remember on the Level Left is that when men push that hard for certain ‘rights’, there’s almost certainly a sexual element behind it. Unfortunately, it’s not likely any drag queens who perform for children will get cancelled out of a job. The left will not draw lines in the moral sand and say, “No. That’s going too far.” The ‘woke’ push back when the right-wing media accuses kiddie drag queens of grooming children for pedophilia - and that may be a premature prediction - but there’s something going on with the whole trans movement and the indoctrination of children we can’t ignore. It’s just creepy. Like the parents of Desmond the Amazing, a kiddie ‘drag queen’, cheered on by the oh-so-inclusive Good Morning America team and its oh-so-woke obedient applauding audience. To absolutely no one’s surprise, Desmond has attracted the attention of a pedophile who think he’s hot as fuck. Do you think he’s the first? The right does understand boundaries. They may draw too many and too tightly, and often for the wrong reasons, but they’re fighting back against what looks to those of us in the middle like a left-wing assault on childhood innocence. Even Jon Stewart has turned into that clueless old grandpa who no longer understands the need to draw boundaries. He recently slammed a Republican senator for wanting to ban drag queens for children rather than tighten gun laws when the leading cause of death for American children is firearm deaths. Okay, point taken about the right’s disinterest in protecting children’s lives, but really, Jon, do you not understand what’s wrong with sexualizing children, especially in an era when the left is doing nothing to protect them from trans medicalization for a problem they’ll most likely outgrow if allowed to do so without ideological meddling? One can reject the congressman’s uncritical acceptance of NRA propaganda but wonder why Stewart can’t see there’s something seriously, critically wrong with what these men in drag are doing. I mean Jesus, people, watch these videos on YouTube! Drag shows are just one way the left will drive the Republicans back into power. It cancels people with political views they don’t like while refusing do deal with its own morally-compromised. And in the meantime, the planet burns, drowns, starves, and chokes on toxic fumes while the fish and whales die from consuming too much discarded plastic and the rich billionaires build their escapes in far-flung places for the post-apocalypse, just like Y2K ‘preppers’ did 25 years ago. Except now the apocalypse is real, and we weren’t paying attention while we fought over Critical Race Theory and pronouns. As ye sow… Cancel culture arguably went off the rails in 2012 with its famous destruction of Justine Sacco for tweeting some not-funny comments about not getting AIDS in South Africa because she’s white. It’s fair to expect negative feedback for one’s public opinions, but getting her fired demonstrated where the left was beginning to lose its moral compass. ‘Social justice’ became a vicious bully pulpit, every bit as willing to censor free speech as the right, and every bit as in denial. It only occasionally ever canceled a genuine blot on humanity like R. Kelly, while eliminating good liberals like Senator Al Franken because of a dumb photo he took while someone was asleep. Now they’re oh-so-outraged Ron DeSantis has introduced a bill requiring bloggers who write about him and other elected state officers to register in Florida? Oh, the free speech implications! the woke pearl-clutchers lament, as they campaign to get books removed from Amazon . Political payback’s a bitch, bitches. As Jesus put it, “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye and then you can see clearly to punch your brother in the face for reading Abigail Schrier’s Irreversible Damage book.” Or something like that. 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!